Chapter VI
Mr. Auld's rebuke: 'If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master.' Douglass calls these words a 'new and special revelation.'
Read in Books4Free →Learning to Read and the Pathway from Slavery to Freedom
From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
Douglass recounts how Mrs. Auld began teaching him the alphabet until her husband forbade it, declaring that learning would unfit a slave for slavery. This revelation gave Douglass the key insight that literacy was the white man's power over the Black man.
Chapter VII
Douglass trades bread with poor white boys for reading lessons; reads The Columbian Orator and Sheridan's speeches on Catholic emancipation.
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