The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass opens with frustration and sadness concerning his ambiguous age. In the first paragraph, Douglass describes how slaves never had an actual record of their births since owners preferred to keep their slaves ignorant and thus powerless to take over or runaway. Basically, slaves were treated as animals and birth dates only came as close as seasons within a year. Douglass makes it explicit how frustrating it was to him that all the white children were able to know to their birthdays and have other knowledge about their background, while knew nothing but how to care for the plantation. Douglass felt deprived and thus began the mound of anger and frustration that he builds prior to his ultimate action: escaping toward freedom. From this first paragraph, I am able to conjure a feel for Douglass' nature. He is a black slave that develops a growing mound of rage toward the abusive power of white society and toward the condition of A!
             frican Americans. Only time may tell how long this rage will stay bottled up inside before Douglass lets loose focused on nothing but his freedom.
             This rage can also be contributed to the incident where he watched the whipping of his own aunt. This was the first time he had ever been a witness to any such "bloody scene" and it became evidence of what really occurs on a plantation. Prior to this occurrence Douglass lived on the outskirts of the plantation with his grandmother where only young children were raised. This whipping was his first taste of the wretchedness of slavery and how loathsome it can be to be under the power of a belligerent master whose only satisfaction comes from whipping his slaves. Not only does he remember this whipping because it was the first he ever witnessed, but also because his own Aunt Hester was the victim. This event must have been extremely emotional for Douglass who had no idea of such things occurring on a p...