A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl

Clotee is a young girl who is a slave in Virginia in the year 1859. The novel gives a good picture of the typical life of the slaves. He master is not above the use of violence in controlling his slaves; his wife can not even begin to handle the household activities without her slaves.

The novel does a good job of showing several topics, the first of which is the fact that the masters wanted to keep their slaves ignorant, so teaching a slave any regular school-type subjects was not allowed. Clotee finds a very clever way around that problem, but she also lives in fear of being found that that she is learning a variety of things, the punishment for which could be a severe beating.

The next thing covered is the issue of slaves escaping. Slaves were considered property, and when the "property" ran away it was the "right" of the slave-owner to go and capture that property back. Sometimes the result was the slave being killed as punishment. In the novel, anytime that a slave runs away and the master and his friends give chase, the master comes back and says the slaves were caught and hung/etc., although it becomes evident that he is often lying, just trying to keep the remaining slaves "in their proper place." The slaves did not have rights. They were not entitled to pay for their labor, they could not be defended legally for running away, and they could be dealt with in whatever manner the master wanted.

The third thing covered is the "Underground Railroad," one of the most important things ever organized to help the slaves. The Underground Railroad was not, of course, a railroad. Some pieces of it were underground in tunnels, etc, but it generally consisted of "conductors" who would help fleeing slaves make progress towards escaping into the North or even as far as Canada. They might just help the slaves by telling them how to get to where they are going or they might actually hide the slaves in special hidden rooms. It was in this manner that many slaves managed to escape from their basically intolerable living conditions.

If you want to get a good idea of the average life of the house-slave, this is a good book. As always, there is also a historical fact section that is very good in itself.


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