Chapter 7 Summary

With the revelation being made to Douglass in Chapter 6 that education was the key to his freedom, he then spends all of Chapter 7 describing how he proceeded to learn to read and write. Although Mrs. Auld had treated him kindly and had started to teach him the alphabet when he first came to live with her family, she had made a complete about-face after her husband had angrily warned her how dangerous it was to teach a slave to read. As Douglass tells it, Mrs. Auld did not just go along with her husband's wishes. She went a step further, and was even more aggressive in her efforts to prevent Douglass from learning to read, sometimes running at him to grab a newspaper or book out of his hands. Douglass describes how tenderhearted and generous she was when he first met her, but...