Roots and letters

I found one of the more interesting parts of the second half of the book to be the story about the magical root that Douglas's friend gives him to protect him from whippings. The root doesn't protect him of course, we know that and Douglas knows it, but the very fact that he accepts the root is somehow very important to the fact that he is no longer whipped. It is almost like accepting a root to keep you from being whipped, especially as a strong young man, is a way of constantly reminding yourself that you don't deserve to be beaten, and there are steps that you can take to avoid it. This seems obvious, of course no one deserves to be beaten. It seems obvious to us because it is in our cultural mandate that no one deserves to be beaten and no one should feel themselves under the complete power of another, but for slavery of course that isn't the way you are taught to feel. By accepting once and for all that he shouldn't and wouldn't be beaten as property Douglas feed his own mind, he gave himself a voice outside of slavery.

Of the criticisms that we read I found it interesting that Margaret Fuller and Robert Septo spend part of their reviews talking about and analyzing the two letters from prominent white abolitionists that preface the book. I didn't pay very much attention to the letter when I read them, sort of using them as a grounding in time for the story, but I think that for contemporary readers they must have been pretty important. With the advent of the internet we sort of take it for granted that anyone can put anything down in print and out into circulation, but in the 19th century people were just starting to get used to the idea that you may not be able to trust everything that you see in print. They looked at the letters as sort of corroborating evidence of authorship, that these two men know Douglas and believe him capable of writing this narrative.