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Life as a Slave
Chapter 3
Childhood
Douglass locates his birth around 1817 in Tuckahoe, Maryland, and describes the relative freedom of early childhood in his grandmother Betsey Bailey's cabin, before slavery's reality set in.
Tuckahoe, Maryland and its originsGrandmother Betsey Bailey's standing in the communitySlaves' inability to know their own age or birthdateThe relative ease of a slave-child's first years