Douglass Relationship With His Father's Death

The context in paragraph one, Douglass is talking about his mother death. How he was not able to have a relationship that a mother would have with their child. The death of his mother leaves him with the same emotions as if it was a stranger. The theme is dehumanizing, Douglass was not able to have the a relationship with his birth mother as a human or a child would be able to. This chapter shows the beginnings of slavery, Slaveholders first remove a child from his family, and Douglass explains how this destroys the child’s sense of personal history.
In the second quotation, Douglass is talking about the meaning of the songs and how it was difficult to explain “apparently incoherent” to outsiders, but the slaves themselves understood the