book is not at all sensationalized as were many of the fictionalized narratives about slavery, yet Douglass is no less passionate about the need for slavery to end. Slavery treated one group of human beings as less valuable than others, and in doing so it disrupted family life and perverted the childhood of slave children. Douglass managed to overcome slavery, but he did not overcome its effects and was fully aware of the degree to which his life was shaped by his own slavery first and by the fact of the continuation of slavery--and the threat that he might be re-enslaved--second.
Freedom is clearly very important to Douglass now that he has tasted it, since he has known the true imprisonment of slavery. He was imprisoned in body, but his spirit was yearning toward freedom even in his slave condition. In Douglass's case,
his imprisonment as a slave is all the more bitter because of his parentage--his father was a white man, reputed to be the boy's master, though Douglass says he has no real knowledge of the fact. As a child, he was separated from his mother, a practice he says was common in the part of Maryland from which he ran away:
For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.
Douglass describes his life as a slave in the pages of this book, and his experiences are illuminating. His story shows how his life and character were shaped by the slavery into which he was born and by the understanding that grew within him that slavery was an unnatural state and that freedom was the right of every living human being. This was a major realization for a boy who had never known any other kind of life, and Douglass's discovery of this truth made his slavery all the more terrible as the imprisonment of his soul. Indeed, now he knew ...