I have recently been given the opportunity to read an excerpt from a book written by Thaddeus Russell. The chapter I was given to look at was called "The Freedom of Slavery". The irony I find in the title alone was only continued in the pages I read, so prevalent that I nearly read the words over again, just to be sure I had read them correctly. .
I was a slave, and I was a free man. I spent years of my life, not just under the control of another person, but owned by them. I was someone's property, much like a pair of trousers or a piece of land would be, and it was up to them to do what they saw fit to do with me. .
Near the beginning of this chapter, the writer claims, "This is not an endorsement of slaveryit is an argument that many freedoms we now cherish were only available to slaves in early America, and that citizenship in the young republic was a terribly constrained thing." I have spent many moments, looking at this passage and wondering how the lives of the free citizens in this country were constraining. Slaves could not spend their times in leisure, nor did they have the choice to spend their nights with their families, they were belongings, to be separated and sold at the whim of their masters. Constraining? What of the women who were not allowed to spend their evenings in the company of another slave, because their master had taken a fancy to them, and wished to keep them for himself. He kept them, and he used their bodies as he saw fit, not because they wanted to keep his company, but because they were little more than a material good to the owner who ravaged their body. .
The songs and the dancing that the white men saw as a sort of freedom they weren't afforded were the only things we, as slaves, had to keep our souls from dying. The songs, were sad, in one way or another, either their words were sad, or their melody was. These songs, while they were intended to keep the mood light, still couldn't bring us fully away from the fact that we were possessions of another.