There was no fighting back when your master raped you, otherwise death was certain. .
General living conditions were horrible. Clothing distributed yearly to the slaves consisted of few articles combined, all made of a coarse linen. Since children couldn't work the fields and turn profit, their yearly clothing consisted of exactly two shirts and nothing else, not even shoes or pants for the winter. Douglass remembers the cracks on the bottom of his feet from the cold winter being big enough to fit his pen.
Of course, Douglass was not the only one to record his account of what had transpired in his life. Harriet Jacobs was another slave who published account of her endurances. She recalls suspecting her master to have been the father of at least 11 slaves. She continues describing how their master's wives had known of this practice well before marrying, and regarded those children simply as property, just the same as the rest of the slaves. Jacobs illustrates how some slaves would be so badly beaten, that they offered "free access" to their wives and daughters in exchange for a cease fire. Such brutality was endured throughout the slave population in the southern states. Other accounts suggest worse and crueler acts of punishment against the slaves. Even for something as little as being no more than a few seconds late to the fields in the morning. .
So what do these accounts tell us? The obvious, of course, that brutality was a daily activity throughout the slave states. Also, further detail of how bad things really were. That African fathers and husbands be forced to compromise the well-being of his family, or that African women be constantly raped at the hand of her master, and on occasion, although frowned upon by the master of the estate, raping by the slave-keepers, or guards. Later accounts in history would reveal a similar type of practice conducted by the Nazis during the Holocaust.