This brief opening chapter describes Douglass’s earliest memories and closest familial relations. Born a slave in Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, young Frederick lives until the age of seven or eight with his grandparents, Betsey (who is a slave) and Isaac Bailey (Frederick did not assume the surname “Douglass” until after his escape from slavery in 1838). Talbot County, at least the part Douglass remembers, is “remarkable” for little more than the “general dilapidation of its farms and fences” and the “indigent and spiritless character of its inhabitants” (9). Douglass has more pleasant memories of his grandparents, in particular his grandmother, who “was held in high esteem, far higher than was the lot of most colored persons in that region” (10).

Of his parents, young Frederick knows little, and for different reasons. His mother, a slave, has been “hired out” by her owner and thus rarely sees her son but for “a few hasty visits made in the night on foot,” after which she is compelled to return “in time to respond to the driver’s call to the field in the early morning” (10). As a boy, therefore, Frederick only ever catches “little glimpses” of his mother. The identity of his father—likely a white man, perhaps his mother’s owner—remains forever a mystery.