(What’s the gist)Yet he finds the courage to speak out. Frederick Douglass just tells his own story: how he has lived and what he had seen. That is enough to send chills dow n the backs of his listeners. "I never saw my mother more than four or five times in my life," he says. "She made her journeys to see me in the night, traveling the whole distance on foot (twelve miles), after the performance of her day's work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise. I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day.