When one is born into poverty and oppression, it is difficult to believe one can achieve more than the community expects one can achieve. Despite the abject poverty and slavery faced by both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, both overcame the forces against them and went on to become writers who advocated abolition of slavery. Douglass' journey is chronicled in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, while Jacobs wrote of her experiences in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. However, despite both Douglass and Jacobs being treated to extreme cruelty and violence, they overcame the obstacles of slavery through a form of accommodation that ultimately was a truer and more profound form of resistance than any form of violence could hope to effect. A conclusion will address why the form of accommodation used by Douglass and Jacobs ended up being more enduring than violence.
It is difficult to imagine experiencing the life of slavery of either Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs and not responding with violence. While Douglass was treated in a kindly manner by some slave owners, he was brutally whipped by Edward Covey, who had a reputation for breaking slaves. Douglass did challenge Covey and beat him in a fight after he could bear no more abuse, so soundly beating Covey that Covey never again beat him. Yet this reaction of a young teenage Douglass is understandable. More remarkable is his ability to achieve accommodation by using unwitting whites as his tutors. The wife of his owner before Covey taught him the alphabet, even though her husband warned her, "If you teach that nigger to read, there would be no stopping him" (Douglass 36). Even so, Douglass learned to read and write.
Douglass learned to rebel through accommodation. By learning to read and write he was eventually able to become an activist for abolition. He achieved this not by directly challenging ...