Frederick Douglass: “Covey, he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church.”

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.

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.

My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.