Equiano and Apess

     When reading Apess, I was struck by how effective he was in his writing style. He clearly knew his facts, yet, rather than forcing them on the reader, he asked rhetorical questions that make the reader think. Though there is nothing soft about William Apess. He was fierce and determined to shed light on the injustice that was carried against his people and the people of Africa. He also backed up his beliefs with verses from the Bible. One of my favorite questions he poses is this: “Did you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples that they ought to despise one because his skin was different than theirs? Jesus Christ being a Jew, and those of his Apostles certainly were not whites-- and did not he who completed the plan of salvation complete it for the whites as well as for the Jews, and others?” And he continues on with more questions that show how terribly wrong many white people were in their way of thinking.
    When I read Equiano, I was entirely captured by his wording so much that I believed his story to be true. Afterwards, when I found out that it was altered from the truth of his childhood life, I almost didn’t believe it. His story was vivid and filled with horrid details of the cruelty slaves faced that I didn’t mind that he, himself had not gone through it. The fact of the matter is that multitudes of innocent lives had gone through those ordeals and many of them could not share their stories.
    There is not doubt at all that both Equiano and Apess share a similarity for powerful writing. They both bring up the hypocrisy of the lives Christians live. Equaino says: “O, ye nominal Christians! Might not an African ask you -- Learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto men as you would men should do unto you? …Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely, this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery.” Apess uses scripture to make his point that God calls for men to love one another. “He who loveth God loveth his brother also (I John 4:21). Let us not love in word but in deed (I John 3:18). Let your love be without dissimulation. See that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently (I Peter 1:22).” Both effectively show that Christians say that they are to love, as God has commanded, and their actions hardly match their words. I enjoyed reading both of their work because of this. Although, I preferred Apess because I loved that he defended all who have faced hardships at the white people’s hands, and not just his own people. I liked that he brought attention to small population of white people compared to the much larger portion of other races and the fact that when Jesus was alive, the white people were the “most degraded people on earth  at that time.”