“If anyone wishes to be impressed with the soul-destroying effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation and on the day of allowance, places himself in the depths of the pine woods, and there he analyzes in silence the sounds which will pass through the chambers of his soul, and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because he there is no flesh in his stubborn heart. » Fredrick Douglass (Douglass 11). In his autobiography Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped and sold to slave masters, describes the brutality of slavery. In 1808, Northup was born free in Minerva, New York. His parents were farmers. and he followed in his father's footsteps to become a farmer himself. He lived in Saratoga Springs, with his wife and three children until March 1841. Traveling to Washington, D.C., with two men who claimed to be hiring him to be in a musical. performance, Northup was kidnapped, sold to slave masters and ended up on plantations. There he witnessed and wrote about the hard physical labor of slavery. He observed that women worked as hard as male slaves. Imagine an African-American woman working on the plantation like a man, eating a little corn and bacon, whipped like a donkey every day, sleeping in “rudimentary, crowded cabins on planks of wood.” Northup was also forced to whip other slaves (Hine, Hine, and Harrold 143). The life of the African American slave was full of brutality and sorrow. Slave music was a vital way to build community in the face of the brutality of slavery. According to Arthur C. Jones, psychologist and founder of the Spirituals Project at the University of Denver, spirituals were “a defiant collective voice asserting power and the will to survive middle of paper…. ..edom and they used it to communicate with each other during slavery. In this song, I recognized the creativity of enslaved African Americans. Works Cited Douglass, Fredrick. Story of the Life of Fredrick Douglass: An American Slave. New York: The Modern Library, 2004. Print. November 14, 2011. Early, Gerald. “Slavery: history in the key of jazz.” Jazz, a film by Ken Burns. PBS, ndWeb. November 14, 2011. Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine and Stanley Harrold. The African American Odyssey, Vol. 1.4th ed. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. Print. November 14, 2011. Jones, Arthur C. “Spirituals as Coded Communication.” Sweet Chariot: The Story of the Spirituals. The Spirituals Project at the University of Denver, Center for Teaching and Learning, 2004.Web. November 14, 2011.Rouse, Steve. “Swing low, sweet Chariot. » Manhattan Beach Music.Manhattan Beach Music.Web.November 14.2011.