My Bondage and My Freedom (1857)

AUTHOR: Douglass, Frederick

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, food, slavery, race, Suffrage, women's rights

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

Douglass makes minimal reference to food, mostly in terms of what slaves eat versus what other people and the other animals on the plantation eat (for example, the brief reference below to the link between “fine foods” and diseases like gout and lumbago at the “Great House”). Animal references typically link the plight of the slave to the position of the farm animal or to the disparity between the food, bedding, and care afforded to hounds and horses (like the Colonel’s fine horses and hounds) as compared to the slaves.

Chapter VII: “Life in the Great House”
Extensive description of the meats and animals found at the Great House in comparison to the “close-fisted stinginess that fed the poor slaves on coarse corn-meal and tainted meat” in the slave quarters (107). Despite these fine foods, though, and the near-starvation experienced by the field slaves, Douglass argues that “Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance. Lurking beneath the rich and tempting viands were invisible spirits of evil, which filled the self-deluded gourmandizer with aches and pains, passions uncontrollable, fierce tempers, dyspepsia, rheumatism, lumbago, and gout, and of these the Lloyds had a full share” (111-112).

Chapter XIV: "Experience in St. Michael's"
Douglass displeases his master by regularly letting the master’s horse escape to the nearby farm of his father-in-law, who had better pastures. Douglass writes that he also let the horse get away because the father-in-law fed his slaves very well, so Douglass would go to the farm for the same reason as the horse.

Chapter XV: “Covey, the Negro-Breaker”
Arriving at Covey’s home, Douglass is one day asked to lead a team of “untamed” oxen to the woods to collect firewood. Covey explains how to lead the oxen, but Douglass, never having done this before, does not understand the terms or instructions. The animals break free and eventually get stuck in the woods, where Douglass eventually frees them and leads them home. He remarks: “...the ox is the most sullen and intractable of animals when but half broken to the yoke. I saw in my own situation several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property; so was I. Covey was to break me – I was to break them. Break and be broken was the order” (212).
Covey himself is repeatedly described as a dog, a wolf, or a snake, or having the features of these. Covey buys a female slave, Caroline, for the sheer purpose of having her bear children/slaves: “It was the system of slavery which made this allowable, and which condemned the slaveholder for buying a slave woman and devoting her to this life, no more than for buying a cow a raising stock from her, and the same rules were observed, with a view to increasing the number of quality of the one, as of the other” (219).