Historical voices

They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.

Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?” These words used to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free.

You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life!

I would sometimes say to them, I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men.

I am strongly tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids;—not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an…

This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge.

Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.

She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.

Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.

Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities.

Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me.

In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so.

It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute.

She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness.

His heart must be harder than stone, that could look upon these unmoved.

Few are willing to incur the odium attaching to the reputation of being a cruel master; and above all things, they would not be known as not giving a slave enough to eat.

He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave.

There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the plantation.

A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation.

In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress.

That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination…

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man.