This article provides a model for teachers to expand students' thinking about the liberating nature of literacy. Literacy is not just about making kids smarter or preparing them for future careers. Neither is it passive, neutral, or innocent. It is infused with values and ideology. It can be used by people to promote freedom or support tyranny. It can challenge or foster stereotypes. It can create or submerge identities as well as silence voices. It involves matters of freedom, identity, and voice. Teaching literacy narratives that contain issues of emancipation can provide an educational tool to help literacy educators translate abstract concepts such as freedom, identity, and voice to the realities of classroom instruction. Guidelines for critically reading and discussing literacy narratives of freedom are summarized in Table 1 and are modeled for classroom application using the canonical slave narrative of the young Frederick Douglass. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)