In My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855, Frederick Douglass revisits his own experiences as a youth who came to understand what it meant to be enslaved for life.  He links this growing awareness with his thirst for knowledge and describes his enlightenment about his own condition alongside his passionate but mostly clandestine self-cultivation in the arts of reading, writing, and oratory. These are themes Douglass had discussed in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845).  In that earlier telling, we meet the young gaggle of white boys, some Read more