Lessons and Survival

Life requires all living things on the earth, in the earth, and those living creatures that fly over the earth to struggle and fight for survival if life is to continue. Survival is not merely the act of obtaining food, shelter, love, and clothing but also achieving mental stability and relief from stress. Unfortunately, oppression and slavery created some major physical, emotional, and mental problems. One of the greatest threats to the survival of the enslaved was the problems that afflicted the mind. 

Enslaved people found a way to walk through the trials of slavery by coming together and developing and organizing a culture that allowed them to cope with and act proactively upon their circumstances. Thus, the culture of the slave community grew organically, accidentally, and deliberately to help enslaved people survive and carve out a space for themselves to be creators in their own experience and give breath to hope.

Survival meant experiencing happiness, however fleeting, experiencing joy, however temporary, experiencing pleasure, having desire, and expressing honest anger and sadness despite being enveloped in the jaws of oppression. 

One of the basic features of survival for enslaved people was the need to face reality as it was, not how they would have liked it to be. The early lessons of slavery meant to gain an understanding of the following facts of slavery:

1. Slaves were unable to determine for themselves the method and principles in which life should be organized. As a result, they were restricted in their opportunity to carry out their potential and actualize their life ideas as they saw fit. 

2. Pain had to be accepted as a norm for enslaved persons. The pain had to be carried and situated in the mind, body, and life of the slave. The pain came in many different forms—physically, such as whipping, or in the form of work-related injuries. The pain was also emotional, such as when family members were sold away. Mentally, the pain would cover aspects of the enslaved' s life wherein they could not visualize an end of slavery or be constrained to slavery, merely owing to one's skin color and the belief in racism. 

The type of slave that slaveholders desired necessitated that these lessons in survival be placed central to the culture of the enslaved.

The slaveholders' culture (based on racism as an ideology and exploitation) placed blackness inferior to whiteness and in need of whiteness. It is important to remember that slavery was not justified by power [as it should have] but instead because it was believed that Africans and Native Americans needed civilization. From this cultural standpoint, slaves were expected to serve the interest of the masters and nothing else because, in the end, the gains would be had by blacks and the burden bore by whites. 

The enslaved never legitimized slavery and, despite the various conditions and scale of treatment experienced by the enslaved, the enslaved neither viewed slavery as the slaveholders nor did they view themselves as the slave that slaveholders desired.

Nonetheless, enslaved persons had to know and respond to the slaveholder's power and the institution of slavery. Blatant disregard of the slaveholder's fantasy and power could lead to pain or death. Thus, enslaved people, particularly children, had to be trained to behave appropriately without losing their sense of dignity or life. 

Parents, Children and Lessons

Slave parents oftentimes had to work through their own suffering to love their children. Love came in a variety of ways—it could be a mother patching holes in their children's clothes and finishing an hour or two before sunrise, a father hunting or fishing to provide extra sustenance to family or community, or the family praying together for and with their child after a tough day. However, the greatest love parents could show their children was preparing their children for a life of enslavement.

In some form or manner, parents were critical elements of the slave community, as "fathers and mothers were responsible for the bulk of their children's socialization."

Beyond securing extra food for their children, enslaved parents had to secure other food for their children. As a result, enslaved parents in the life of slavery involved techniques and survival strategies.

The first lesson began with respecting elders and keeping silent when around older people unless they were addressed.

Note: silence had multiple functions, one example:

• To keep information silent offered the practitioner a more believable mask and affective 'country dumb' countenance/appearance which led some to believe they were actually half-witted, which was technique enslaved person sued to extract information.
• "Their families also trained Children in the arts of reconnaissance and espionage. Trained to eavesdrop on whites when they worked in the big house, youngsters were taught the body language of 'hearing 'em talk while they wuz eating,' while giving the appearance that they were too naive to comprehend."

Slave children had to learn how much silence and discretion mattered as slaves. Slave children were not privy to certain conversations of older slaves, as they might have repeated what they had heard in the presence of the wrong company. The older the enslaved became, the more they were entrusted with 'difficult and dangerous lessons.'

Slave children learned how to respond to the commands of the slaveholding household. However, it was in the presence of whites where silence was needed most. This was because no mercy and love undergirded the punishment to slaveholders for speaking out of turn or back talking. Thus, slave children were taught how to respond to the demands of slavery and manage white people by being submissive and obedient to racial etiquette, primarily as a way to avoid "suffering, pain, sale and/or death." 

The most important lesson that parents had to help their children learn was living in two worlds as one person or moving in and out of worlds and taught to handle brackish [times where the two worlds met] environment [interracial situations] . Young slave children would begin to see great differences as one world would begin to split into two. The two worlds had varying and opposing expectations.

As they began to gain a clearer picture of slavery-having their eyes matured to the nature of their circumstances. As their perception grew sensitive, as enslaved people, they would come to witness, wrestle with, and measure the activities of life and the ever-present paradox of being enslaved. For instance, as enslaved children would bear witness of their parents celebrating in the quarters, in their homes, or among themselves, black triumphs like the activity of runaway slaves and maroon slaves. Early in life, they would hear and imitate their parents' emotions as they critiqued white behaviors and express themselves more freely. Also, early in life, enslaved children may or may not sense that the presence of their parents protected them. 

However, as slave children spent more time in slavery, children witnessed and heard the echoes from the slave quarters grow quiet and would see their parents act differently in the presence of overseers, slave owners, and untrusted or unfamiliar whites. The older they became, they would learn that, when in trouble with whites, they could not always be protected by their parents. In addition, they would perceive that interracial settings and power dynamics seemed to conflict with the examples and the lessons taught by their parents and the slave community. For instance, as children were taught to respect the elderly, by calling them Mr. and Mrs., they would hear their respected elderly being reduced to first names or boy or girl by an overseer. 

Children would hear, in the presence of whites, how dumb or ugly black people were. They would see children being torn away from parents and parents torn away from children and sold like cattle. They would learn how their skin color relegated them as servants and in dreadful circumstances. Slave children had to learn how to deal with this paradox without breaking and distorting their own personalities. 

The race's survival depended on how well the lessons were taught and how well slave culture aided in socializing children to help them pass through and manage this everlasting paradox. Another one of the foremost lessons enslaved children had to learn was that "regardless of their status in the broader society, there would be dignity and respect among themselves." 

Helping their children adjust to slavery, parents did not teach their children to demonstrate unconditional submission to slaveholders and were instructed to protect relatives. Instead, parents attempted to show and explain that their obedience to the slaveholder and whites, in general, was shallow, and to some extent disingenuous, but a necessary tool for enslaved people to conceal their true feelings and avoid unnecessary pain. 

Parents' successes and failures, thereby helping their children work through the problems of living in the condition as a bondsperson, showed up in runaway advertisements, petitions, and slave codes. For instance, runaway slave notices show that enslaved children grow up with the desire for freedom, loyalty to the quarter community, pride of their whole being, and would do whatever it took to gain a modicum of freedom or relief.

Nonetheless, slave runaway notices, even though not detailed, also showed failure. It is almost certain that some of the enslaved that ran away did so because they were despised in the slave community and not wholly welcomed in the white community; sale, freedom, or flight were their only options.

Petitions prove that enslaved people were not unconditionally obedient to slaveholders and found ways to make a life for themselves within the framework of slavery by breaking the rules in tactful ways, which did not always lead to punishment. 

The constant need to control slaves and the continual revision of slave codes proves that parents were more successful than failures at helping enslaved children find their way within the institution of slavery and keeping their dignity. 

The critical role of parents and what parents understood about slavery made it hard for a child to lose his parents to the market or for the parents to lose their child or children to the market.