Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

The events described in this chapter “might well be dramatized for the stage” (372). In 1877, Douglass returns to St. Michaels and visits with Captain Thomas Auld, his former master, the man who once sent him to Edward Covey to be “broken” as a field-hand. With Auld nearing the end of his life, “conditions were favorable for remembrance of all his good deeds, and generous extenuation of all his evil ones” (373). For his part, Auld tells Douglass that he was “too smart to be a slave” and that he did right in running away (374). Several years later, Douglass gives a speech at the courthouse in Easton, where he and his co-conspirators were imprisoned for the crime of plotting their escape from slavery.

Douglass also visits the Lloyd plantation, where he meets the great grandson of Colonel Edward Lloyd, the man who once owned more than a thousand slaves. Seeing the kitchen attached to the home of his “Old Master,” Captain Aaron Anthony, Douglass recalls it as the last place he was his mother. He then “went round to the window at which Miss Lucretia used to sit with her sewing, and at which I used to sing when hungry, a signal which she well understood, and to which she readily responded with bread” (378).