Inspired Response to Fredrick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life..."

First of all, I feel obliged to say as a disclaimer that I have heard of and discussed, sometimes pretty in-depth, both Fredrick Douglass and his famous slave-narrative Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass prior to my exposure to it in this class.  However, I've never actually read the text...and now having done so, I definitely learned a lot more about both Fredrick Douglass himself and, of course, his perspective as a slave and what that would be like in a real-life context.  Some of what I had been previously ignorant and just learned on this go-round of the Narrative was pretty simple stuff...for example, I had no idea that Douglass's father was white, but rather always presumed he was a thoroughbred African-American.  And what's more, his mother was apparently one of the darkest black women around at the time...which, to me, makes it even more fascinating that Douglass's father would have broken the tremendous social barrier of the time to sleep with a black woman.  Douglass even goes so far as to acknowledge that literally every single person he had ever encountered would willingly acknowledge that his father was, no doubt, a white man...but anyway, on to actual textual analysis.  I was definitely immediately struck by Douglass's abrupt, straightforward tone...and it baffled me that he could manage to be so incredibly condemning of slavery (easy though as that may be to do) while still appearing to be so emotionless, though of course as a reader one has to assume that certain emotions went hand in hand with certain experiences he recounts.  He does, for example, actually seem to express some frustration about not being able to tell his age, though the whites always could; although he does still convey that frustration with hardly any emotive assertiveness.  Still, even without emotion, there is really no arguing with the blatant injustice communicated in phrases like "...it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves ignorant."  Ultimately, I guess what I am trying to say is, it is one thing to study slavery in your American history classes, become familiar with what it is, and be bludgeoned repeatedly over the head with the reminder that it is a VERY (yes, the four-letter/swear word) bad thing.  That much becomes obvious pretty quickly.  It is, however, completely another thing to be directly exposed to a text containing the actual lived experiences and injustices of a slave in his life.  In such a context, the realization of how terrible and devoid of righteousness the concept of slavery is becomes much more potent than from, say, a white history professor's mouth, or a textbook written by white authors who also have no lived experience of what they write about.  Perhaps this is but a basic reminder, and much ado about not very much, but in my first reading of Narrative I found it quite striking and ultimately I think it's what I most take away from Douglass.