Reading Response FDouglass-Laurencia Colon

Part 1: 1) After the young D loses his mistress as a teacher, what strategies does he practice continuing learning to read? Who does he turn to for help? How does he persuade them to help him?

“The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street as many of those I could, I converted them into teachers”.

Young Douglass became friends with the little white boys he comes in contact with on the street and as best as he could in his means he appeals to them for some reading lessons. He carries his book with him and manages to get help with Alphabets and readings from his friends at any given chance at different times and different places he finally succeeded in learning to read, mostly between hours of his errand duties. Smartly he derived a way of not only appreciating their kindly aid but also giving them something they lack, he confers to them bread, which was always in abundance and to which he could freely garner in the house compared to some of his little friends in the neighborhood.

Part 2:”The reading of the documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their home and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the wicked of men.” (Paragraph 7)

Douglass got deeper understanding in his thought about the story of slavery, yet while he grasps that he became sadden about what has been known to him. He expressed how bitterly he feels towards his enslavers and considered them as band of successful robbers who stole him from his home in Africa into a new environment and reduced him to slavery. It shows how psychologically slavers suffer as they get more knowledge on slavery.