mother separation F.D
“my mother and I were separated when i was but an infant”. he doesn’t know why they would do this except to “hinder the development of the childs affection towards its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child”
“with the same emotion i should have probably felt at the death of a stranger”
Woman in douglass : troubling absence/presence.
- “he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked” - then “lay on the heavy cowskin”
- “he said ‘if you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell… learning would spoil the best nigger in the world… there would be no keeping him”
- “you have seen how a man became a slave; you shall now see how a slave became a man” - no space for woman
Autobiography
- “i have no accurate knowledge of my age… never having seen any authentic record containing it”
- different names: kept ‘frederick’ to keep a “sense of identity” : “stanley” “bailey”
- “a still tongue makes a wise head” - had to repress is literary, rhetorical talents.
Voice of preacher
- “the christianity of this land, and the christianity of christ” - “devils dressed in angels robes”
- thomas auld, “the snake”. “religious pomp and show”
- “it was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom” - “i rose”
- slavery will soon be “unscriptural”
voice of an orator
-“you are loose from your moorings and are free; i am fast in my chains, and am a slave!… O that i were free!”
the learned ex-slave
slave songs would sound like “unmeaning jargon” , but which were “full of meaning to themselves”
the songs came “not in a word, in a sound”.
“while i am writing these lines”
trauma
- his feet are so cracked “with frost” that “the pen with which i am writing might be laid in the gashes
- “those songs still follow me”
rememory of grandmother - also oratory.
“she stands - she sits - she staggers - she falls - she groans - she dies - and there are none of her children or grandchildren present to wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death”
