Traumatic experiences do not just go away. Frederick Douglass went through a variety of horrors to win his way free of enslavement and they colored him and his views for the rest of his life, some in overt ways and others in more subtle ways. Some do not appear in the course of the narrative; we never hear him say, for example, that he experienced night terrors or other symptoms associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and similar conditions from the time that he was “transformed into a brute” after being broken by Mr Covey, or what lingering prejudice or vengeful feelings it left him toward white southerners in general that he excluded from his writing on the grounds it would have undermined his audience’s sympathy for him, though we can conjecture that it was there (Douglass 41). That sort of self-censorship is always the hardest to read around and requires serious primary source research and a thorough knowledge of the author and situation to sort out. Others are more obvious: it took great effort and ingenuity for Douglass to learn how to read, which he credits as the genesis of the sentiments that led to his thirst for emancipation. And of course it meant utterly forgoing the comfort of accepting the status quo, relaxing into routine and also left him with a life-long burning hatred of slavery.
That said, not all the costs of freedom were entirely negative. Douglass’s experiences as a slave left him with a burning need to fight against the institution of slavery and its defenders, and the things he suffered as a slave conspired to make him well qualified for his future abolitionist pursuits. The way in which he learned to read and write by furtively copying his master’s son’s old workbooks and cajoling street kids into teaching him the letters he did not yet know is again a good example. Many people had access to some form of education in America at that time, but the experience of having to struggle and steal the knowledge and skills that his owners forbade him on the grounds that “learning would spoil the best nigger in the world” and forevermore ruin him as a slave can only have driven him to refine his literary skills until they reached the point where he could compose a moving narrative that would captivate Northern audiences (Douglass 27). Then as now, there are far more opportunities to learn than there are people with the willingness and drive to take advantage of them. What seemed like a basic skill to many was a godsend to Douglass, and that was because Mr. Auld sought to deny it to him.
Staying with the example of the Aulds, another one of the costs Douglass paid was having his metaphorical face shoved into the degrading nature of slavery and the effect it had on the character and morality of those engaged in it. The harm slavery did to the slave was obvious; no explanation is needed for why being beaten and raped is harmful. But Douglass also talks about how slaves began to take pride in the relative wealth and status of their masters, and would even get into fights over who had the better master under the misguided sentiment that they “seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves” (Douglass 21). Doing something horrible to someone is no great feat. Making them take pride in the person doing it and defend them before others is to twist the victim in knots and make them accept what was done to them as right and proper. Similarly, he found with Mrs. Auld that “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me” (Douglass 28). What was at first a kind mistress who began teaching Douglass his letters became “even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself” to the prospect of spoiling their slave by showing him compassion and introducing him to things beyond their station (Douglass 29). Slavery was a toxic system for everyone involved, even if it did not hurt everyone equally. Douglass was submerged in the worst of it.
Work Cited
Douglass, Fredrick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. Kindle Edition.
