A Curse or a blessing?

          Chapters five, six, and seven 

Throughout these chapters, Douglass tells us his journey from being illiterate to writing and reading like a white man. He states how his kind mistress gave him the most help: "(Mrs. Auld), she very kindly commenced to teach me the A,B,C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning how to spell words of three or four letters" (page 39). How ever, this feeling of excitement drifted, Ms. Auld was no longer interested in teaching Douglass, and in fact she became nervous by the idea: "My mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had in compliance with the advice and direction of her husband (against it), not only ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one else" (page 43). Here we see how a woman changed her "tender heart" and turned it to stone, Douglass states the change in a few words: "The first step in her downward was in her ceasing to instruct me ... Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper" (page 43). Anyhow, Douglass managed to find ways to learn, and found himself surrounded with white hungry boys who would trade bread for their knowledge. Douglass succeeded in learning to read, and he always carried a book with himself even if he sometimes felt that "learning how to read had been a curse rather than a blessing" (page 45).