Learning to Read and Write

Simone Sutton

10/02/09

AP English III

“Learning to Read and Write”

Frederick Douglas was a slave who was fortunate enough to learn how to read and write, while still being enslaved. He would eventually run a way to join the abolitionist movement. But it was not easy, he had to do most of his learning in secret or he would face the wrath of his cruel(ish) owners. At first his learning was actually encouraged by his mistress. She would be the one to teach him how to read.”When I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.” A soul like hers must have been rare and dying in those times. For a person to treat a slave like an equal, like how one human being ought to treat another was unheard of and actually discouraged. She saw Douglas as a person not as a slave, but something made her change that. “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me, when I went there she was pious, warm and tender hearted… Slavery soon proved to divest her of these heavenly qualities.”Being a slave owner was just as bad as being a slave. It changes people. Good people like the mistress become mean and evil. She began to think that slaves are not the people she once thought they were, ad because of this change she stopped teaching Douglas how to read, and she would attack him if she even thought he was reading. “.. Education and slavery were incompatible with each other” that is what was constantly going through the mistress’s mind when dealing with Douglass.

“Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.”

Showing great ingenuity Douglass still learns to read by reading when he is out of the house doing errands for his owners, befriending the neighborhood kids so they would teach him how to read. “This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who in return would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge”. Douglass literally craves knowledge and learning. So much so that he would trade his own personal for a chance to learn something new. Him using the word bread suggests that knowing is on the same level as food as necessary for his survival. And wallowing in ignorance is like starving to death.

When he turns twelve is when he realizes the gravity of his situation as a slave. He just now realized that he will never be free. When he begins reading the book “The Columbian Orator” he reads a conversation between a master and his slave. The slave is very intelligent and soon becomes emancipated. The book was full of argument for and against slavery, and the more he read the more he began to think, he became angry. “The more I read the more I began to abhor and detest my enslavers” The book he was reading introduced many ideas that lead him to realize his life as a slave was completely unfair. He became angry and hateful and felt a kind of pain. “Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy” In learning to read Douglass learned everything that was wrong about his life and knew nothing he could do to fix it. Reading led him to this point yet it couldn’t tell him how to get out. Now he is stuck knowing something that he never wished he knew “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity”, if at that moment he could unlearn everything he knew he probably would.

Feeling depressed and still a little angry Douglass listened to everything he could about slavery, kind of looking for a way out. That’s when he heard of abolition. But he couldn’t learn very much about the subject.

In learning to write he learned how to draw four letters by working in a shipyard, and then he would show off to the neighborhood kids. He would show them what he knew and they would show him what they knew. Whenever he was left alone he would practice something form his young masters copy book or from a dictionary, and after years of hard work he could say he knew how to write.