1 Meanwhile, I would learn to write.
2 With these, I learned mainly how to write.
3 During this time, I succeeded in learning to read and write.
4 I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas.
5 Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.
6 After that, when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he.
7 My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.
8 In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way.
9 By this time, my little Master Thomas had gone to school, and learned how to write, and had written over a number of copy-books.
10 When left thus, I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas's copy-book, copying what he had written.
11 In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my arrival at New York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions.
12 I was too young to think of doing so immediately; besides, I wished to learn how to write, as I might have occasion to write my own pass.
13 The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek.
14 The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being in Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use, write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was intended.
15 It is possible, and even quite probable, that but for the mere circumstance of being removed from that plantation to Baltimore, I should have to-day, instead of being here seated by my own table, in the enjoyment of freedom and the happiness of home, writing this Narrative, been confined in the galling chains of slavery.