In Chapter 8 of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Frederick Douglass writes this sentence on page 47:
If any one thing in my experience, more than another, served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother.
By this point in the book, Douglass has described in graphic detail slave sales, family separations, whippings, and murder, as well as their routine deprivation of education, clothing, and food. What could possibly be worse than these? Over the next two pages, he injects into the story of what happened to his grandmother a stunning mix of cold journalism, historical perspective, heartrending exposition, profuse literary allusion, and a hopeless plea for divine intervention. Rather than summarize the woman's fate here, which would do an in justice to this American masterpiece, I urge you to read the book, whose tragic narration and life-affirming power have intensified 176 years after its publication, and upon my second reading of it, a half-century after the first.
