You should read the original 12 Years A Slave -- it hits that note pretty squarely. Solomon Northup, at least as he presents himself in his memoir, was one of those 19th century hypercompetent guys, like a Twain character. And writing about having been enslaved, there's this almost bemused tone of a civilized man having been captured by barbarians or something.
The Known World by Edward P. Jones is also an outstanding novel about slave society, and reading it is the best I've done at this sort of imaginative exercise.
2: Edward P. Jones is a great writer.
Another novel that comes to mind is Kindred by Octavia Butler.
Hear me out though: one thing I occasionally think about though is the special agony it must have been to be enslaved, when the slave-owner was obviously dumber than you
But all in all wouldn't you prefer to have a dumb owner? Being able to get one over on him (without him realizing it) would be a source of rare pleasure. And depending on the circumstances, possibly offer a hope for escape.
3.2 also came to mind for me.
In most cases most slaves wouldn't have interacted all that much with the slave-owner, no? There's a whole layer of middle management. The CEO isn't your boss. Or am I way off base? I suppose it depends a lot on the era and location.
Well, having a dumb middle-manager then. I guess the layers of hierarchy can straddle race in complicated ways, though.
That was me. Anyway hopefully the actual history people will correct me.
(One interesting thing from doing Learned League in addition to team pub trivia, is that I hadn't realized that history is actually one of my best categories, and in particular RWM is much better than me at trivia but in a team setting I hadn't realized that I actually know a lot more history than her. Probably the most interesting thing about my homeschool education is that we did American History one era per year. I forget exactly what age we started, but it's something like 1st grade pre-Columbus, 2nd grade Columbus to Revolution, 3rd grade revolution, 4th grade revolution to pre-civil war, etc.)
Looks like 16% of slaves were owned somewhere with no more than 6 total; 53% with 7-39; 31% in groups of 40 or more. I have the impression there might have been overseers hired much or most of the time for that middle scale, but who knows.
I hadn't really thought about how it sounds like working at the worst small business you can image, but even worse than you can image.
4: Would you rather be owned by a Trump supporter or a DeSantis supporter?
I guess there's no right answer.
On the one hand I can't see anybody getting into the head of "not only am I enslaved and forced under threat of violence including death to pick cotton, but I also wish that guy would let me do a better job of it."
On the other hand, you might end up thinking "if the cotton harvest was better they might not beat us so hard, but this guy won't even give me that option."
11.1: I'm picturing something more like, " not only am I enslaved and forced under threat of violence including death to pick cotton, but then you go and leave it to rot in the rain because you couldn't figure out that the sales guy wouldn't be around until after X event happened, and so now we're all going to be short on food this winter."
And get whipped for embarrassing the dumbass slaveowner when he realizes he wouldn't have lost so much money if he had listened to what you tried to suggest.
10.1: It turns out to be worst of all to be owned by an Obama supporter.
I'm reminded of the anecdote from the Soviet famine of 1921-22 where a village had its grain taken at gunpoint per War Communism, it was loaded onto a nearby train, and rotted while the train went nowhere.
One of the best accounts by an enslaved person - one that touches on this point as well as others - is "If This Is A Man", and I particularly remember the response, accompanied by blows, to one prisoner asking why something or other was being done: "Hier ist kein Warum". Here there is no "why". Levi would definitely have said it was better to have a stupid owner - you could get away with more stuff, and it also reassured you that they were actually going to lose the war. I wonder if the peasants in 16 would have reassured themselves that no system as manifestly stupid as Communism could possibly survive for long?
14 made me think of "The Bridge over the River Kwai", which of course annoyed actual former POWs immensely, especially the ones who had built the real railway bridge over the Khwae, because they had deliberately gone as slow as they could as an act of resistance. (Whether they count as slaves is a tricky question. They were forced labourers, but it's legal under LOAC to force POWs to work. You have to pay them and feed them properly, though, which of course the Japs didn't.)