My Bondage and My Freedom

Teach a slave to read and he is forever unfit to be a slave: Frederick Douglass heard his master say it through a doorway in Baltimore and understood that he had just been handed the key to his own freedom. This is the second telling of his life, written when he was his own editor and no longer anybody's exhibit: the abolitionists who had put him on their platforms wanted him to keep a little of the plantation in his speech, to give the facts and let other men supply the philosophy.