: Re: A POV character who's a slave? I'm currently working on a novel, in which one of the POV characters is a slave. He was born to a slave (so he was born a slave) of a rich merchant family

@Eichhorn147

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If you're looking for first-hand accounts, I'd recommend Ten Years a Slave. It's an autobiographical account of a free black man who was forced into slavery, and it's pretty shocking. It was also made into a (wonderful/horrific) film last year, which I'd recommend looking out for.

For a short-read, there's A Letter to my Old Master, a letter - believed to be real - from a freed slave to his old master, who asked him to return to work.

It's not quite a first-hand account, but I'd also recommend looking up the YouTube series Ask a Slave; it's based on the real-life, modern experiences of an actress working in a historical house, where she portrayed a slave and had to answer questions from visitors about her 'daily life'. What's quite interesting is seeing the inherent beliefs and misunderstandings people still have today about slavery and race.

Also, I don't have any books to recommend but it might be worth looking into Stockholme Syndrome and domestic abuse as well as slavery, to help with the angle of your character loving the slave owner. It might help your character feel less contrived if, instead of being naive, he's been manipulated. I think you can believe anything is 'your fault' if someone tells you so long enough.

For some more generic thoughts about your story, a person who has been raised in slavery from birth would most likely be indoctrined in the religion and custom of their slavers, which could potentially help mould the thoughts of your character. I'm not certain if your story takes place in this world? It might help your story to create some specific, rather racist religion if it doesn't, but even if it does some people have interpreted the Curse of Ham in the Bible as a condemnation of dark skin - as if it's something you're cursed with - and the Book of Mormon has mentions of God 'setting a mark upon' sinners, which has been interpreted as meaning giving them dark skin.

Now obviously that's hogswash, but if you lived in a culture of slavery, you would want to find reasons to justify your actions and ways of seeing your slaves as something lesser than you, and you could easily find meanings in religious passages to support your needs.

In Ten Years a Slave, the slave owners regularly gather the slaves to listen to Christian sermons and speeches, and if you were brought up having people read from important-sounding books every day, and explaining that the passages mean you're indebted to them, you might well believe it yourself.

However, I think the older you got, the more difficult it would be to believe. As What said, you would most likely be aware of the injustice. I think it would be entirely human to ask, 'Why me? What's the difference between me and my master?' You would compare yourself to them, especially if you were brought up together, and I'm sure more than once you'd see injustice directly, even if it was small - say he hit you with a stick or stole sweets from the pantry. When his skin didn't 'darken' and he wasn't beaten, you would have to question why.

It gets harder if there are more slaves, as there are likely to be, as you would be exposed to more points of view which would likely be different, and it would be very easy to be jaded and bitter from very early on. Even 'kind' masters didn't treat their slaves well; a slave is a slave.

I don't know how grim a story yours is, but in American slavery, we have accounts of children being taken away from parents and sold, and young women being raped; it would be pretty easy to see the injustice there.

Still, as Craig pointed out, some slaves in America stayed with their masters because it was the only life they'd known - a home and daily meals (and not being killed for running away) would seem the sensible option to many people. That doesn't mean they were happy. It's not really comparable but just as an example of human psychology, in 2011 Gallup reported 71% of American workers hate their jobs - I think it's fair to say a lot of people, no matter the situation, will take the devil they know.

I think there's a very interesting and complex psychology there to explore. Good luck!

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