With regard to Douglass’s first autobiography, Winifred Morgan writes, the “first paragraph of his Narrative notes that he had never seen ‘any authentic record’ (47) of his birth.” This is relevant to the idea that literacy and the ability to manipulate written words has historically been regarded as proof of a black person’s humanity. The absence of a written record of Douglass’s birth symbolizes the fact that until he wrote his own record of his life–writing himself into existence–his race kept him from being regarded as a human being.
In Witnessing Slavery, Frances Smith Foster writes “Moses Grandy attributed the lack of permanent recognition of a slave’s birth to the attitude of the master who considers slaves as chattel and to the denial to slaves of the information with which they could calculate the anniversaries of their existence.”
In his biography of Douglass, William McFeely says a historian named Dickson Preston determined “from an inventory of his master’s slaves the time of Frederick’s birth–February 1818 (a year later than the date that Douglass himself calculated)” (8).
McFeely suggests that Douglass’s speculation about the race of his father was probably founded on gossip he heard in his grandmother’s cabin, “as people accounted for his difference in color from his brothers and sisters.” This talk related to the fact that Douglass was “‘yellow,'” and that he “had a muted, dull complexion” that was lighter than those of his relatives. (8)