Summer Reading Exam

Narrative and Life of Frederick Douglass

1. Describe the situation of Frederick Douglass’ family at the beginning of the book.

2. In addition to corporal punishment, what other hardships did slaves face?

3. How did moving to Baltimore improve Douglass' situation?

4. Why did Frederick Douglass believe slaves were discouraged from learning?

5. How did Frederick Douglass learn to write? How did this knowledge shape his future?

6. According to Douglass, how does slavery affect even kind or generous white people? Give details to support your answer.

7. Why did he choose not to give all facts of his escape?

8. Why did he believe that religious beliefs made a slave owner “more cruel and hateful in all his ways?”

9. What circumstances caused him to cease being whipped at Mr. Covey’s farm?

Describe the context and meaning of the following quotations:

1. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. He succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

2. Every moment they spent in that school, they were liable to be taken up, and given thirty-nine lashes. They came because they wished to learn. Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness. I taught them, because it was the delight of my soul to be doing something that looked like bettering the condition of my race.

3. "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would become unmanageable . . . As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." . . . I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. . . From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.