The Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass... Review

But the path to freedom was paved with brutality. Returned to the countryside, Frederick was placed under the care of Edward Covey, a "slave-breaker" known for his cruelty. For six months, Frederick was worked beyond exhaustion and whipped until his spirit was nearly extinguished. He felt himself transforming into a brute. But one sweltering afternoon, something snapped. When Covey rose to strike him, Frederick fought back. For two hours, they grappled in the dust of the barn. Frederick did not win the fight in a legal sense, but he won his soul. He had looked his oppressor in the eye and refused to be broken. Covey never laid a hand on him again.

Years passed, and the boy was sent to Baltimore to serve the Auld family. It was there, amidst the brick and mortar of the city, that the first spark of rebellion took root. Sophia Auld, a woman not yet hardened by the "irresponsible power" of slave-holding, began to teach him his ABCs. When her husband discovered this, his fury was transformative. He declared that learning would spoil a slave, making him unmanageable and unhappy. To Frederick, this was a revelation. He realized that the white man’s power to enslave the black man lay in the withholding of knowledge. From that moment, the alphabet became his weapon. He traded bread for lessons from poor white boys on the street and scrawled letters in the secret margins of discarded books. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass...

The sun had not yet risen over the Tuckahoe plantation when the sharp crack of a distant whip signaled the start of another day of bondage. For young Frederick, the world was a narrow corridor of hunger and cold, defined by the absence of a mother’s touch and the presence of a master’s shadow. He did not know his age, for such knowledge was kept from slaves to blunt their sense of self, but he knew the hollow ache of an empty stomach and the sting of the winter wind on his uncovered skin. But the path to freedom was paved with brutality