The institution of slavery is a peculiar one indeed. While serving to oppress a race, culture and identity, slavery produced a set of ideals about the acquisition of knowledge that to this day keep our race, culture and identity in constant struggle. The greatest success of slavery was to keep blacks from reading. If they could not read, the acquisition of knowledge was virtually impossible. In one of today’s popular rap lyrics, the lyricist known as Nas illuminates one of the major themes running through Douglass’ narrative, “If the truth is told, the youth can grow, learn to survive, until we gain control…” The institution of slavery was by definition an institution of illiteracy.

The ability to read was freedom through knowledge or consciousness of our situation. If slaves became consciousness of their circumstances, to understand that they were humans would have led to full-scale resistance. Frederick Douglass’ narrative serves to identify how freedom and liberty are defined through the acquisition of knowledge and the power of reading. To gain knowledge is to have a sense of self. The power of slave owners was in their ability to make slaves believe that they had no

In the same chapter, Douglass writes, “My father was a white man”. He reveals to the readers the implication of his master being his father, but leaves it up the reader to decide the truthfulness of these opinions. Douglass uses phrases like “hearing my master say”, “heard speak of my parentage”, opinion was also whispered” to show the deleterious effects of slavery. He writes, “The means of knowing was withheld from me (p.340).” Douglass identifies a dichotomy in his path from slavery to freedom, the path from the pre-linguistic or hearing to the linguistic or language. The emphasis on hearing these implications and not knowing if they are true is directly involved with seeing written documents that would show him the truth. The underlying theme here is the lack of written language and how this influenced the culture of the slaves by stealing from them their sense of family relations and the allowing slave owners to avoid taking parental responsibility for their children. Douglass states that the slave owners were dually aware of this practice and therefore put into effect laws that condemned children of slaves to the position of their mothers.

In chapter five, Douglass moves to Baltimore to go live with a new master. To his surprise, he is met with kindness and humanity. His master’s wife, Mrs. Auld begins to teach him to read. It is in this chapter that Douglass’ consciousness is completely unveiled. In trying to explain to his wife the detrimental effects of teaching slaves to read, he inadvertently reveals to Douglass the power slave owners had over their slaves. “A nigger should know nothing, but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil even the best nigger in the world. Now, if you teach that nigger to read their would be no keeping hi. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. … It would make him

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