Douglass suggests that there was an inverse correlation between his desire to read and his master’s desire for him to remain ignorant, and that his master’s opposition made him even more convinced that reading could be useful to him. While it seems evident that one purpose Douglass had in mind was to use the skill to make progress in the material world, and obtain his freedom, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs tells the story of a pious, older black man who was willing to assume the risk of learning to read illegally so he could decipher the words of the bible.

These two examples are relevant to the debate surrounding the “Gateway of Death” theory, or the disagreement about whether or not black people sang songs that seemed to be about spiritual matters– but were actually coded references to, and sometimes directions for, escaping from enslavement on earth–or if the references to freedom in black spirituals actually had to do with the freedom they expected to feel when they were released from their lives, into heaven.