No sympathy was ever showed towards a slave from the behalf of a slaveholder or an overseer. The narrator portrays the life of a slave and relationships established between slaveholders and slaves.

There on the plantations he met his mother, but she died soon so he never really felt any affection to her.

Thus the realities of slavery opened before him. When the narrator realized that his grandmother had left him he started sobbing bitterly. There also lived his sisters and brothers, and many other children but they all were stranger. When he turned seven years old his grandmother took him to the farm of the old master and left there. As years passed young Frederick was told that he did not belong to his mother or grandmother, he belonged to a person referred to as “old master” and when he was old enough he would go to him and live there. Their home was a log hut built of clay, wood, and straw. First his years lived with his grandparents, other grandchildren also lived there. The narrator starts his story with the description of his mother town, which was poor and rather ruined. “ My Bondage and My Freedom” is an autobiographic account told by Frederick Douglas himself, in which he is the narrator. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. This volume also reproduces Frederick Douglass's only work of fiction, The Heroic Slave, published in 1853.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. This new edition examines Douglass's biography, literary strategies and political activism alongside his depiction of Black women's lives and his narrative histories of Black heroism. Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom is a literary, intellectual and philosophical tour-de-force in which he betrays his determination not only to speak but to write 'just the word that seemed to me the word to be written by me.' Recognizing that his body and soul were bought and sold by white slaveholders in the US South, he soon realized his story was being traded by white northern antislavery campaigners. An instant bestseller, Douglass's autobiography tells the story of his early life as lived in 'bondage' and of his later life as lived in a 'freedom' that was in name only. 'It was said to me, 'Better have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not 'tis not best that you seem too learned.''Īppearing in 1855, My Bondage and My Freedom is the second autobiography written by Frederick Douglass (1818-95), a man who was born into slavery in Maryland and who went on to become the most famous antislavery author, orator, philosopher, essaysist, historian, intellectual, statesman and freedom-fighter in US history.

Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.

The European Society of Cardiology Series.

Oxford Commentaries on International Law.

My bondage and freedom