18th February: Slavery.

I have to tell I read the two excerpts without having an authentic image about slavery in America. The most serious material I've seen in the topic was probably that quite naturalistic film I saw when I was 13 or so. (The film itself was about a black American woman being sold by a black master to another black master, but I can't recall much more about it.) I had, therefore, to rely on my sense of realism in order to decide what I should think about the two stories.

The first one by Harriet Beecher Stowe was hard to believe even in the beginning, but it deliberately passed the line of realism afterwards. One may accept that the slaves of the household were favoured by the masters (at least for the sake of comfort), but I just can’t help visualising the whole scene exactly like a Walt Disney-cartoon. You can almost see the floating smell of the cookies, and you most probably wouldn’t be suprised if one of the ill-behavioured slave kids – isn’t their behaviour surpassing any expectations regarding a situation like this? – would emerge and float around smiling along the trail of smell. Even if the surreality of the chapter doesn’t ring a bell, you may wonder how come that slaves are free to bake the things they please, and even if their master could be that permissive, how committed the author can be to reality if she depicts the life of slaves as such an idyllic business in an age of actual slavery.

The other excerpt by Harriet Ann Jacobs featured a favoured slave from the household, too, yet in a much more believeable way. Her master – like most of mankind – being unable to deal with the situation of possessing other people, acts with some hints of controversy. While most of us would consider him cruel and hypocrite, he seems to believe that he’s doing his best to his slaves. This is what allows the slave girl to rebel against his master almost directly without making the story too romantic or killing herself – we could call this set-up a stroke of a genius, provided it wasn’t a true story.