But this book put Patrick in a kind of panic.
He fixated on a story Douglass told of how, over Christmas, masters give slaves gin as a way to prove to them that they can't handle freedom.
Because slaves would be stumbling on the fields. Patrick said he related to this.
He said that there are people in jail who, like slaves, don't want to think about their condition, because it's too painful.
Too painful to think about the past, too painful to think about how far we have to go.
His favorite line was this line: "Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me."
Patrick said that Douglass was brave to write, to keep thinking.
But Patrick would never know how much he seemed like Douglass to me.
How he kept reading, even though it put him in a panic.
He finished the book before I did, reading it in a concrete stairway with no light.