My Bondage and My Freedom

The man whom they called “old master” owned a few farms in Tuckahoe and “was the chief clerk and butler on the home plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd” (55). In his role, Captain Anthony oversaw overseers on Lloyd’s farms and maintained a staff of overseers on his own land. Lloyd’s home plantation was on the Wye River. The time came for young Frederick to leave his grandparents’ cabin, which he dreaded. He had some awareness then of being enslaved, meaning that he knew that someone else controlled his life.

On the morning that he left for the Lloyd plantation with his grandmother, the pair walked 12 miles from Tuckahoe to the Wye River. They went through the woods. Douglass observed “old logs and stumps” and took them “for wild beasts” (58). They reached the Lloyd plantation in the afternoon, where Douglass again found himself in the company of many children of all colors, some nearly white. In the fields, many men and women were working. Betsey encouraged him to go play with the children, some of whom were his cousins. Others there, whom his grandmother pointed out, were Douglass’s brother Perry, and his sisters, Sarah and Eliza. All were strangers to the boy. While he busied himself playing, Betsey took her opportunity to slip out of sight. When the boy saw that his grandmother was gone, he began to cry, and his siblings consoled him. That late afternoon, he cried until he fell asleep.

Douglass repeats that he has nothing to say about his father because he doesn’t know who the man was. He offers, instead, possibilities. His father may have been enslaved on another plantation; he may have been a free Black man; or, he may have been an Anglo-Saxon. On the other hand, he recalls his mother well. Harriet was a tall and very dark-skinned woman. She was known for being “remarkably sedate in her manners” (61). Douglass recalls that she occasionally visited him at Colonel Lloyd’s plantation and in the kitchen of his enslaver’s house. A man named Mr. Stewart who lived 12 miles away received Harriet as a field hand. In her role, she didn’t have much leisure time to visit her son, and Mr. Stewart wouldn’t permit any such time anyway.

Instead, Douglass ended up in in the charge of Aunt Katy, the enslaver’s cook, who beat and starved him. One day, after trying to roast some dry kernels of corn to abate his hunger, Harriet entered the kitchen, piteously observed her son’s hunger, and gave Katy an angry lecture. She then gave Douglass “a large ginger cake […] in the shape of a heart” (66). Shortly thereafter, Harriet fell ill and died. After her death, Douglass learned that Harriet was able to read. Moreover, she was the only enslaved person and person of color in Tuckahoe who knew how. Douglass asserts that he never learned how she acquired the skill but finds it remarkable that she did, particularly because she was a field hand. He credits his love of letters to her and not to his supposed “Anglo-Saxon paternity” (68). There were rumors that Douglass’s enslaver was his father. Douglass figures that he was eight or nine when his mother died on a farm in the neighborhood of Hillsborough in Tuckahoe. Her grave is unmarked.

Maryland was one of the milder enslaving states, meaning that it was “divested of those harsh and terrible peculiarities” that characterized the system in the Deep South (71). Douglass asserts, however, that, in more secluded places, enslavement can become as cruel in Maryland as anywhere else. Colonel Lloyd’s home plantation was also in a secluded place—so secluded that his children and grandchildren couldn’t attend school but received instruction at home from a tutor named Mr. Page. Almost every plantation around Colonel Lloyd’s home plantation belonged to him. His close friends owned the others, and they were all as fervent in their support of enslavement as he was. An overseer, who acted as “accuser, judge, jury, advocate and executioner” (74-75), ruled over the enslaved people.

Douglass quickly adapted to his new home. He found pleasure with his new playmates. There were many houses on Colonel Lloyd’s land, including his own— “a long, brick building, plain, but substantial”—which stood in the center of the plantation and was known as the “Great House” (76). Mr. Sevier, the overseer, had a small red house up the road. The enslaved people existed in “a very long, rough, low building” nearer to their enslaver, which was called “the Long Quarter” (76). There were also barns, tobacco houses, blacksmiths’ shops, dairies, a summer-house, greenhouses, turkey-houses, and sundry other buildings that housed the food and where tradesmen worked. There was also a cemetery some distance away, marked by large tombs. Some of the enslaved people claimed to have seen ghosts emerge from their graves and others still claimed to have heard awful sounds. Most enslaved people believed that those who died as enslavers went to hell. The former enslavers’ spirits, they believed, couldn’t rest because they wished to live again just “to wield the lash” (78).

The younger enslaved people referred to the men who had special skills, such as blacksmithing and shoemaking, as “uncle.” Enslaved people seldom got surnames. Some men, however, earned other honorifics. For example, Uncle Isaac Copper, known for his skills with medicine, received the prefix “doctor.” For the body, he prescribed Epsom salts and castor oil. For supposed diseases of the soul, he believed in the Lord’s Prayer and hickory switches. The enslaved children went to him to learn the Lord’s Prayer. A child who didn’t repeat after him perfectly received lashes over the head with a switch.

Douglass often skipped his prayer lessons and went to visit the windmill of Mr. Kinney, “a kindhearted old Englishman” (81) who enjoyed seeing the enslaved children come to observe his machine. This feature of Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, in addition to the plentiful fish in the creek, made the farm “a field for industry and enterprise” (83). This was especially true because Douglass’s enslaver hardly noticed him. Mr. Kinney also occupied himself with his duties as Colonel Lloyd’s chief butler, which included managing storehouses, measuring out the meager food allowances for enslaved people, shipping crops to market, and overseeing the skilled workers’ shops on the plantation. However, the enslaved children remained in the care of Aunt Katy, who cared so little that Douglass and the other children mostly starved. There were instances in which he was so hungry that he fought with the dog, Old Nep, for kitchen table crumbs. Luxuries included the water in which meat boiled and “the skin taken from rusty bacon” (84). Sometimes, he got full meals, as well as assurance from old enslaved people who told him that things would get better when he became a man.

The enslaved people on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation spoke poor English—a mixture of Guinea and other West African tongues blended with English. Some of the enslaved people had recently come from the West African coast. Mas’ Daniel, the youngest of Colonel Lloyd’s sons, picked up the dialect and some of their ideas as a result of spending so much time with them. Generally, however, everyone on the plantation carefully obeyed notions of rank. No enslaved person ever went to Colonel Lloyd’s house and the Lloyds never went to theirs. Additionally, Captain Anthony’s family never fraternized with that of Mr. Sevier.