If you teach that nigger how to read, it would forever unfit him to be a slave (Frederick Douglass, quoting his master 1845:37). Chapter II: Frederick Douglass and the Literacy-Empowerment Paradigm This chapter looks with more detail at all three autobiographies by Frederick Douglass in order to identify a genealogical origin for the interpretations of slave literacy that are discussed in Chapter I. This chapter coins the phrase, “literacy-empowerment paradigm,” in order to tease out the epistemic function of literacy (a la Jens Brockmieir) in the contexts of slave narratives. What Douglass says is the "pathway from slavery to freedom" is interpreted as twentieth century "literacy." Yet this chapter argues that such an interpretation does not read all three autobiographical narratives in the contexts of antebellum literacy history or literacy theories; moreover the Douglass autobiographies' revisions of the literacy story, which occur from one autobiographical narrative to the next, reveal what is at stake in the literacy-empowerment paradigm for nineteenth century African Americans like Douglass. This chapter examines these revisions in the contexts of literacy theories of reading and "new knowledge," and research which describes the important distinctions between "independent" and "social" literacy. Such distinctions enable the chapter to demythologize the literacy-empowerment paradigm, and place the Douglass literacy narrative into the historical contexts of the antebellum South's literate culture. The chapter concludes with observations about African American literary interpretation's debt to Anthropology, and what literacy theorist Brian Street calls "Great Divide" theory of literacy, whose "autonomous model" of literacy enables the correlation of written language with "being."