American Literature / Unit 19 AML 1818 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Drill 4: The Source of the Passage
The idea
The board asks where that passage came from, offering Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Washington's Up from Slavery, Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America." The answer is Douglass's Narrative. Two signals settle it. The narrator is a man enslaved in a city household watching his mistress change, which is the Baltimore episode in Douglass. And the voice is first-person testimony from inside slavery, which excludes Washington, writing after emancipation about his rise, and Du Bois, writing sociology and essay. Jacobs wrote first-person testimony too, but her narrator is a woman.
In practice
A man, a city household, a changing mistress.
Where people slip
Jacobs is the real distractor here, not Washington. The way past her is the narrator's sex, which the passage gives you, rather than any guess about tone.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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