By Desiree Taylor
2023 Reading Frederick Douglass Together Research Fellow
This program is made possible by a grant from Mass Humanities, which provided funding
through “A More Perfect Union,” a special initiative of the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Read the complete essay.
The month of February is dedicated to Love. And so it’s all the more appropriate to tell a story about love and how it changed one life, and through it everything, right down to our lives today.
In the last two of his three autobiographies, Frederick Douglass tells the story of his enslaved mother visiting him when he was an enslaved child on the Lloyd plantation twelve miles away from a Mr. Stewart’s plantation where his mother was rented out by their owner as a field hand. She brings with her a heart-shaped cake for him. This incident had a profound effect on Douglass, and as a consequence, on us today…
“That night I learned the fact, that I was, not only a child, but somebody’s child. The ‘sweet cake’ my mother gave me was in the shape of a heart, with a rich, dark ring glazed upon the edge of it. I was victorious, and well off for the moment; prouder, on my mother’s knee, than a king upon his throne.”
