Caitlin's Praxis Journal Main Menu Ethnic Studies 250B Praxis Journal Praxis Journal for Ethnic Studies 250B, American Slave Narratives Praxis Journal Entry 1 -- 8/29/16 Analyzing two passages from the Narrative Praxis Journal Entry 2 -- 9/5/16 Frederick Douglass -- Literacy as Rebellion Praxis Journal Entry 4 -- 9/20/16 Praxis Journal Entry 5 -- 9/25/16 Analyzing a passage from the reader and the film Praxis Journal Entry 6 -- 10/9/16 Praxis Journal Entry 7 -- 10/17/16 Praxis Journal Entry 8 -- 10/24/16 Praxis Journal Entry 9 -- 10/31/16 Praxis Journal Entry 11 -- 11/20/16

Praxis Journal Entry 3 -- 9/11/16

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The passages I chose come from My Bondage and My Freedom in the Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader:

"Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brothers and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning... The conditions of brotherly and sisterly feeling were wanting--we had never nestled and played together. My poor mother, like many other slave-women, had many children, but no family! The domestic hearth, with its holy lessons and precious endearments, is abolished in the case of a slave-mother and her children" (p.186)

"It has been a life-long, standing grief to me, that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her. The counsels of her love must have been beneficial to me. The side view of her face is imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of her's [sic] treasured up" (p.190)

"There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world. My mother died when I could not have been more than eight or nine years old, on one of old master's farms in Tuckahoe, in the neighborhood of Hillsborough. Her grave is, as the grave of the dead at sea, unmarked, and without stone or stake" (p.192)

The theme I chose, reflected in these passages, is Douglass' relationship with his mother and siblings. Like a lot of slave children, Douglass was separated from his mother as an infant. Instead his maternal grandparents raised him until around age seven, when his grandmother brought him to their master's plantation to work with the older children. As Douglass' wrote, his mother died when he was very young and he saw little of her before her death because she couldn't leave work long enough to see him. He had no physical mementos of her, nor any kind of record of her life. He couldn't even visit her final resting place because it was unmarked. The closest thing Douglass had to a physical representation of his mother was an impersonal drawing in a natural history book (p.188-9). There was no Bailey family history or genealogy except for what might have been passed down orally. Douglass met three of his older siblings (Perry, Sarah and Eliza) and a number of cousins for the first time when his grandmother left him at the plantation. 

I think Douglass' lack of a relationship with his mother, combined with a lack of knowledge about his father, siblings, and birth, helped form one of his earliest conceptions of slavery, namely that slavery erases all traces of human identity and connection from birth. Douglass knew from an early age that he was missing information white children took for granted: their parent's names, their birthday, their family history. Because he was a slave, he was denied information that forms the fundamental and most important building block of human identity. We get our first introductions to human behavior and customs from our parents, and while Douglass' grandparents certainly loved him, he was deprived of their love and guidance in early childhood when he needed it the most. His family, the people he was supposed to be the closest to, were little more than strangers (or, in the case of his father, a complete stranger). When they died, there was nothing left of them. I think Douglass chose to write about his family this way to show how completely slavery destroyed the institution of the family and deprived slaves of knowledge about themselves even in the most basic way. 
 

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