How did enslaved people resist subjugation in the master/slave relationship? What were the consequences? (See Section #7: Resistance.).

What role did other slaves' advice and experience have in their adjustments?.What role did reflection and religious faith have in their adjustments?.What adjustments did they make (or refuse to make)?.How did their awareness influence their attitudes and behavior?.In these readings, how and when did the enslaved become aware of their place in the master-slave relationship?.transforms the man into a tyrant, the brother into a demon,' echoing a truth voiced by Thomas Jefferson seven decades earlier. 'Such unlimited power,' Austin Steward writes in his 1857 narrative, '. These selections are drawn from the nineteenth-century published narratives as well as the twentieth-century interviews of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narrative Project.ДЄ recurring theme in these selections is the dehumanizing effect of slavery on both slave and master-the slave due to his being oppressed, the master due to his power to oppress. Berry, a scholar of African American history, 'where powerless enslaved males and females became the victims of reproductive abuse to which they did not willingly give their consent.' 2 Resistance brought severe punishment, often death. 'Forced breeding in the slave quarters manifested itself as an indirect form of rape,' writes Daina R. Masters forcibly paired 'good breeders' to produce strong children they could sell at a high price. as they are some of the real 'dark deeds of American Slavery.'' Enslaved women were forced to submit to their masters' sexual advances, perhaps bearing children who would engender the rage of a master's wife, and from whom they might be separated forever as a result. 'I know these facts will seem too awful to relate,' warns former slave William J. The second group deals with one of the cruelest hardships endured by enslaved African Americans-sexual abuse by their slaveholders, overseers, and other white men and women whose power to dominate them was complete. And James Curry asserts in his narrative that, no matter how ignorant masters kept their slaves, it was 'impossible to beat it into them that they were made to be slaves.' Frederick Douglass recalls becoming aware as a child of his status as a slave-'Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters?'-and struggling to reconcile slavery with his belief in a benevolent God. Harriet Jacobs came to realize that her status as property defined her role in the master-slave relationship: no matter how humane a master might be, he or she could sell a slave with little or no discomfort. The first group presents statements from eleven formerly enslaved black men and women whose narratives were published between 18. Palmer, 'this required knowing and using the proper forms of deferential address for whites, the uncomplaining acceptance of verbal and other forms of abuse, and a day-to-day obsequiousness that whites needed to assure themselves of their superiority.' 1 How did a person maintain a sense of worth (and worthi ness) when survival required 'degrading submissions,' as Jefferson wrote, and constant self-monitoring to avoid the master's wrath? The slave's perspective of the master-slave relationship is the focus of these two groups of selections. Not only were slaves to be chattel labor, they were to act as accomplices in their subjugation. Not only were masters to be masters, they were to be tyrants. Query XVIII From the author of the Declaration of Independence we have a stark admission of the contradiction of slavery in America-that its existence required the 'perpetual exercise' of inequality among human beings. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781,

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