Not as Romantic as Whitman

"The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false... in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father."
I think this passage from the fist chapter really sheds a lot of light on the nature of slavery. For a person to be born as a object or possession is a disturbing thought. What's more disturbing is that they are the product of sexual assault. This is a way for slave owners to show complete and utter dominance over the slaves, by way of creating them. A father is typically is the man who gives care and protection to a child. According to certain western religions your father is supposed to be your model for God. An all-knowing being in which you have to unquestioningly obey, and ask for mercy.The idea of a slave-holder as a father, and God is terrifying, and there's a lot going there. Douglass decides to reject these ideas, and decides that the identity of his father is irrelevant to him. Instead he decides to move forward. 

My first impression of this novel is that it's going to be very "real". Excuse the casual, non-academic langue, but I can't think of any way to put it. Douglass opens by telling a brutally vivid story of his aunt being savagely beaten by an overseer, simply for spending time with another slave from a nearby farm. These stories are the harsh realities of slaver. These are story that Douglass lived, and could not have possibly imagined. This differs greatly from Walt Whitman's encounters with slavery.

"The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside;
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile;
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him,
And brought water, and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,	185
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north;
(I had him sit next me at table—my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.)" No discredit to Whitman, or "Leaves of Grass" which is undeniably a great poem, and has been highly influential, and so forth. However Whitman's depictions lack a certain truth. Runaway slaves did not have the fortune of running into kind people like Whitman, who fed them, took them in, and then let them stay for weeks. I also understand that this is clearly a fictional account, and a metaphor. But the reality of it was that northerners were probably just as scared of runaway slaves as southerns (possibly even more so, due to less exposure. Still a good amount of exposure, but not as prevalent as in the plantations of the south.) Whitman romanticizing the idea of a runaway slave is a little odd upon further examination. Also his depiction can be seem by some as stereotypical. The nervous runaway slave that seeks refugee by running to the white savior, in this case played by Whitman. Having said that I do like that Whitman includes African Americans in his vision of American. This kind of inclusion must have been rare for Whitman's time. I'm sure Douglass definitely would have appreciate this on some level. As evident from the preface, where it not for sympathetic abolitionists like Whitman the conditions of African Americans in America would not have changed. It's people like Douglass and Whitman working together to create equality. Overall I looked forward to reading "Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass". I think his accounts of slavery will be saddening yet uplifting. It's a story that can only be told honestly, unromantically, by someone who has lived through it.