Growing Up In Slavery

Speaking Slavery Growing Up In Slavery is edited by Yuval Taylor and published by Lawrence Hill Books. Growing Up In Slavery was published in 2005. Yuval is a “senior editor at Chicago Review Press”. (W.W.Norton & Company Inc, 2017). Lawrence Hill Books is devoted to publishing quality nonfiction books such as African American topics, politics, feminism, etc. These collection of stories are experts from slaves and are modified for readers to comprehend today. Growing Up In Slavery explains to readers how ten slaves write their battles in slavery from childhood to teenage years. In these hand written stories you will learn to be lucky that you have freedom and that you didn’t have to deal with the hardships like these poor slave’s did.
In this book, it explains the distress and grief these slaves had to face in their everyday lives. There is ten slaves and each of them wrote their own story about what they had to face each and everyday. For example, one of the slaves is Frederick Douglass. He was the most famous African American of the nineteenth century. This book, sets back into the eighteen hundreds and kids at eight years old would be taken away from their loved ones and were put to work like cattle by their new possessor. For example, Frederick Douglas at the age of eight was taken from his mother without even saying goodbye. Douglas had to call his new controller Aunt Kathy or he would get a flogging. He explains the misery he had to sustain and how many times he was beaten or punished to starve. For example, he wrote about his new owner Kathy, “The cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; the voice, made all of sweet accord changed to one harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon”. (Taylor, 2005, p. 58). Each slave at the end of their story explains their after life. Growing Up In Slavery makes you think of life in other people’s shoes and how it would make you feel if you were them. To conclude, Growing Up In Slavery is about what it was like for African American lives in the southern part of the world. Now today in humanity we all have equability. Yuval Taylor edited this book in order for us to fathom the struggles and battles that these poor slaves have to attain. Not only did these ten slaves want to give up, but also desired freedom more than anything. Be lucky that you have freedom and that you didn’t have to face hardships like this poor slave's