"Life for Me Ain't No Crystal Stair"; Readin', Writin', and Parental (Il)literacy in African American Children's Books
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Abstract
While Frederick Douglass's important Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) demonstrates an individual's alleged personal liberation spiritually and psychologically through reading and writing, the narrative equally forwards a culturally chauvinistic agenda that privileges the printed word. Proposing to show his learned northern abolitionist, primarily white male audience that access to reading and writing transforms him from his perceived animal barbarism to civilized humanhood, Douglass impressively and eloquently details human bondage and his release from it through elaborate rhetorical strategies: symbolisms, ironies, allusions, parallelisms, ambiguities, repetitions. Indeed, Douglass's liberation from his enslavement comes less from his physical freedom than from his ability to read and write.
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