Have I not as good a right to be free as you have?” Words like these, I observed, always troubled them; and I had no small satisfaction in wringing from the boys, occasionally, that fresh and bitter condemnation of slavery, that springs from nature, unseared and unperverted.
Douglass recounts how, as a child, he would challenge his white playmates about his right to freedom, observing their natural moral discomfort with slavery.
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This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.
I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.