Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave

Dunbar reiterates over and over again throughout Never Caught that human bondage is always wrong, no matter how supposedly lenient a master might be. No one should be treated as the property of another person. Judge’s life is far from easy. She loses her family, loses her husband, loses her children at a young age, works physically taxing jobs, lives in constant fear of recapture, and ultimately ends up living in abject poverty in a house full of women in similarly destitute positions. Despite all of this, even at the end of her life, Judge asserts that she would rather have died than be returned to slavery.

Slavery is dehumanizing. As Dunbar illustrates, a slave has no autonomy. They do not have a say in what happens to their body or how they spend their time; anything they do have can be taken away at a moment’s notice, and with no warning. Freedom is about having choices: where to live, whom to marry, what job to perform. While free Black people still lacked much of the autonomy that whites in Judge’s time period had, any choice is better than no choice. In saying that she would “rather suffer death than be returned to slavery” (197), Judge makes clear that death is preferable because it would be her choice.