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In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, when Douglass was older he was learning how to read and once he got caught, his master said “…if you teach a nigger (speaking of Douglass) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” These words meant greatly to Douglass as it gave him an idea on what education will do to a slave. By having education and learning of the world outside of the field, slaves would have been able to join together into the abolitionist movement but due to the fact that these masters would be ignorant to let an African American learn and educate themselves, all of this was prohibited and limited until there were some that actually were able to take the matter into hands. Douglass was one of the lucky ones to have a headstart in the understanding of what it meant to be educated in times like these. By learning how to read and how to write, these vulnerable humans would understand their rights and of the exploitation that they were receiving from their masters. “It would forever unfit him to be a slave” this brings back the idea that Douglass realized that being a slave was not something he wanted to do forever, and eventually he felt like physically he would keep being a slave because of his skin color but in reality in his mind, he was moving on and trying to feel freedom.

Reading this Narrative made me extremely sad and lose faith in humanity. It never occurred to me that in those times slaves were treated this cruelly more like animals by their fellow humans. As Fedrick Douglass tells us that he was deprived of one of the purest forms of love, his mother at a very tender age. It appears that slaves never got to experience any form of emotions or affection but only knew what punishments were, pleasing their masters were all they had known. As I skimmed through the chapters, the series of awful events witnessed by Fedrick spoke to me making me realize how important it was to put a stop to slavery. On page 11 the paragraph “…very many of their sleeping hours are consumed in preparing for the field the coming day; and when this is done, old and young, male and female, married and single, drop down side by side, on one common bed, — the cold, damp floor, — each covering himself or herself with their miserable blankets; and here they sleep till they are summoned to the field by the driver’s horn. At the sound of this, all must rise, and be off to the field. There must be no halting; every one must be at his or her post; and woe betides them who hear not this morning summons to the field; for if they are not awakened by the sense of hearing, they are by the sense of feeling: no age nor sex finds any favor. Mr. Severe, the overseer, used to stand by the door of the quarter, armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cowskin, ready to whip any one who was so unfortunate as not to hear, or, from any other cause, was prevented from being ready to start for the field at the sound of the horn.” After reading this paragraph I imaged what it would be like for us to be in their place and just by simply thinking about it I realized how they had to endure everything without saying a word. In these lines Fedrick drew a transparent picture of the struggles they had to go through, even after a long day of slavery they were still expected to set aside their own necessary chores like cooking and laundry to prepare for the upcoming day. There was no destined place for them to sleep on, they had to sleep on the hard floor even with all those bleeding bruises and sore bodies. They were treated as robots and expected to behave as such, dare if they may say, do or take a break they would be punished severely. Fedrick’s literacy style and syntax enhances the experience of its readers and makes them wonder what it might would have been like, drawing attention to struggles that have been overshadowed.

“Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d—-d b—-h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now stood fair for his infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you d—-d b—-h, I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet.”

This passage just demonstrates one of the incidents that got written down by Fredrick Douglass. This is just an incident that we have been told of, imagine how many people suffered the same fate. The slave owners did not care if they were whipping slaves in front of their children begging for mercy as that begging feeded the barbaric souls of the slave owners. This passage shows that this whipping and blood dripping had become a common practice for the slaves.

It reveals that at a young age he had to see these horrid scenes and by the time he got old he got accustomed to it. Seeing these things since childhood can affect a child in many ways, one of those ways could be for the child, in our case Fredrick Douglass would be to see these things happening to be normal. Yes he didn’t become numb but he knew it was inevitable so he wasn’t holding on to some false hope.

The way Douglass narrated this whole scene in his narrative shows that he was just writing about any other days as this passage lacks emotion. He describes this horrifying scene so casually cause for him it did become a normal thing. On top of that, he saw this incident as a kid and by the time he learned how to read and write, he had seen so many worse things happening to people that this incident just made it to the top but it was nothing out of the ordinary for him.

Why did they have to be so cruel when the work slaves were asked to do was done. Why did he have to torture her in front of a child. Where was human decency. And most importantly who came up with the idea of racism that oh because they are of a darker skin they don’t get to have rights, who started all of this. And so many more questions cause this whole narrative is so troubling.

A quotation that I choose from the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas that had a strong impression on me is “After a patient waiting, I got one of our city papers, containing an account of the number of petitions from the north, praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and of the slave trade between the States. From this time I understood the words abolition and abolitionist, and always drew near when that word was spoken, expecting to bear something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves. ” This quotation stood out to me because the people were waiting for petitions to get signed to stop slavery and handed the petitions to Washington DC to put an end to slavery. Frederick Douglas was fighting for abolition to end slavery permanently and he was fighting for his slaves and giving them the rights they deserve. This passage adds to our understanding of slavery is slavery was a difficult time in history and people just worked days and night as slaves in very bad conditions. The literary style Frederick Douglas uses in this reading is diction and syntax by describing the horrible conditions of being a slave and the tone of how the slaves were feeling and how hard it was for them being slaves. When I was reading the reading I can picture in my head the slaves working in bad conditions. The reading contains a lot of imagery by describing how the slaves are feeling and how their slave owner was treating them as slaves. He wants the reader to understand the slaves working conditions and it is not easy being a slave.

1.  Reading – This week, we are reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (in its entirety) as well as a short excerpt from Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  You can find a link to the Jacobs reading under the “Readings” tab at the top of the blog.
2. I have recorded a brief introduction to the reading which you can access HERE.  Use the  Passcode: x#K6x#x# to access the recording.  After watching the video, please share a comment on this post offering one possible motive a slave or former slave might have for writing his/her autobiography.  Please share your comment by Monday, March 22nd.
3. Choose a passage or quotation from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass that made a strong impression on you in your reading. Post the passage on our class blog and provide a brief (300 word) analysis of its significance. Some things to consider: What does this passage add to our understanding of slavery in America? What does it reveal about Frederick Douglass? What do Douglass’ diction, syntax, and literary style add to his story here? What questions are raised for you by the passage you’ve selected?  Please share your response as a “new post” (not as a comment on this post), and include your name in the title of the post.  Your post must be up by Wednesday, March 24th in order to receive full credit.  Please be prepared to share your passage during our zoom call on Wednesday.
4. After reading the excerpts from Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that I have linked to on our “Readings” page, please compose a two-part response post.  Your post must be shared by Sunday, March 28th.

• First,  what does Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl add to our understanding of the experience of slavery? How does this narrative connect to or differ from Douglass’? (As you read Jacobs’ description of her attic hiding spot, which she refers to as a “loophole of retreat,”  keep in mind that she remained in this hiding place for seven years!)

• Second, please address the following prompt:  Although slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, slavery in various forms continues to be an important Human Rights issue even in our own day. Spend some time exploring the topic of contemporary slavery on the internet, and share three important things that you learn about this subject.

5. Office Hours:  I will be holding regular office hours on Monday.  You can sign up HERE. This is a good opportunity to meet with me about your essay!

6.. Essays Due: Your paper must be submitted to me as a Google Doc by Friday, March 26th.  Please share it with [email protected]. While your essay itself should have an engaging title, please give the file the generic title: Your Name. ENG2850 Essay 1.  (As I indicated earlier, you have the option of submitting the essay as late as Sunday, March 28th, but I would encourage you to get it done by the 26th in order to enjoy an unburdened Spring Break.)

Please respond to any two of the following discussion questions by Friday, March 19th.  Share your responses as comments to this post, being sure to refer to specific details in the poems to illustrate your ideas.  Feel free to share your thoughts as responses to your classmates’ posts.

–Wordworth’s poem  “Tintern Abbey”has been described as offering readers a “religion of nature.”  What do you think that term means?  Where do you see evidence of this in the poem?

–Why do you think Wordsworth gives “Tintern Abbey” such a precise and detailed sub-title? What is the significance of this poem’s full title?

–In the final portion of “Tintern Abbey,” the speaker turns to his “dear friend.” Who is this friend and what role does he/she play in the poem?

–“Composed upon Westminster Bridge” and “The World Is Too Much with Us” are both sonnets. Why do you think a poet might choose to work with such a highly structured form?

–Consider the first four lines of “The World Is Too Much with Us”: “The world is too much with us; late and soon/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”  What do they mean to you?  How do these lines resonate with your own lived experience?

–Describe some of the ways in which Wordsworth’s poetry conforms to the features of Romanticism that we’ve discussed. What evidence can you find to illustrate this?

1. Office Hours – Monday, March 15th.  I will be holding an open office hour from 3-4pm to discuss your essay assignment.  Please come if you are struggling with getting started, you have questions about the assignment, or you want to run your ideas by me or by your peers.
2. This Week’s Reading – William Wordsworth. We are continuing our readings in Romanticism with William Wordsworth.  Please read “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” and “The World is Too Much with Us.”  You can find these poems in Vol. E of the Norton Anthology.  Be sure to have the texts available during our call on Wednesday.
3. Hypothes.is.  In preparation for Wednesday’s class, we will be annotating “Tintern Abbey” using the annotation tool Hypothes.is.  Hypothes.is is an application that will allow us to annotate a text virtually in the same way we might if we were making notes in the margins of a physical text, but with the added bonus of being able to see and respond to one another’s notations.  Please use this Guide to Getting Started with Hypothes.is  to walk you through the process of setting up a free Hypothes.is account, adding the Hypothes.is extension to your web browser (ideally Chrome),  and joining our ENG2850 Hypothes.is group using this link. 
4. Once you have set this up, go to this digital version of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, click on the Hypothes.is icon in your toolbar, select ENG2850 and begin making annotations on the text.  This could mean sharing definitions of the words you look up, asking questions about the text, or identifying parts of the poem that seem particularly interesting to you and adding your own thoughts.  Please make three annotations to the text in advance of our Zoom session on Wednesday.  Be sure that you have selected “ENG2850” from the pull-down menu, rather than “public”.  This will keep our annotations visible only to members of our class.
5. Wordsworth Discussion Questions. Please respond to any two of the discussion questions I’ve posted about Wordsworth’s poems (see separate post for the questions.). As usual, you can either answer the questions directly or respond to your classmates’ comments.  Please share your responses by Friday,  March 19th.
6. Reminder – Email me at [email protected] with the question you plan to explore in your essay.  I should hear from you by Sunday, March 14th.

I chose “The Chimney sweepers” by William Blake, the image gives a representation of how hard and depressive the lives of children were. I saw this image and it helped me understand the poem completely, a little boy is shown walking alone as to how his mother died and the father sold him as told in the first stanza of the poem. As a kid he could barely say “weep” and now he cries in the rain, so no one witnesses, because to him his tears held no value as he wasn’t heard as a child and was unwillingly forced into being a sweeper and the image portrays that. Cleaning chimney’s all day, they would get covered in soot and the image represents how the soot is being fallen everywhere. In the fourth stanza tom dreams about the angel coming and setting them free and, in the image, shows how the little boy is looking towards the sky waiting for the angel to come so that he can be set free, now everyday he goes to work looking at the sky wondering if the angels would come for his rescue.

The poem I went with was “London” by William Blake. What drew me to this poem was that William Blake actually talks about a society we live in today. In the first stanza, the poem reads “I wander thro’ each charter’d street, “and in the picture we can see the old man is being guided by someone down a street because he is not familiar with the area which is why he uses the word wander in the line, fits perfectly with the picture. As he keeps walking, he looks around and sorrow follows. He talks about manacles which is a metal band or a chain that keeps someone tied down. He says in the second stanza “The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” and I think he means that if people stop following the same hard routine, they fear they might not have a successful or a comfortable future and that they might be destroyed, and in the picture above we can see a man trying to put out fire. This to me seems like that the man thinks if he keeps on the manacles tied onto him by society, only then will he be able to put out that fire and continue to live by. This poem is a part of songs of experience because throughout every stanza, he talks about a society when everywhere he looks, he sees the innocence of men, women and children being destroyed right before his eyes, the old man in the picture has closed eyes and the guy is looking at him wondering if he is exhausted from all the walking but little does he know that the old man has been withered down and can’t look into the place any further.

I choose the poem “London” by William Blake. The title of the poem drew me to select the poem “London”. A pair of lines that seems meaningful to me is In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear. These pair of lines mean that he sees pain in people’s eyes and the fears and tears in newborn babies. Everyone in the city of London is placed on restriction by law based on the population. William Blake can understand the feelings of people of being abused in the city life. The theme of the poem “London” is the city London is a dark and miserable place.