Aspects of Slavery and Freedom Seeking in North Carolina
Earth-Slave Life
Scholars will never be able to fully explain the life of the enslaved, as it is an impossible task. Life cannot be described by words, as life is to be experienced. Or, as Howard Thurman wrote, "the living content of experience is always richer than the articulation of experience." We cannot tell you how it felt to be an enslaved person, nor can we tell you what they saw through their eyes. The understanding we have gained is based on records and autobiographical accounts, some rich and others not so much-ultimately no source is complete, and researchers do the best they can with what they have.
This section on the life of the enslaved focuses on some broad and direct circumstances in the life of the enslaved.
This entire book is about the life of enslaved people. Unfortunately, the nature of explaining requires we break up and compartmentalize life to understand the different aspects of the life of enslaved people. Nonetheless, it should always be kept in mind that life is not so neat, and much is lost when attempting to do so. To focus on the hand is to ignore the foot; to focus on the foot is to overlook the kidney. All things go together. Like the body, life works together.
See Lerone Bennet World of the Slave for a more general overview of slavery
"Any people who could endure all of that brutalization and keep together, who could undergo such dismemberment and resuscitate itself, and endure until it could take the initiative in achieving its own freedom is obviously more than the sum of its brutalization. Seen in this perspective, theirs has been one of the great human experiences and one of the great triumphs of the human spirit in modern times. . . . So, let’s not forget that the great tragedies not only treat of negative matters, of violence, brutalities, defeats, but they treat them within a context of man’s will to act, to challenge reality and to snatch triumph from the teeth of destruction." Ralph Ellison