My view of "My Bondage and My Freedom" by Frederick Douglass

When I first started reading "A CHANGE CAME O'ER THE SPIRIT OF MY DREAM." Frederick Douglass made it clear that he really appreciated his slave owner Mrs. Auld for being kind to him and taught him how to read and write. He aid she wasn’t confident teaching him maybe for feeling that she wouldn’t be very good or that it wasn’t something that was really needed at first but she realized he was a human like her and taught him what she felt he needed to know. Then he started to explain that enslaving someone isn’t something that comes natural. It takes plenty of practice. “Nature has done almost nothing to prepare men and women to be either slaves or slaveholders. Nothing but rigid training, long persisted in, can perfect the character of the one or the other.” And that when he came in possession of Mrs. Auld she wasn’t really sure how to be a slave owner and that he seemed ore like a friend than property. Se understood that he was a human “I could talk and sing; I could laugh and weep; I could reason and remember; I could love and hate. I was human, and she, dear lady, knew and felt me to be so. How could she, then, treat me as a brute, without a mighty struggle with all the noble powers of her own soul.” But when she mentioned this to her husband basically called her an idiot that her feelings were innocent and ignorant. “That struggle came, and the will and power of the husband was victorious. Her noble soul was overthrown; but, he that overthrew it did not, himself, escape the consequences.” But clearly his ideals were overthrown and Frederick Douglass learned to read and write anyway. So Frederick Douglass became apart of the family rather than apart of the furniture. Then he further explained how kind she always was. She always had a smile on and was kind to people who wasn’t so happy. “She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach.” He then tells the constant fight between Mrs. Auld and her husband it was clear that it was going to be a fight between the two. Mrs. Auld was going to have to choose between her husband and the mental welfare of the family friend, Frederick Douglass. So she chose to be an even better slave owner, she chose to stop him from reading and being a human. “Nothing appeared to make my poor mistress -- after her turning toward the downward path -- more angry, than seeing me, seated in some nook or corner, quietly reading a book or a newspaper. I have had her rush at me, with the utmost fury, and snatch from my hand such newspaper or book, with something of the wrath and consternation which a traitor might be supposed to feel on being discovered in a plot by some dangerous spy.” Frederick Douglass’s world flipped up side down if he sat in a corner he would be watched continually, and given unhappy looks. And if he was in another room for long periods of time he was often blamed for reading a book. But this would not stop him he would continue to learn more with or without there consent. I really liked this story because even when challenged to become ignorant again he still fought.