Winifred Morgan writes “Jacobs’s most important relationship, of course, is with her children, and this keeps her in place when she might otherwise have fled or even committed suicide” (87). In keeping with her point that Douglass’s narrative emphasizes self-reliance and the power associated with literacy, as opposed to community, it’s relevant to consider the fact that when Douglass mentions the prospect of suicide, the thing that saves him is not necessarily the thought of other people, but “the hope of being free.” He feeds this hope by reading, trying to use the dictionary to understand what the word “abolition” means.