Читать книгу Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass - Страница 9

In 1825, when he was six or seven years old, Frederick's owner selected him to leave the farm and work as a companion to a small child in a white family, the Aulds, in Baltimore. His mistress was kind at first and provided him with the rudiments of education alongside her son. But the education of slaves was taboo, and before long she was stopped by her husband.

This bar against learning to read made Frederick believe that it was all the more valuable. He had had a glimpse of a different life, one in which he could be educated. In the Narrative, he says he believes that the providential hand of God rescued him from rural slavery, which in many cases was a worse experience than city slavery. He believes that God brought him to Baltimore and let him hear the statement (from his white owner) that education would ruin a slave's acceptance of his or her lot in life. He sums up the view of slave owners: “if you teach that nigger … how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.”

Frederick would try to get his hands on books whenever he was alone in the house. He enlisted white neighborhood boys to help him learn, asking them to write words on sidewalks or fences so he could learn how to spell them. In return, he gave them pieces of bread because at the time he was well fed. One of the books the local boys made recitations from was The Columbian Orator, a collection of political essays and dialogues designed to inculcate civic values and patriotism in white American schoolchildren. Douglass obtained a copy of the book and studied the speeches with enjoyment. What stuck in his mind the most was a dialogue between a master and his slave. He also came across the word ‘abolition.’ He resolved to learn more about the abolitionist movement, and looked for ways to escape his life as a slave.