Excerpt from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
3 My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also
whispered that my master was my father, but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing, the means of knowing was
withheld from me. My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant--before I knew her as my mother. 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. Frequently, before
the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and
the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless
it be to hinder the development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the
mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.
41 never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in
duration, and at night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home. She made her journeys to
see me in the night, traveling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day's work. She was a field hand, and a
whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master to the
contrary--a permission which they seldom get, and one that gives to him that gives it the proud name of being a kind master
Something that is not present in this autobiographical passage but would likely be present in a fictional adaptation of it is
es
A)
maps and diagrams
B)
pictures with captions
o
a salutation or greeting.
D)
dialogue among characters.