Homegoing and Twelve Years a Slave

I had never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but after reading Homegoing for Book Club, I decided I needed to read it.  I appreciated the book for what it was intended to be – an honest expose of slavery.  The religiosity of the book was annoying, but I did appreciate Harriet Beecher Stowe’s belief that slavery was evil and not the way things should be.  I also appreciated that she presented various kinds of slave owners – kind, indifferent, cruel, horribly cruel – and she did not hold back on the kinds of torture the slaves received.

Then I read Twelve Years a Slave (also for Book Club), and it is an actual story of a slave who was a free man but then was kidnapped and forced into slavery until he could be found.  Solomon Northrop seemed to walk many of the same steps that Tom had walked, though Tom had never been free.  They both had kind masters; they both had cruel masters; they both were beaten, starved, and tortured; they both were very religious.

Both books underscored a few points for me:

Without religion, many more slaves would have died.  For them, the religion was the only hope they had;

People, both men and women, can be very cruel to those they perceive “less than they;”

Children learn cruelty (bullying, nastiness, etc.) from those around them; and

Even well-treated slaves would have preferred freedom to their “easier” life than some others on their plantations.

Reading books about slavery and its horrors sickens me, saddens me.  How people could treat other people that way is beyond me. But then we see such things happening still throughout the world, whether it is in trafficking, war, or other equally awful practices.  Continuing to talk about the horrors, continuing to expose them, and teaching children strong values is the only way I know to combat them.