Reading Response Fredrick Douglass-Mateo

PART 1-After the young Douglass loses his mistress as his teacher, what strategies does he practice to continue learning to read?  Who does he turn to for help?  How does he persuade them to help him?

The strategies he uses after his mistress stopped teaching him was to become friends with the white kids. He would go to the educated White kids and bargain with them using bread to feed their hunger since they were less fortunate and in return they would teach him to read and write. He would also finish his errands quickly so he could see the kids and brought a book with him so he could write down the lessons he learned but never told anyone since he didn’t want to embarrass the kids since teaching slaves was an unpardonable offense.

Part2-

“The reading of these 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
 homes,
 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
most
 wicked
 of
 men.”(Paragraph 5)

What Douglass is trying to express here when he says this is that learning to read had been a curse because he learned the truth about how his condition came to be and how he was put in his position as a slave. As he reads the The Columbian Orator book he he grows hatred for his enslavers and he learns more about how they went to Africa and robbed people of their homes and families. Furthermore he says that “freedom… was ever present to torment me”. This is basically saying that since he has learned to be literate and learning about the slaves freedom in the book he has been feeling teased by it because it gives him false hope about something he may never have as in a false reality. He says that after reading the book he regretted his own existence and that he would have killed himself to be free in that sense. This is all significant because it shows his struggle with trying to speak out the truth and learning it but also gave him motivation to keep going