There are some things history makes difficult to sentimentalize.
Frederick Douglass was a child when he learned what slavery meant. The lesson came through a closet door. Douglass remembered that his Aunt Hester was beautiful, strikingly so. She was, he wrote, “a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions, having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance.” She also had an admirer, a young man named Ned Roberts.
