Douglass spent the first twenty years of his life in bondage. Since birth, Douglass experienced the horrors of slavery. His first master, rumored to be his father, separated him from his mother around the age of one. I believe this to be the origination of Douglass" apparent off handedness about his mother. Douglass himself realized this, as he commented, "For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result." (p. 48) Consequently, Douglass never bonded with his mother, whom visited him briefly four or five times before her death when he was around seven years old. Given the absence of the mother-child bond, Douglass states "I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger." (p. 49) The early separation apparently effected his relationship with the rest of his family, as he described his home life as "charmless" and, in regards to his two sisters and brother, " the early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories." (p. 73) It does not appear that Douglass had a deep relationship with his grandmother either. He makes little reference to her, other than she raised him along with other children, slave and the master's. He describes how, in her old age, she was built a hut in the woods and basically placed there to die. I also found the following reference regarding his grandmother: "At about the age of six, his grandmother took him to the plantation of his master and left him there. Not being told by her that she was going to leave him, Douglass never recovered from the betrayal of the abandonment." (http://www.frederickdouglass.org/douglass_bio.html) I could find no reference to the matter in Narrative, but the book is lacking in many details of the relationship between himself and his grandmother.
