Anything to Be Rid of Thinking

It’s impossible not to become depressed, angry, and disgusted when reading slave narratives. The cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy, and cruelty people demonstrated during the years slavery was legal in the U.S. is mind-boggling. In reading this book so far, I’ve been upset and moved plenty of times, but there’s one section I keep thinking about. Douglass had just taught himself to read, and he’d begun reading up on the history of slavery. He says that when he first started learning about the history of slavery, and reading the arguments against it, he actually regretted learning to read. He remembers wishing he could go back to being ignorant, or even turn into an animal, because being fully cognizant of his situation—his entrapment, his position as property, a thing rather than a human, the injustice of all this—was agonizing. At one point, he says that he’d rather be anyone or anything other than himself, “anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!” (33).

I’ve never been in a position remotely horrible as Douglass’s, but I know exactly what he’s talking about in that line. I’m willing to guess that most of his readers have felt this way at one point or another. No matter what sparks it, the times when you’re so unhappy and frustrated that you can’t stand being in your own head are agonizing. There’s absolutely no way to escape from yourself, no matter what you do. Even measures like drugs, alcohol, or sex are temporary: eventually, you go back to remembering that you are you, inevitably and forever, and your life at this moment is your life, and there’s no escaping those facts. Lives do change—people alter their circumstances for the better all the time (Douglass certainly did)—but when you are living through those moments of entrapment inside your self, you don’t usually feel like things can change.

I think that line is an example of one of the things that made this book, and books like Harriet Jacobs’, so important to the abolitionist movement. In addition to exposing the atrocities committed by slaveholders, they speak to the fact that slaves are just as human as white people. It seems like one of the big factors that enabled slavery was the dehumanization of black people. Books by slaves that deal universal human emotions make this delusion impossible to maintain. If you have felt the same way a slave has felt, how can you deny his humanity without denying your own?