"Put your backs into it!" I hear the slave driver yell at my parents. I wonder how many scratches they'll come home with tonight.
My name is Isabella Douglass and this is my horrible life. Listening to my parents cry out in pain, being worked to exhaustion, and being treated like the animals I'm told to take care of. You disobey an order, you get the whip. You try to runaway, you get "put to sleep" and that's a relief to some of the surviving adults' opinion.
I'm in the barn, disobeying orders to shovel the horses' manure and instead writing this book, so pay close attention 'cause if I'm caught I'll be whipped. The horses know I'm in trouble; they're my only friends here, probably because I'm the one that feeds them. The horses stomp their feet to tell me that a white man is coming.
I hastily hide my notebook and precious pencil and pick up the shovel, pretending to be hard at work. The horrible man stops to stroke one of the horses on the nose before he addresses me. He probably has another list of chores for me. Maybe he'll have me move to the fields, my 12th birthday is coming up; that's usually the time that they have the kids move with the adults.
He seems to stare at me with disgust, the way all whites do to us blacks. I stare back just as intently. I know I'm probably giving him attitude, but the son-of-a-bitch deserves it.
Suddenly he slaps me on the face with his hand, hard. It stings at first, but I'm so mad that I don't notice it after three seconds. The tension in the air is increasing by the second.
"Don't you give me any attitude!" the man yells, slapping me harder, "I'd expect that you'd have that pile finished by now, if you were smart. Instead, it looks to me like you've just sat here, lazy whore!"
He did not just call me a whore! I was just about to show him how much of an asshole I could be too when another white man walked in and told me to return to my cabin.
As I was walking out I was sure to give the white man who called me a whore a good one of my famous death looks. He just ignored me. I figure he was in the presence of one of his superiors.