From Slavery to Freedom
on the Wings of Words: Ruminations on Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
Nibir K. Ghosh
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Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself unfolds the historic
journey of an unlettered and unschooled slave-boy who, by dint of his passion
for learning, refuses to be a silent witness to the most degraded forms of
oppression, exploitation and inhuman torture carried out by the white masters against
his kind. The present essay
examines and explores the various aspects of the Narrative to show how Douglass learns to soar on
the wings of words not only to break the fetters of slavery and secure his
freedom but also to pave the way for his exemplary role in the American
abolitionist movement.
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When I picked up the inspirational narrative
of Frederick Douglass at the University Book Store in Seattle on 23 September
2003, I was instantly drawn to the appendage “Written by Himself” in the title
itself. As I had not till then come across any title of a book where an author felt
the compulsion to authenticate his authorship, I couldn’t help feeling a little
surprised. Then it dawned on me that, since it was an autobiography of a slave,
Douglass must have been concerned by the prejudice that questioned the ability
of someone ‘less than human’ to read and write. It is quite possible that
Douglass may have been aware then about the trials, tribulations and the
humiliation that Phillis Wheatley – a black slave girl – had to undergo way
back in October, 1772 to prove to the gathering of eighteen heightened white
statesmen and politicians from Massachusetts Colony that she was the rightful
author of her collection of twenty poems. “The panel,” writes Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., “had been assembled to verify the authorship of her poems and to
answer a much larger question: was a Negro capable of producing literature?” (Gates,
Jr. 5)
Perhaps, in order to emphasize that a slave
actually has written the book, Douglass thought it prudent to include the fact
in the title as a kind of a declaration. The book was published in 1845 and
Frederick Douglass who lived from February 18, 1818 to February 20 1895 is a
name which anyone who is well-versed or even distantly acquainted with African
American writings should be aware of. In a letter dated April 22, 1845, Wendell
Phillips, abolitionist and president of the American Anti‑Slavery
Society, wrote to Frederick Douglass to
convey his deep appreciation of the latter’s brilliant Narrative:
I was glad to learn, in your story, how early
the most neglected of God's children waken to a sense of their rights, and of
the injustice done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had
mastered your A B C, ... you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the
slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel
and blighting death which gathers over his soul. (Phillips in Narrative 44)
Douglass’s story moves chronologically through
eleven chapters, beginning with his birth and parentage and culminating in his
freedom from the fetters of slavery. What is significant in the Narrative
is how an extremely sensitive soul grapples with the dehumanizing first-hand
experience of slavery in all its wretchedness and how, refusing to accept his
fate as a bondsman, he feels the ceaseless stirrings of freedom from slavery.
This desperate urge for free-dom is kept alive by his instinctual need for learning
to read and write to attain his goal.
At the very beginning of the Narrative,
Douglass writes about his parentage. His mother was Harriet Bailey, daughter of
Isaac and Betsy Bailey, both colored. His father, he presumes, was a white man.
He had no means of verifying the whispers that told that his master was his
father. Douglass succinctly points out that it was a common custom to separate
children from their mothers at a very early age. He says, “For what this
separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of
the child’s affection towards his mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural
affection of the mother for the child.” (48)
Douglass
describes his master as “a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding.”
(51) Nothing seems to have given his master greater pleasure than the
opportunity to whip a slave. He provides a graphic description of how brutally
his master treated Aunt Hester:
I have
often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an
own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked
back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers,
from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose.
The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran
fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and
whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to
swing the blood-clotted cowskin. (51)
As a
constant witness to such elements of extreme barbarity and violence, Douglass
found his heart and soul hardening against the very institution of slavery and
its white perpetrators. He cites the instance of a white slave owner Captain
Thomas Auld who would visit the Methodist church on a regular basis. Douglass
describes with seething irony how the said gentleman used religious ideals
clothed in scriptural words to justify his oppressive cruelty in dealing with his
slaves:
I have
said my master found religious sanction for his cruelty. As an example, I will
state one of many facts going to prove the charge. I have seen him tie up a
lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cowskin upon her naked shoulders,
causing the warm red blood to drip; and, in justification of the bloody deed,
he would quote this passage of Scripture—“He that knoweth his master’s will,
and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.” (98-99)
Douglass
recounts how, even as a seven-year-old, he would be deeply affected by the
songs sung by the slaves in chorus that described their miserable existence
fraught with ceaseless oppression. Though the songs displayed scant regard for
melody or rhythm, they told “a tale of woe … (and) breathed the prayer and
complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony
against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” (57-58) According to Douglass, the
songs convey the misery and pain of the debasing nature of human bondage far
more effectively than ‘volumes of philosophy’. He lyrically describes the
lasting imprints the slave songs had on his impressionable mind and heart:
The
mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing
these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek.
To those songs I trace my first glim-mering conception of the dehumanizing
character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still
follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my
brethren in bonds … I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express
my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me
while in the jaws of slavery. (58)
The above
passage highlights how the songs may have contributed to the making of the poet
in Douglass. First, he sees the
barbarity, second through the songs he learns how demeaning slavery can be and,
third it shows the determination of the little boy that he would never remain permanently
bound by man-inflicted fetters. Also, the lyrical intensity implicit in his
outpourings of grief and anguish may remind one of William Wordsworth’s assumption
in “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” that a poet is “a being possessed of more
than usual organic sensibility, (who) had also thought long and deeply.” (Words-worth)
The rhythm and flow of words in the Narrative make it a treasure-trove
of outstanding literary merit.
It may also be
pointed out that the songs sung by the slaves to assuage their agony and
anguish, resulting from the daily tortures inflicted upon them by their
ruthless masters, are reminiscent of the Negro spirituals and Blues that became
the hallmark of African American culture with the advent of the twen-tieth
century. In this context one may recall a statement made by Alice Walker in an
interview where she talks about the therapeutic effect of words: "Writing
poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide
the evening before." (Walker 249)
In a similar vein, Alaine Locke, refers to the power of the slave songs and
Negro spirituals in the epoch-making collection entitled The New Negro:
“The humble origin of these sorrow songs is too indelibly stamped to be ignored
or overlooked. … They lack the grand style, but never the sublime effect. Their
words are colloquial, but their mood is epic. They are primitive but their
emotional artistry is perfect.” (Locke 200-201)
The Narrative
also serves as a powerful document against slavery. Time and again, one can see
images of cruelty expressed through graphic word-pictures of slave owners and their accomplices in
inflicting grim and unbearable tortures on their bondsmen without the slightest
pretext of a cause or reason. The portrait of the slave-driver, Rigby Hopkins,
may be taken as an illustration of Douglass’s acute power of observation and
his skill in wielding the language to drive his point home: “His (Mr. Hopkins’)
chief boast was his ability to manage slaves. The peculiar feature of his government
was that of whipping slaves in advance of deserving it … His plan was to whip
for the smallest offences, to prevent the commission of large ones … He could
always find something of this sort to justify the use of the lash, and he
seldom failed to embrace such opportunities.” (118)
Chapter X of the Narrative
dwells at length with the craving for freedom from bondage that Douglass
experienced even at the tender age of seven/eight. Fired by the zeal to escape
the predicament of remaining permanently enmeshed in chains of bondage, he
often vacillated between bitter despair and endless glimmer of hope. He
confesses how, like Prince Hamlet in Shake-speare’s play, he too seems to be
caught in the dilemma of ‘To be or not to be’. Echoing Shakespeare’s lines,
Douglass writes: “I say, this picture some-times appalled us, and made us ‘rather
bear those ills we had,/ Than fly to others, that we knew not of.’” (124) Caught
between the reality of his existence and the prospect of gaining freedom, he
became restless:
On the one hand,
there stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully upon us,—its robes already
crimsoned with the blood of millions, and even now feasting itself greedily
upon our own flesh. On the other hand, away back in the dim distance, under the
flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered
mountain, stood a doubtful freedom—half frozen—beckoning us to come and share
its hospitality. (123)
Referring to
Patrick Henry’s choice between death and liberty, Douglass expresses his
resolve in favour of ‘doubtful liberty’ and asserts with conviction: “For my
part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.” (124)
Even a cursory
reading of the Narrative is bound to convince anyone of the author’s
extraordinary power to use words with ease and felicity. But, at the same time,
one may wonder how a slave boy, especially in the pre-civil war era, could acquire
such learning and flair for writing to become a legend among the abolitionists.
This should be a matter of paramount concern for those who believe in the
transformative potential of words. It is true that with desire, determination,
commitment and steadfastness one can aspire for any goal in life.
Yet, it appears almost incredible that a slave-boy,
without access to any formal education of any kind, could write in the manner
that Douglass does in the Narrative. His deep conviction that slavery
would not always be able to hold him “within its foul embrace” would not have turned
to fruition but for what providence had in store for him.
At the age of
seven Douglass was sold to a couple named Hugh and Sophia Auld to take care of
their little son Thomas. When he reaches the Auld household he is pleasantly
surprised to find them affectionately disposed towards him. He records his
first impression on meeting them thus: “… here I saw what I had never seen before; it
was a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions; it was the face of my
new mistress, Sophia Auld. I wish I could describe the rapture that flashed
through my soul as I beheld it. It was a new and strange sight to me,
brightening up my pathway with the light of happiness.” (74) Reflecting on such a turn of events, Douglass writes:
I may
be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a
special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the
hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur
my own abhorrence. (75)
With
utmost sincerity Douglass acknowledges the human kindness he receives from the
Aulds as an act of divine dispensation: “From my earliest recollection, … and
in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and
spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to
cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer
thanksgiving and praise.” (75)
Sophia Auld takes
a lot of interest in little Douglass and teaches him the alphabets. Gradually,
she tells him how he can combine a few letters and create three or four-letter
words. His heart is full of praise and gratitude for Sophia Auld whom he refers
to as “a
woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings … she had been in a good degree
preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery. I was utterly
astonished at her goodness … The meanest slave was put fully at ease in her
presence, and none left without feeling better for having seen her. Her face
was made of heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil music.” (77)
However, soon fate
intervenes to give his ecstasy a jolt. One day while Sophia is in the process
of teaching him to read, she encounters her husband. Her husband gives her a
scolding and forbids her from teaching him to read and write saying that such
acts were unlawful and unsafe. He instructs her: “A nigger should know
nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil
the best nigger in the world … if you teach that nigger (speaking of
myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him
to be a slave.” (78)
Douglass is quick to comprehend from the content of
Hugh Auld’s admonishment of his wife that education can create “the pathway
from slavery to freedom.” What needs to be specifically pointed out from this
episode is that any society that wants to keep the oppressed in their place, its
first attempt is to stop them from getting access to anything related to
reading, writing, knowledge, culture etc. because the moment they are able to
ration-alize, they are sure to question the status quo. The kind of
determination this boy at the age of seven has is evident from his statement:
“What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most
hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a
great good, to be diligently sought.” (79)
Hugh Auld’s views
on the hazards of teaching a “nigger” to read and write comes as an awakening
for Douglass. On the contrary, it is interesting to see the effect it has on
Sophia. With a tinge of humor, Douglass recalls: “Slavery soon proved its
ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the
tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of
tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing
to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband’s precepts. … She was not satisfied with simply doing as
well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better.” (82)
Subsequently,
if Sophia Auld saw Douglass even with a newspaper she would rush at him and
snatch it away from his hands. Douglass ruminates: “She was an apt woman; and a
little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and
slavery were incompatible with each other.” (82)
Though Douglass is deeply interested in reading,
writing and expressing himself, he realizes how difficult it is to learn
anything without a teacher. But he is not the one to give up his determination
to use education as the “path-way to freedom.” He soon explores other avenues
for acquiring learning. The Aulds had plenty to eat and Douglass would take
loaves of white bread in his pocket and go to the streets to meet white little
boys who were poorer than him where eating and other things were concerned. He thought
of a plan wherein he could exchange the bread and make them his teachers to
augment his learning:
As many of these as I could, I converted into
teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different
places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. This bread I used to bestow
upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more
valuable bread of knowledge. (83)
With the anxiety of “being a slave for life”
weighing heavily upon him as he grew older, Douglass became all the more eager
to immerse himself in reading books that could take him forward on his mission
to freedom. Around the age of twelve, he heard about a book entitled The
Columbian Orator that the white kids often mentioned in their
conversations. Collecting 50 cents by shining shoes for a month, Douglass bought the book.
What immediately attracted his attention, among the many speeches and texts
from celebrated writers, intellectuals and statesmen from diverse ages, nations
and cultures that the book contained, was a conversation between a slave owner
and a slave. The slave runs away thrice and is caught thrice and brought back. In
the said conversation, whatever can be said in support of slavery is narrated
by the slave owner and whatever can be said against slavery is spoken by the
slave. In the story, the slave owner is so convinced with the arguments that he
finally frees the slave. Douglass accepts that the moral he gained from the dialogue “was the
power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder.” (84)
The various other
speeches that he found in The Colombian Orator had a magical effect on
his mind and soul:
These
were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated
interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had
frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance … The
more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could
regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left
their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange
land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the
most wicked of men. (84)
The Colombian
Orator made Douglass not
only aware of man’s inhumanity to man in terms of race and color but also
stirred within him the passion to denounce slavery and other agencies of
oppression and exploitation. The book became Douglass’s most prized possession
and he would carry that book with him all the time. Because he was not supposed
to write or read at the Auld home, he would go into the streets with a piece of
chalk and practice his writing on the pavements, walls, and trees to acquire
the skills he so desperately needed. Interestingly, one common word which would
always perplex him was “abolitionist”:
I was eager to
hear any one speak of slavery. I was a ready listener. Every little while, I
could hear something about the abolitionists. It was some time before I found
what the word meant. It was always used in such connections as to make it an
interesting word to me. If a slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or
if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or did any thing very wrong
in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of as the fruit of abolition. (86)
It is pertinent to mention here that, while
embarked on his mission, Douglass was never tempted by thoughts of material
gains for himself. He writes, “I have observed this in my experience of slavery,—that
whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment,
it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain
my freedom.” (135) His avowed goal was not restricted to ways and means to
attain his individual liberty. He generously shared the fruits of his knowledge
and wisdom with fellow-slaves to awaken their urge to freedom.
Douglass’s
passionate dream of attaining freedom ultimately succeeds when, on the third
day of September 1838, he leaves his chains forever and arrives in New York. From
that moment started the remarkable journey unparalleled in human history. Freed
from the chains of slavery, he wrote his iconic Narrative and engaged
himself, heart and soul, in addressing huge gatherings on the denunciation of
slavery and advocacy of equal rights for the slaves as human beings. His
intuitive ability to be inspired by the power of words that began with The
Columbian Orator did not become dormant after he procured his freedom.
Towards the end of the Narrative he mentions how he became an avid
reader of Liberator, the weekly abolitionist newspaper published from
Boston: “The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire.
Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds—its scathing denunciations of
slaveholders—its faithful exposures of slavery—and its powerful attacks upon
the upholders of the institution—sent a thrill of joy through my soul, such as
I had never felt before!” (151)
In his ‘Introduction’ to the Penguin edition of Frederick
Douglass’s Narrative, Houston A. Baker, Jr. opines that “Prior to the
1960s, an accepted position in American literary and historical studies was
that no distinct, authentic, written Afro-American voice existed in the canons
of discourse surrounding American abolitionism.” (7-8) In my view, to accept Baker’s
opinion on its face value is to ignore the intrinsic merits of not only the
Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass but also to undermine the role
of Douglass as a torch-bearer in stri-ving for the total emancipation of the
slaves.
It will not be an exaggeration to say that,
if we look back from the vantage point of the huge deluge of African American
writings and movements to the Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass,
it will not be unfair to aver its indisputable contribution in laying the
foundations of protest against the dilemma of race in a nation built on the
notions of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Also, as current statistics
reveal that there are more African Americans in jails than in schools or
colleges in the U.S. today, the veritable connection between education and
freedom that the Douglass Narrative foregrounds can offer plenty of hope
for any one aspiring to live a life with freedom and dignity in any nation or
society where slavery may exist in any domain, be
it Religion, Class, Caste, Creed, Colour, Ethnicity, Language, Mindsets,
Prejudices etc.
In short, an objective assessment of the
extremities that Frederic Douglass had undergone to resurrect himself from what
he calls “the tomb of slavery” to reach the “heaven of freedom” (113) may
remind us of the lines of John Keats in “The Fall of Hyperion”: “None can usurp
this height but those to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will
not let them rest.” (Keats 406)
WORKS CITED
Baker, Jr., Houston A. “Introduction.” Narrative
of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Penguin
Classics, 1986. pp. 7-24.
Bingham, Caleb. The Columbian Orator
(1797). Edited by David W. Blight. New York University Press, 1998.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life
of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Penguin
Classics, 1986.
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Trials of
Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounter with the Founding
Fathers. Basic Civitas Books, 2003.
Keats, John. “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream.”
Keats: Poetical Works Ed. H. W. Garrod. Oxford University Press,
1970 (rprt. 1976). pp. 401-416.
Locke, Alain. “Negro Youth Speaks.” The
New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925). Edited by Alaine
Locke. Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992. pp. 199-224.
Walker, Alice. “From an Interview.” In
Search of My Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1973. pp. 244-272.
Phillips, Wendell. “Letter from Wendell Phillips,
Esq.” in Narrative
of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Penguin Classics, 1986. pp.
43-46.
Wordsworth, William. Preface to
Lyrical Ballads (1802) https://web.english.
upenn.edu/~jenglish/Courses/Spring2001/040/preface1802.html. Accessed
April 5, 2022.
· Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh is UGC Emeritus Professor, Agra College,
Agra. A Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA
during 2003-04), he has authored/edited 15 widely acclaimed books. His most
recent works include Mirror from the Indus: Essays, Tributes and Memoirs (2020)
and Republic of Words: Conversations with Creative Minds from Around the
Globe (2021) [with Dr. Sunita Rani Ghosh].
Published in RE-MARKINGS Vol. 21 No. 2 September 2022. pp. 42-51.
ISSN 0972-611X . www.re-markings.com
© Nibir K. Ghosh 2022
v
Comments Received with thanksI enjoyed
reading your chapter. And equating Douglass to a poet or “a being possessed of
more than usual organic sensibility, (who) had also thought long and deeply”
(Wordsworth). And ending on the Aulds and their kindness, which is a great
reminder (especially in our “politically correct” and divisive time) that white
people aren’t all racist. The latter is a commonsensical thought that is far
from commonsensical in our present age. - Cyril Wong
It's a very good essay and an excellent introduction to Douglass's life
and work - Jonah Raskin
Hi
Nibir, Your Douglass essay
is excellent. A nice overview of his early life. I like the quotes you
selected. When Douglass writes about the slave songs he lays the
foundation for what DuBois would expand on in The Souls of Black
Folks. The emphasis on reading and freedom takes on new meaning
today as conservatives try to prevent certain books from being read
or taught. - E. Ethelbert Miller
I only know basic facts about Frederick Douglass but your essay gave me
a clear image of the man. Your thinking is very clear - I know it when I begin
to comprehend a writing visually, I thought how you moved from the songs to the
narrative via Blues and Alice Walker was particularly masterful. I
also learned how to quote/site from the references/documents effectively.
The passages you quoted are so memorable - they form the ringing bass for the
essay. Thank you for writing. - Miho Kinnas
Nibir, this is a nice coincidence—I’m teaching the Narra-tive tomorrow, and I’m going to send out your essay now. It’s much clearer than anything I’ll say! I like most of all how you show the alignment of Douglass with Romantic thought, especially in the final paragraphs. I spend a few powerpoint slides on the shifts in American literary history—Douglass didn’t get a single mention in the 1953 triple-volume literary history of the United States. But if we shift to the 1990s, Emory Elliott’s one-volume Columbia literary history, Douglass is all over the place. He’s really important in helping us understand how much “history” has changed. I’m talking about this a lot in class, and it is CONFUSING to students, who kind of want a stable, unitary picture. Well…they don’t know about American history at all, so I can’t blame them. But, as you show, Douglass is a heroic presence in the 19th century and also a marker of how much the world has changed in the 20th. Would I have your permission to forward the file you sent to me? I should ask before I go ahead and do that. Please let me know. Best, -- John Whalen-Bridge, National University of Singapore
