 I think it's a great source to start inquiring about to what extent have African customs survived, the middle passage and the horrors of slavery. I think the conversation is a natural one to have in the early years of slavery, obviously, but by the time Douglas comes around, you know, slavery has already, the transatlantic slavery has already been cut off, slaves are not seen as imported anymore, but yet it's a testament to the extent to which African customs and traditions and culture survives, the institution, the trade, the trafficking, and the attempts quite literally to beat Africans into submission into slavery. So it's a good document for asking those kinds of questions about how does this survive, what does it's survival mean, what happens when an African American is confronted with African customs that they have rejected. That's a real internal personal struggle for Frederick Douglas. And it tells us a little bit about the character of the community in which African Americans are operating, that there is no one set definition of what slavery was, who was a slave, how did slaves live their lives, and all the facets that go into creating the African American community. So I really ask my students to kind of probe it on that particular level and the questions that come out of that document that lead them to discover a new sense and a new understanding of African Americans. I really use it with John Hope Franklin's book in search of the Promised Land, which is the story of a female slave who's owned by a Virginian but who lives in Nashville. And so she's allowed to live and exist almost as a free black woman with these tenuous connections to slavery and it really shows in her life then the kinds of things that can happen in those complex situations. Douglas's life is also very complex and so I ask the students to think about this little story, this little snippet in the larger story of his life. Well, I hope that they'll try to find out the extent to which slaves were in fact either dominated by their master and not dominated by their master. Where are the margins within which slaves can control their own lives? I hope that they'll question their monolithic understanding of slavery because it seems to me that a lot of students come with such an understanding that all slaves lived on a large plantation, all slaves picked cotton, all male slaves were in the field, all female slaves were in the house. It's not the kind of story that gives us any kind of agency among the slaves. So I really want them to examine that. It's very important for them to read excerpts about the same event across the four different autobiographies of Douglas. How did he change in the course of his life? Why did he expand upon this story in one of the narratives but not in other narratives? Is it something he remembered? Is it something that gained greater importance as he went on in his life? Those are the kinds of questions that you can ask of an individual and we always need to get past, especially in slavery, we always need to get past the sense that we're looking for consistency and that individuals are not consistent and we shouldn't expect that of our historical figures. Here's a slave who is taught to read against the law and it's done openly. Here's a slave who passes through many masters, again not the perception that most students have of slaves. Here's a slave who does the unthinkable. He confronts a slave breaker. And so in that sense it gives them the hero's story but it also it's building from a story about which they already think they know something and I think that's real important that we start with things that they think they know and that they can then learn that there's more to that.