“If any one desires to be impressed with the deadly effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on the day of indemnity, go into the deep pine woods, and there analyze in silence the sounds that will pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not so impressed, it will be only because there is no flesh in his stubborn heart." Fredrick Douglass (Douglass 11). In his autobiography Twelve Years as 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 Saratoga Springs, with his wife and three children until March 1841. Traveling to Washington, D.C., with two men who claimed to have hired him to be part of a musical performance, Northup was kidnapped, sold to slave masters, and ended up in the plantations. There he witnessed and wrote about the harsh physical labor of slavery. He observed that women worked just as hard as enslaved men. Imagine an African-American woman working on the plantation like a man, eating a little corn and bacon, being whipped every day like a donkey, sleeping in “rough and crowded log cabins.” 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 pain. An essential way to build community in the face of the brutality of slavery was slave music. 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 in the midst…the center of the paper…. .edom and used it to communicate with each other during slavery. In this song I recognized the creativity of enslaved African Americans. Works Cited Douglas, Fredrick. An Account of the Life of Fredrick Douglass: An American Slave. New York: The Modern Library, 2004. Print. November 14, 2011. Soon, Gerald. “Slavery: history in a jazz key”. Jazz, a film by Ken Burns. PBS, ndWeb. November 14, 2011.Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold.TheAfrican 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.14 Nov.2011.