Fredrick Douglas

            In, "My Bondage and My Freedom-, Fredrick Douglas takes you back into his life long enough for you to gather the pieces of the puzzle that unveils the missing pieces of his future. He demonstrated that knowledge is not power in itself, but what you do with the knowledge is the power. Over a period of time, he found out that even when life continues forward sometimes you can still be imprisoned to the past without the knowledge of how to be free. "The time is but a speck, yet large enough to justify a pause for retrospection "and a pause it must only be."" (69) His quote brought such a power to the fact that even though, his life was hard and he caught himself staying in the past, when he realized that he already obtained a part of his future, it made the rode to freedom more accessible. Fredrick Douglass was constantly up-rooted in his childhood, which later in life engraved a slave mentality, but once the seeds of knowledge were planted, he was never the same. .
             Douglass slave mentality had been branded in him all his life. When a mind and life have been the same way for so long, the idea of a new concept seems almost impossible. Being raised by his grandmother for approximately the first five years of his life gave Fredrick love and security. He never understood that his grandmother and the "old master- had an agreement that when he became of a certain age that he would be taken to the plantation. So, when he was introduced to the fact he was a slave it terrified him. Having security and love taken from you, must be hard on any child. However, deeper than that is why he had to be snatched away, because he was a slave. What was a slave to a five-year-old boy who could do as he pleased? He never really knew what it meant to be a slave. Although, he never had to welcome some of the brutal acts that he saw, he knew he was still a slave. Frederick Douglass had to battle with the emotions of slavery versus the reality of slavery.