Annotations From The Narrative

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this kind of knowledge. His master feared that if Frederick knew of his background, he would be deemed useless as a slave. Knowledge was a thing valued by slaves and feared by their masters. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. [Ch. 2, p. 47.] Douglass is speaking here of the songs he used to hear on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. When he was a slave he was more sensitive to this music than any other parts of slavery. They had always filled him with sadness even after he became free. He starts to realize as a young boy after hearing these songs, just how bitter and depressed slavery makes a person. It is at this point where he can first recall slavery as inhumane. (2nd) The slaveholders have been known to send in spies among their slaves, to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition. (1st) The frequency of this has had the effect to establish among the slaves the maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise ...

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yet accustomed to the life of slaveholding. Yet with time she grew cruel just like the others. It seemed as though slavery was bad for both the slave and the slaveholder. It could make even the kindest person into a cruel master. Once her husband found out he was furious. He felt that if you taught a slave how to spell and read, he would start learning about all kinds of things. He would become dissatisfied with his life as a slave and want something more. Mr. Auld was exactly right. Literacy was the key to liberating the soul. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty – to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. [Ch. 6, p. 58.] This was a ...

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