![]() ![]() Auld taught Douglass how to read and to write, bequeathing the tools with which he’d confront the scourge of racism. The boy’s staggering intellect manifested early, as he was shuttled around the Lloyd family’s empire, where Anthony worked, eventually serving the openhearted, devoutly Christian Sophia Auld, in Baltimore. ![]() His father was assuredly white, although Douglass was never certain whether his own master, Aaron Anthony, had raped Harriet: “Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families,” he opined. ![]() Reinvention was essential not only to Douglass’ survival but also to his shaping of our national character.īorn in Tidewater, Md., in 1818, Frederick Bailey barely knew his mother, Harriet, who died when the boy was 8. Blight, a Yale historian, notes in his authoritative, meticulously researched biography, Douglass revised and tweaked his own story in three autobiographies. Frederick Douglass, one of our more brilliant and towering political figures, carved out numerous acts in his lengthy Shakespearean life, from enslaved man to silver-tongued orator to global celebrity. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote in “The Last Tycoon,” perhaps the most self-evidently ridiculous sentence in our literary canon. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. ![]()
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