Nusaiba Ramisa – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

I chose to analyze the following passage from Chapter 1 of the narrative in which Frederick Douglass talks about his relationship with his mother, “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of [my mother’s] death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger” (237). Douglass explains how he was separated from his mother a few months after his birth. This separation clearly distorted his chance of ever forming familial bonds with his mother and he never truly knew what it’s like to feel his mother’s love, “her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care” (237). This practice was commonly performed because the slaveowners viewed the babies of the enslaved as new property which they intended to sell off to other slaveowners. He goes on to explain how African American people were born as slaves and raised with this mentality from infancy. This passage helped open my eyes to, yet another horror of slavery and the unspeakable cruelty enslaved humans faced at the time. As I read the narrative, I noticed that Douglass writes in an informal storytelling style which made it easy to comprehend every little detail. He didn’t overcomplicate his writing with complex diction and syntax in the way that most writers tend to do to seem more formal. I felt as though he was directly speaking to me and telling me all about his life. It was completely unfiltered and adding in all the detailed accounts of his life made it feel more personal. After learning about what Frederick Douglass went through, I came to the realization that he was an extremely strong-headed person. Regardless of what situation he found himself in, he always managed to overcome everything that life threw at him.