Let the reader reflect upon the fact, that, in this christian country, men and women are hiding from professors of religion, in barns, in the woods and fields, in order to learn to read the holy bible.
From his autobiography, Douglass reflects on the irony of enslaved people being forced to hide to learn to read the Bible in a Christian country.
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The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his 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.