Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

He did not know when he was born. Masters withheld ages the way they withheld everything else, and Frederick Douglass had to reckon his own from a remark he overheard his owner make. What he did know he set down with the names attached: the county, the farms, the men who held the whip, all printed while he was still legally property and could be seized on the strength of the book itself. The naming was the point, since readers were already insisting no former slave could have written such a book. Douglass writes plainly, almost coolly, about an aunt tied by the wrists to a kitchen hook and whipped until the blood came dripping to the floor, then turns and shows a slaveholder forbidding a child to read, and the child understanding in that instant exactly what reading must be worth. The second half repays the first: a Monday before daylight, a stable, two hours of it, and a boy who is never beaten again. Few books have done so much with so little raised voice.