55 pages • 1 hour read
Julius LesterTo Be a Slave
Nonfiction | Biography | Middle Grade | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “To Be a Slave”
Julius Lester begins this chapter with a key description of slavery: to be treated as an object, but to be a human being. He explains, “They were not slaves. They were people. Their condition was slavery” (15). Using direct quotes from enslaved people, Lester dispels the picture of slaves as “dumb, brute animals” or as children who benefited from slavery (15).
Some former slaves were sorry when slavery was abolished, and Lester comments that this fact demonstrates the deep impact of slavery on human beings. For some slaves, their masters were their fathers; in one unusual instance, a slave owner acknowledged his Black son and taught him that he was equal to whites. For most slaves, however, slavery was cruel, and they lacked personal relationships with their master. Whipping was a frequent punishment given out by the plantation overseer or driver.
In the slave narratives, enslaved people had a complete understanding of the economic motivation behind slavery. Lester writes: “Black men, black women, and black children were enslaved because it was profitable to other men” (23).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Auction Block”
The cruelty of slavery was compounded by the fact that slaves typically lived on two or more plantations over the course of their lifetimes. Slaves were sold for different reasons, and “for the slaves, selling was an occasion of deep sorrow” (24). Some mothers, in an attempt to “cheat” the auction block, even killed their own infants. Many times, slaves were not even told that they or their loved ones were going to be sold.
Slaves were sold in two different ways: directly to someone the slave owner knew, or through a slave trader. Like any market, the slave market was susceptible to fluctuations in price. Events like Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 prompted many slaves to be sold.
A slave trader typically arrived in a town with slaves chained together. Prospective buyers could examine the “merchandise” before participating in an auction. Slaves were sold to the highest bidders, and slave traders used various tricks to maximize their profits. The auction block was the site of much grief as loved ones were forever separated. Unless the auction took place locally, slaves did not know anything about their new masters.
Slave traders chained slaves together in “slave coffles” to be marched across long distances. Sometimes slaves died from the brutality of the journey. If a slave trader needed to make a stop along the way, slaves were held in a “slave jail.” After marching on foot, they sometimes traveled by train or steamboat to reach the plantations in the South.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Plantation”
The image of a sprawling, peaceful plantation is a popular one, but it is historically incorrect. Most plantation owners were not wealthy people living in white mansions. In the South, owning slaves was a symbol of social status. Most slave owners held fewer than 20 slaves, and, while the slave owners were powerful, they were a minority. Only one quarter of whites in the South owned slaves, yet the system of slavery was the foundation of the Southern economy.
The plantation consisted of the slave owner’s house, the slave quarters, the overseer’s house, the fields, and any barns or sheds. The plantation was surrounded by woods. On most plantations, slave “cabins” were dismal and unfit for people to live in. For most slaves on a plantation, days were spent performing the labor-intensive work required for growing cotton. The work began early in the morning, and at the end of the day, punishments were meted out if work was deemed inadequate. Returning from the fields, slaves still had to complete various chores before going to bed. Exhausted, they fell asleep fearing they might oversleep the next day.
Reviewing the 200 years of slavery, Lester finds it “remarkable” that the time period is often viewed “matter-of-factly and not as a time of unrelieved horror” (48). During the time of slavery, some white Americans fought against it as an evil system; most, however, were apathetic and accepting of it.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Repeatedly in this section, Lester explicitly corrects common misconceptions of slavery. He tackles the view of enslaved people first, giving evidence to dispel the idea that many were content to be enslaved. He begins the first chapter with this foundational understanding: Everything the reader encounters in the book needs to be read with the understanding that enslaved people were not one-dimensional historical characters, but fully thinking, fully feeling human beings who were denied their basic humanity. In these chapters it is evident that enslaved people were dehumanized in many ways—stripped naked, denied a name, separated from loved ones, bought and sold, and brutally abused. Despite these efforts to dehumanize, enslaved people were still fully human.
Lester also corrects the view of wealthy, immaculate plantations. Although this view has dominated the public imagination, the reality is that most plantations were small, and conditions were grim. Although the motives for slavery were economic, the system really only put power and money into the hands of one-quarter of the Southern white population. Lester also expands historical understanding by mentioning famous figures in American history; for example, he describes the slave quarters kept by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. He also points out that most whites—even whites from the North who did not own slaves—were accepting of the evil system. He contrasts the stark details of slavery described by former slaves with the way a white visitor to a plantation described the sound of the people marching to the fields as “pleasant.” He thus highlights once again the different views of history and the importance of publishing the experiences of enslaved people.
Although these chapters include many graphic and traumatic details about slavery, Lester has still filtered the content for a younger audience. For example, he includes the story of Eliza, a beautiful enslaved girl. She is put on the auction block and stripped naked, and a man who “always bid for the good-looking colored gals and bought ’em for his own use” bids for her (31). Amazingly, another man outbids him and immediately lets Eliza go free. This story, like the acknowledgement of slave owners fathering enslaved children, touches on the sexual abuses in the system of slavery without going into explicit detail.
