Today's Reading

I spent today reading this book- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  An insightful and powerful autobiography, it is also difficult to read as it recounts with graphic detail the many hardships slavery imposed upon those it oppressed.  

The passage below details Douglass's estrangement from his mother, also a slave, who died when he was only a young child and he had no memory of seeing her during the daytime hours (when she would be working in the fields):

She was a field hand, and a whipping was the penalty for not being in the field at sunrise… I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day.  She was with me at night.  She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.  Very little communication ever took place between us.  Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering.  She died when I was around seven years old, on one of my master’s farm’s, near Lee’s Mill.  I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial… Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger. (14) 

Cheers, 

Colin