When I was about thirteen years old, and had succeeded in learning to read, every increase of knowledge, especially respecting the FREE STATES, added something to the almost intolerable burden of the thought—I AM A SLAVE FOR LIFE.
In his autobiography, Douglass describes how gaining literacy intensified his awareness of his enslaved condition and the injustice of it.
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It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.
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.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.