Frederick Douglass, who began his life enslaved and without the possibilities of learning to read and write, realized that his path to intellectual freedom lay in the power of literacy. Thus, he began an insatiable quest to learn all he could and through whatever resources he encountered. In chapter 7, Douglass realizes that the poor white boys in the street could provide literacy lessons in exchange for bread.
As his abilities in reading and writing increase, Douglass's diction increases in complexity. Consider the following passage:
Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorry or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had break for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities.
Douglass uses strong and precise adjectives, such as injurious, to project not only a voice for those directly held in slavery but those, like his mistress, whose character is forever changed by the damaging tentacles of slavery's reach. Douglass uses a compassionate tone for a woman who owns him and removes from his world any possibility of education. The diction he uses shows how literacy has given him advanced powers of reasoning which includes an incredible compassion for a woman who has oppressed him.
Douglass also illustrates his abilities to create complex structures in this chapter. He shows parallelism in the example above:
She had break for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach.
Douglass also shows his ability to construct cumulative sentences, such as this one:
I could regard [my enslavers] in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery.
The sentence could end after robbers and still convey a powerful message. However, the additional modifying phrases strengthens the sentence without losing any coherence and paints a strong image of the actions taken against those enslaved in America.
Throughout this chapter, Douglass shows his ability to break free from societal norms of his period in history, forming his independent thoughts about the importance of abolition.
Having been taught to read by Sophia Auld, Frederick Douglass furthered his skills on his own after her husband forbade her to teach a slave. Douglass also taught himself to write, and he wrote with a certain "figurative capacity," as demonstrated in this well-constructed sentence:
...however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. (Ch.7)
Douglass repeats certain words in this sentence for emotional effect, such as slave. In addition, he uses parallelism in order to present ideas equally; the symmetry here emphasizes his meaning.
The diction which Douglass employs is rather formal, perhaps because of the age in which he lived and also because he worked hard to educate himself despite the almost complete lack of opportunity he experienced as a slave.
When Douglass is denied educational opportunities once given to him, he remarks,
The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell. (Ch.7)
Here again, Frederick Douglass employs figurative language and parallel structure. He also establishes a tone of dramatic power, self-determination, and intellectual freedom.
In all of these examples from Chapter 7, Frederick Douglass demonstrates that he has educated himself well, and that he is a man who has attained intellectual freedom mostly through his own efforts. With moving rhetoric he writes of his intellectual freedom:
...the silver trumpet of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. (Ch.7)
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