At the time of his self-emancipation, Frederick Douglass was only twenty years old. His 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave remains a narrative not only of slavery or emancipation, but of childhood. While scholars have written about Douglass’s childhood experiences of slavery’s violence, labor, familial relations, and trauma, “childhood” has largely been discussed as a metaphor, theme, or historical detail within Douglass’s narrative , rather than a defining category for understanding the text. Too often, even the fact of Douglass’s childhood throughout the narrative is buried in attending to the adult narrator, sometimes construed not…