The mistress’s initial kindness had a greater effect because it was during that time that she taught Douglass to read, an event which had enormous impact on his life. He acknowledges this when he says, “Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.” People are fed and sustained not only by food, but also by ideas and understanding. Douglass finds vindication for his belief that slavery is wrong. Douglass “was led to abhor and detest” his enslavers. Douglass comes to feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.
He thinks that if he were an animal, he wouldn’t have the ability to think and worry about his circumstances. Now that he can read, Douglass is tormented by his constant thoughts about his life as a slave and the impossibility of freedom. He regards slaveholders as “a band of successful robbers” and as “the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. Douglass’s purpose is to express his thoughts and feelings about being enslaved and about the effects of literacy. He relates three events that help him achieve his goal: his mistress teaching him to read, his further pursuit of instruction from “all the little white boys,” and the acquisition of certain reading materials that encouraged his own thoughts and feelings about slavery.
Douglass’s Narrative shows how white slaveholders perpetuate slavery by keeping their slaves ignorant. At the time Douglass was writing, many people believed that slavery was a natural state of being. They believed that blacks were inherently incapable of participating in civil society and thus should be kept as workers for whites. The Narrative explains the strategies and procedures by which whites gain and keep power over blacks from their birth onward. Slave owners keep slaves ignorant of basic facts about themselves, such as their birth date or their paternity. This enforced ignorance robs children of their natural sense of individual identity. As slave children grow older, slave owners prevent them from learning how to read and write, as literacy would give them a sense of self‑sufficiency and capability. Slaveholders understand that literacy would lead slaves to question the right of whites to keep slaves. Finally, by keeping slaves illiterate, Southern slaveholders maintain control over what the rest of America knows about slavery. If slaves cannot write, their side of the slavery story cannot be told. Wendell Phillips makes this point in his prefatory letter to the Narrative.
