I've been making fair progress in Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, finding much to enjoy in his prose style, which offsets the somewhat depressing nature of the subject matter involved. It's a story I already know well from his Narrative of the Life, but it's lost none of its power and odd suspense. I say 'odd' since all readers know the eventual outcome of the writer's travails, yet in the grimmer moments of his young life you genuinely wonder if Douglass is going to pull through given the extremes he endured.
But, at the same time, you have no doubt as to the extraordinary strength of the man's character. It isn't that he advertises this, far from it; rather it emerges through the compelling details he gathers for the reader and, above all, through the intelligence suffusing the text. His understanding of the psychology of the slaveholders is a mark of his inherent superiority over them - something that he is quietly aware of.
And there is a lot that is fascinating about that twisted psychology. To give one example: Douglass, himself a deeply religious man, observes with some perplexity: For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have found them, almost invariably, the vilest, meanest and basest of their class. He further notes: It is not for me to explain the fact. Others may do that; I simply state it as a fact, and leave the theological, and psychological inquiry, which it raises, to be decided by others more competent than myself. Must say, I doubt that there were many such.
