Figurative Language In Mother To Son And Frederick Douglass's Autobiography

In the texts “Mother to Son”, “Learning to Read”, and “Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography,” the speakers in all 3 texts use figurative language to describe the risks of getting an education. For example in “Learning to Read” the speaker wants to learn to read in order to feel independent. When the speaker is able to read in the end she says that she feels like a queen upon her throne. She was able to read in the end because she worked very hard learning even though she was sixty years old. In “Mother to Son” the speaker talks about climbing up a staircase. The speaker talks about how it is important to keep going up and to not give up. When you learn things you need to keep learning and not give up. In Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography, Frederick

In “Learning to Read”, the speaker describes how a person named Uncle Caldwell was able to get away with having books by greasing the pages and putting them on his head to make it look like it was just leaves on his head. This helps people understand how difficult it was for slaves back then to read. In order to learn they had to be very sneaky and if they were caught they would likely be killed. In “Mother to Son,” the speaker describes how they are climbing up a staircase. She describes the stairs as having tacks, splinters, boards torn up and dark spots but she keeps climbing up the stairs. Learning to read as a slave was a lot like climbing up the staircase described because they had to teach themselves and the other people didn’t want them to learn so it was very difficult but the ones who kept trying were able to learn eventually. In Fredrick Douglass’s Autobiography, the text describes how Frederick felt after knowing about the evils of slavery after reading. He describes how he felt anguish pain and depression at the thought of being a slave. He says that sometimes he wished that he would be stupid again or that he would turn into some type of lizard instead of knowing how to read. This shows how learning to read is a risk not just in trying to learn how but in the things that could happen after you learn how to