NATIVE GUARD By Natasha Trethewey Houghton Mifflin. 51 pp. $22 The frontispiece of Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard informs me she was born in Gulfport, Miss., that her mother was black and her father white. Reasonable deduction (assuming the "I" of the...

While Frederick Douglass was a slave employed in a shipyard in Baltimore, he endured a highly public attack. Diminishing employment opportunities and consequent salary pressures had led white workers to resent the competition of black workers, and managers were all too willing to...

In the following essay, originally published in 1986, Sundquist examines Douglass's symbolic and rhetorical use of literacy and paternity—and the powers each represents—in My Bondage and My Freedom.