Name: Eli March 2017
Humanities Africans in NY: Creative Narrative Assignment
It’s a Hard Life
They call me Solomon Peters. I have been living in the New Amsterdam Colony ever since I was young. It is all that I know of. Today, I live on a farm with my wife and kids, I guess you could call me a proprietor It is nothing much but half freedom is better than none. My ancestors were brought from their homeland to do slave work in New Amsterdam. I am not one to brag but my family and I have more money than most slaves. I have started to write a will for when my death occurs. In this will, I have put the directions for where my property when I pass, but that is a story from another time. I am not very fond of the idea of half freedom. I think it is horrible that we slaves are treated as not human. I am predicting that in the future the land of the blacks will no longer be a thing. That half freedom will no longer be a part of us and we will be fully enslaved. I have left my entire estate in the hands of my wife. I trust that she will look after it and keep it going for generations to come. Although I am not complaining about living in The Land of the Blacks, I do believe that sometimes it is a disgrace. The only reason that they do this is so they have a buffer for attacks on New Amsterdam. It just makes us look like objects in place for protection, not real humans but thatś all we are really meant to be anyways.
In the year of 1712 there was a slave revolt. Between 25 and 50 slaves stormed New Amsterdam setting fire to buildings. They killed 9 whites and injured 6 others. In the end the slaves lost. It always seems to be this way in my mind, the slaves always lose. I haven’t known anything else. I was born in the British colonies and raised as a slave. I don’t know how my ancestors felt living totally free in their homeland, away from slavery, away from the Europeans, back in their homeland of Africa. I have not had the pleasure of having that as my reality, but now I must live enslaved for it is all that I know. My ancestors were taken from their home and piled onto a boat, hundreds of them to come over to the Colonies and serve the British. I do hope that my children will grow up and be free. I hope they can smell the sweet smell of freedom that I never got a chance to smell. The Dutch West India Company has not done anything to help us nor will they in the future. The colonists control all of our lives. I do hope that the patriots overcome the loyalist. I believe that there is good in their hearts and therefore will free us. I think they know how it feels to be controlled by someone.
In this assignment, we were supposed to write a creative writing piece from the point of an enslaved African. I learned a lot from it because it really got me into the shows of the enslaved African I was writing from. I think this assignment was a bit of a struggle for me. It was hard to right from their POV not actually knowing what they went through.