Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

“That night I learned as I had never learned before, that I was not only a child, but somebody's child.”

Slavery deprives Frederick of his biological mother, who was hired out by her owner to work on another farm, too distant to allow her to see her son except on rare occasions. On this night, she happens to visit Frederick after Aunt Katy, the tyrannical cook, once again deprives him of dinner, prompting an outburst of admonishment from Frederick’s furious mother.

“To me it has ever been a grief that I knew my mother so little, and have so few of her words treasured in my remembrance. I have since learned that she was the only one of all the colored people of Tuckahoe who could read. How she acquired this knowledge I know not, for Tuckahoe was the last place in the world where she would have been likely to find facilities for learning. I can therefore fondly and proudly ascribe to her an earnest love of knowledge. That in any slave State a field-hand should learn to read is remarkable, but the achievement of my mother, considering the place and circumstances, was very extraordinary. In view of this fact, I am happy to attribute any love of letters I may have, not to my presumed Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother—a woman who belonged to a race whose mental endowments are still disparaged and despised.”

Here Douglass mingles sadness and pride with a bit of defiance. His mother, like millions of others, was a victim of slavery. She probably died heartbroken at having been separated from her son. By learning to read, however, she displayed the same intelligence and curiosity Douglass showed throughout his life. When asked, therefore, whether he believes that he derived his intellectual qualities from his unknown white father, Douglass can defy the rude questioner’s expectations by answering in the negative and citing his late beloved mother.

“The whole scene, with all its attendant circumstances, was revolting and shocking to the last degree, and when the motives for the brutal castigation are known, language has no power to convey a just sense of its dreadful criminality.”

Slavery unleashed the worst in human nature, including man’s desire for sexual control of an unwilling victim. Such is the case when Captain Anthony, Frederick’s first legal owner, whips the beautiful young slave woman Esther.