Frederick Douglass argues that there are several ways to understand a particular experience. Douglass supports this claim when he explains that the lives of slaves can be learned from the songs that the slaves sang or the “volumes of philosophy on the subject” (chapter II). Furthermore, Frederick Douglass aims to correct the idea that slaves sang songs because they were happy. Rather, slaves sang songs to express the horrors of slavery and the misery of the slaves. Thus, there are multiple understandings of an experience based on a person’s perspective.
In chapter VII of his memoir, Douglass explains the multiple ways in which he taught himself how to write. First, he copied the letters on the timber in the shipyard. Then, when his Master and Mistress were out of the house, Douglass would “[write] in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written” (chapter VII). Douglass goes on to explain that he wrote in the copy-book for years until he was able to learn how to write. Douglass’s way of learning how to write is an example of his argument from chapter II that there are multiple ways of understanding an experience, and there are a number of different ways of learning a certain thing.
Ideas in Ink 