Slave Narratives

Alexander Grelier
10/23/18

Slave Narratives

After reading many excerpts of different slave narratives from slaves in Mississippi, I got to have a much better understanding of what slave life in the south was really like. I learned that lots of the time slaves were fed false information by their owners, and were unable to have their own opinion. For example, in one slave narrative I read, the slave wrote about how he heard that Abe Lincoln was attempting to help free slaves, but his owner would say terrible things about the president, giving him a faulty portrayal of what he was really like. It seems that the only way slaves in the 19th century could gain knowledge was through the words and opinions of their masters, leaving them completely oblivious to what was really going on around them. Also, it's easy to tell that these slaves were completely uninformed and blind to the world because of their grammar and word choice. In the excerpts I read, slaves would often use words such as "'spect" instead of "expect", "'kep" instead of "kept", and "an'" instead of "and". For what exact reason were these slaves blinded from knowledge and understanding? Was there any way for slaves to have their own opinion about things going on in the world? Especially with all of the unreliable ideas being fed to them?

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