My Bondage and My Freedom

“The reader will pardon so much about the place of my birth, on the score that it is always a fact of some importance to know where a man is born […] In regard to the time of my birth, I cannot be as definite as I have been respecting the place. Nor, indeed, can I impart much knowledge concerning my parents. Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. A person of some consequence here in the north, sometimes designated father, is literally abolished in slave law and slave practice.” 

In a conciliatory tone, Douglass explains the deficiencies in his personal history, establishing the reasons why his autobiography—and that of any slave—would differ from that of a free person. He emphasizes time, place, and paternity but only offers definitiveness regarding the setting of his birth. Every slave knew that their lives began on a plantation, which is where most of them remained.

“The practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.” 

Douglass illustrates how slaves did not have the ability to foster bonds with blood relations. This denial of bonding rituals likened slaves to livestock, which slaveholders similarly bred, sold, and separated. The separation of a slave from his or her mother was a key aspect of establishing ownership. Denying mothers their maternal role—that is, the desire to see after the well-being of their children—made slaveholders the sole determinants of the slave’s well-being. The slave feared the slaveholder but knew no other caretaker.

“I was a slave—born a slave—and though the fact was incomprehensible to me, it conveyed to my mind a sense of my entire dependence on the will of somebody I had never seen; and, from some cause or other, I had been made to fear this somebody above all else on earth.”

Douglass defines his origins within slavery. Though he had not yet met Colonel Lloyd, the plantation owner’s authority loomed all around Douglass, who conveys the feeling of the slaveholder’s omnipresence. Colonel Lloyd, whom he didn’t yet know, was “somebody”—that is, a person with an individual identity, while Douglass was one “slave” among many in Lloyd’s world.