My Bondage, My Freedom, Douglass (pg. 322-324)

Slave narratives are pretty typical fare in American social studies courses from early elementary school all the way through upper level college courses. I suppose the goal in this is to deeply instill an appreciation for how far we have come as a nation in the past 200 years, and to teach children in our melting pot of society a sense of equality amongst one another, a preventative measure of sorts to keep history from proverbially repeating itself. Commonly, depending on the age of students, the narratives are pretty similar. You have an introduction of the slave and their background, a summary of plantation life, and then varied stories of inhumanely difficult labor, cruel beatings and a terrible sense of all around suffering. These stirring accounts are then typically balanced out with talk of abolitionists and discussion of the underground railroad and then detailed accounts of daring and epic escapes from the confides of plantation life to that of the free north. The narrator shares with the reader ever harrowing detail of sneaking out under cover of darkness, running barefoot through woods, swamps and rivers, avoiding slave hunters and dogs by hiding in trees or in the cellars of homes along the underground railroad, and etc. Douglass's accounts of captivity are probably some of the most detailed, and therefore most gruesome, so as a sympathetic reader I couldn't wait to get to the part where he would eventually account his much deserved escape to freedom. However in a rather stark contrast, he refuses to do so, and while that was off-putting at first, I soon realized that his reasons were very well justified. Calling out the writers of previous narratives he denounces the practice of recounting their methods of escape. Because of them, he believes the underground railroad ought to be called the "Upper-ground railroad [as] its stations are far better known to the slaveholders than to the slaves," and goes on to say that he "must deprive [himself] of this pleasure and the curious gratification which such a statement of facts would afford." He admits that he would rather suffer under all the assumptions that might be made in his lack of an explanation than, "exculpate [himself]...and thereby run the hazard of closing the slightest avenue by which a brother in suffering my clear himself of the chains of...slavery." I found this both noble and righteous and overall rather interesting as I had never thought unto this point that in essence by sharing their tales of escape most free slaves were ultimately closing off many routes to their brethren in the south who could no longer do the same thing after their masters got hold of these books.