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FindingJane
May 01, 2016FindingJane rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Literate, articulate and excruciating in detail, Mr. Northup’s saga of enforced bondage to various white masters stands as a shining gem in the crown of black literature about this era. He outlines just how terrible his days were and how dreadful his nights, when slaves dared not oversleep no matter how fatigued they were from the day’s toils. Rarely did a day pass without a whipping, unless the slaves were under the yoke of a kind master. Unlike Frederick Douglass’s similar account, Mr. Northup goes into painstaking detail, naming names and places, all the while showing a shrewd view of human nature. There are no good blacks and evil whites; there are decent and indecent people among them both. Whereas Mr. Douglass maintained that a white master who was religious was a particularly terrible nemesis of the slave, Mr. Northup stresses that even among the pious there were those who were gentle towards their property, who knew how to win the loves of those underneath their yoke. If anything, Mr. Northup is quick to blame slavery—the sin rather than the sinner—under which both white and black men suffer, one that teaches young white children to practice and delight in cruelty and makes it impossible even for church-going, compassionate men to see anything other than moral rectitude in an immoral system. It is a sobering and harrowing account of a bygone age and one that continues to leave its stain upon the current age. (If you think racism doesn’t exist in America, try listening to a white person complain that white privilege means travelling in a limo instead of on a train.)