The passage I chose to analyze is the very last paragraph of chapter II in page 242, The passage starts with a part of a song slaves would sing when they were leaving to work at the Great House Farm. Douglass tells us how slaves used music as a sort of copying mechanism to deal with the lost of their freedom, or for some slaves like him that never had freedom to begin with and were born into the system of slavery. Often we connect music and songs with happiness and joy, but Douglass says that every time he heard the slaves sing about going to the Great Farm House it just made him depressed and sadden, and there where times where he even cried hearing the “wild notes” the slaves would sing. He talks about how those songs dehuminized slaves even more than they already were, and that it followed him throughout all of his life and made his hatred slavery grow even more. Douglass speaks of how people, and slaves themselves, would say the slaves were “happy” and that the singing was evidence of that, but Douglass states that slaves used to sing when they were the most unhappy, and how those songs represented the sorrow and sadness they were feeling. He makes a comment that said “The song of the slave represents the sorrow of their heart; and he is releaved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by tears.” which to me seems to mean that singing for slaves singing was their way of letting their sadness, anger and sorrows out for the world to see when they werent able to say their feeling out loud. Douglass even goes on to say how he himself has done the same thing, utilizing songs to represent his feeling towards slavery.