Editor's Note: Linda Hirshman is a lawyer, cultural historian, and author of several books. Portions of the following essay appear in her latest work, The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation, which chronicles the fascinating alliance between the abolitionists Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman.

“It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away,” Frederick Douglass begins his Narrative, “to part children from their mothers at a very early age.”

When Douglass’ mother was sent twelve miles away to work for another planter in 1819, he couldn’t have been much more than a year old. He never knew his father, who he’d heard was “a white man.” There was talk that the man was his enslaver, but of this, he says, “I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me.” Douglass was lucky enough in his early years to be sent to his mother’s mother to be raised until he was old enough to be of use. During his years as a slave, he was called by his mother’s surname, Frederick Bailey; he named himself Douglass later, after he escaped. She did not live long after their parting, but he was “not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial.”

The master’s enslaved children were, Douglass astutely notes, “a constant offense to their mistress.” The master had to mollify her by treating them worse, beating them more often, and selling them to the “human-flesh mongers” who traded in slaves. Indeed, Douglass writes, the masters often acted more kindly in selling their children than in keeping them, because keeping them meant beating their own slave offspring or having their children’s white half brothers do the cruel deed to their own siblings.

Douglass had been so completely separated from his mother that he “received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” In his second telling of his story ten years later, however, Douglass places his mother in a heroic narrative. He remembers what she looked like, he says; she resembled a drawing “in ‘Prichard’s Natural History of Man.'” Her visits to him “were few in number, brief in duration, and mostly made in the night. The pains she took, and the toil she endured, to see me, tells me that a true mother’s heart was hers, and that slavery had difficulty in paralyzing it with unmotherly indifference.”

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In his second version, the 1855 memoir entitled My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass pens a maternal visit worthy of a fairy tale or the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The cruel plantation-slave cook, Katy, had cut off his rations in an attempt, she claims, to starve him into submission. As he tells it, he was suffering the extreme hunger of a day of fasting when his mother appeared for one of her rare visits. Dressing down the abusive servant, she made Douglass a ginger cake and fed him on her lap.

As with so much of Douglass’s life, it is the telling rather than the content that matters. How much more powerful than this sweet story is the brief and poignant one-sentence indictment of his separation from his mother, written in the first version, when his memory was freshest: “It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age.”

Around 1823, when he was still a toddler, Douglass’ grandmother brought him from her peaceable kingdom outside the plantation to live in the master’s house. Thereafter, Douglass was a chattel, little better than a “thing.” He was hungry and terrified by the constant threat of brutal abuse. He was sent from one owner to another like a piece of furniture. With each transfer, his life changed.

Douglass’ legal owner, Aaron Anthony, was an administrator for a huge plantation owner named Colonel Edward Lloyd. At first, when his grandmother delivered him to Anthony’s house on Lloyd’s plantation, the young boy was not worked, but he was hungry all the time. Indeed, the slaves there were so hungry that Colonel Lloyd had to tar every fence around his fabled fruit orchards to stop them from stealing the apples and the oranges. And Frederick was so cold, he later remembered, that his feet “so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”

When Douglass was around seven, Aaron Anthony decided to send him to his son-in-law’s brother, Hugh Auld in Baltimore, to care for the Aulds’ young son. Frederick was delighted. He was eager to see Baltimore, which had mythic status on the rural Maryland plantation. When he was delivered to the Aulds at their house on Happy Alley off Aliceanna Street, Frederick saw “what I had never seen before,” he writes; “it was a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions; it was the face of my new mistress, Sophia Auld.” Douglass remembered his transfer to the Aulds in Baltimore as a manifestation of divine providence in his life. The Aulds had not owned slaves, and Sophia in particular treated Frederick like the person he was.

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When Sophia started to teach her son to read, she taught Frederick, as well. If ever an act could be attributed to divine providence, it was the moment when the slave met the alphabet. Sophia had even progressed to words of several letters when, as Douglass reports, her husband, Hugh, found out what was going on. "Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him.” And so, Frederick determined to learn two things: how to read and, therefore, how to pursue “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” The harder his formerly sympathetic masters tried to stop him from learning, the more determined he was to learn how to read. Frederick would not merely be a person; he would be a man of letters.

“The plan . . . I adopted,” he writes, (and) the one by which I was the most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent on errands, I always took my book with me, and by doing one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge."

Douglass knew their bread was worth more than his. As the young Douglass would say to the hungry boys: “I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men. ‘You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life!’”

This is the second place in the memoir where Douglass speaks of the occasional kindness of a white person who came across his path. He would thank these people specifically, he continues, but he was afraid he would get them in trouble for teaching a slave to read.

Because Frederick was treated as mere chattel, when his formal owner died, the Aulds were compelled to send him back to the plantation to be evaluated as part of the “inventory.” Douglass was relieved when his dead master’s son-in-law Thomas Auld sent him back to the Baltimore Aulds. Frederick had no way of knowing, but right after he arrived back in Baltimore, enslaved, William Lloyd Garrison moved a mile away, to edit the abolitionist paper the Genius of Universal Emancipation. There would be no