Frederick Douglass and the Language of the Self

Of such subtle yet poignant importance was this imposed system of time that Douglass alluded to it at the beginning of the first of his three autobiographies as the very first evidence of his personal status as a slave. Although Douglass knew where he was born (in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland), his date of birth was not for him to know: “I have no accurate knowledge of my age,” he admitted, because “any authentic record containing it” would be in the possession of his master. The deprivation of the means to record time is the structural center of Douglass’s first paragraph, in which he defines what it means to become aware of one’s own enslavement: “A want of information concerning my own [birthday] was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.” This disorientation motivated the slave’s search for his humanity as well as Douglass’s search for his text, the text that would come to stand for his life in the form of an autobiography. This deprivation of a sense of time had created that gap in the slave’s imagination between self and other, between lord and bondsman, between black and white, even between human and animal. “By far,” Douglass confesses, “the large part of slaves knew as little of their ages as horses knew of theirs.” “I do not remember to have ever met a slave,” Douglass continues, “who could tell of his birthday.” He is a slave, Douglass seems to be saying, who stands outside of the linear progression of the calendar. And precisely here Douglass summarizes the symbolic code of this world, where the slave’s closest kin are horses, and where the slave has a notion of time that is cyclical and thus diametrically opposed to the linear conception of the master: “[the slaves] seldom came nearer to [the notion of time] than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, springtime, or fall-time.” He was a slave who stood outside of historical time.

To the end of his life, the mystery of his birth remained for Douglass what he called “a serious trouble,” and this helps explain why a man in his eighth decade took the trouble to make one final attempt to obtain facts about his existence. Douglass’s journal entry, as Peter Walker cites it, suggests the pathos of the unrewarded quest:

“The death of Aaron Anthony,” Douglass concluded, “makes me fix the year in which I was sent to live with Mr. Hugh Auld in Baltimore, as 1825.” At last Frederick Douglass possessed a major “fact.” From the date of his master’s death, Douglass could extrapolate the year in which he was sent to Baltimore as a boy. Perhaps emboldened by the specificity of the new information, he concluded this curious entry by being even more specific—even if, like the slaves, he once more dated the passage of time by the movements of the animals and the seasons: “I know it must have been in the summer of that year that I went to live in Baltimore because the spring lambs were big enough to be sent to market, and I helped to drive a flock of them from Smith’s Dock to Fells Point on the day I landed in Baltimore.” With this recollection of lambs in summer, Frederick Douglass’s diary ended, as did his lifelong quest to locate facts that could reach beyond the limitations of memory.

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Frederick Douglass assumed numerous roles in his lifetime—slave and freedman, journalist and scholar, civil servant and politician, diplomat and lecturer, articulate advocate of both the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women. Indeed, these two interests in a sense “frame” Douglass’s life: metaphorically “born” in August 1841, while he made his first speech to an abolitionist audience in Massachusetts, fifty-four years later Douglass returned home after attending a women’s rights convention to die at his desk. During those fifty-four brilliant years, Douglass advised presidents, edited and owned newspapers, wrote three autobiographies, served as the Recorder of Deeds and Marshal for the District of Columbia, as Consul General to Haiti, and as President of the Freedman’s Bank.

Despite the greatness and richness of Frederick Douglass’s career, however, it is not the life alone that continues to attract scholars. More biographies have been printed about Frederick Douglass than about any other Afro-American, including the great W. E. B. DuBois, whose life seems to loom so large that few scholars have dared attempt to contain it. From Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1868, through Charles Chesnutt and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century, to William Pickens, Arna Bontemps, and Benjamin Quarles in the 1940s, to Philip Foner, John Blassingame, and Nathan Huggins in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the life of Frederick Douglass continues to fascinate the scholar and the creative writer. (At least three historical novels figure Douglass as their protagonists.)

At first, we can say that so many scholars write about Frederick Douglass because he was the first Black Representative Man, and, along with DuBois, perhaps one of the only two truly representative men of letters we Afro-Americans are privileged to have had. Yet what is curious about this range of biographies is that, in the main, they repeat the same “facts” in much the same order—following Douglass’s autobiographies faithfully. Thus Douglass himself can be said to have crafted the public image by which he would one day be recalled. For, above all, Frederick Douglass was concerned with the way his public self was represented in words—a public self which he created, manipulated, and transformed through the three fictive selves he posited in his three autobiographies.

When I choose to call these selves “fictive,” I do not mean to suggest any sense of falsity or ill intent; rather, I mean by “fictive” the act of crafting or making by design, in this instance a process that unfolds in language. There is no doubt that Frederick Douglass intended to shape his biographers’ work, even from the grave. Except for John Blassingame’s slim and virtually unknown work, Frederick Douglass: The Clarion Voice, each of Douglass’s biographers have turned to his three autobiographies to ascertain the contours of his life. The first was The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; an American Slave, Written by Himself, published in 1845, and which by 1850 had sold 30,000 copies in English. Ten years later, My Bondage and My Freedom appeared. This work of 462 pages is three times as long as the 1845 narrative, and even includes a 58-page appendix consisting of extracts from his speeches. By 1857, two years after it was published, My Bondage and My Freedom had sold 18,000 copies. In 1881, Douglass published The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which never sold very well, and which he expanded and republished in 1892. Written and rewritten over a period of forty-seven years, the three autobiographies present precisely drawn portraits that Douglass intended to will to history so that he would be remembered exactly as he wanted to be. The latter two books are essentially polemical extensions of the first, containing ever briefer accounts of his life as a slave in exchange for more expansive accounts of the public reformer and his social programs. Indeed, it is fair to say that Douglass, as he aged, more and more subordinated a conception of self in his autobiographies to an embodiment of an ideology and a social ideal.

But the writing of blacks had, since the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment, always assumed ideological and social implications larger than the “mere” rendering of a life. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Enlightenment is that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, ethnocentrism and logocentrism had been joined into a powerful argument used to justify the enslavement of the African. The absence of writing, of a collective black voice that could in some sense be “overheard,” was cited by European philosophers as a reason to deprive the African slave of his humanity—a mode of discourse within Western philosophy that began at least with Francis Bacon in 1620 and which extended from Bacon through Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Hegel, Emerson, and a host of lesser lights including William Lloyd Garrison and John Greenleaf Whittier, down to William Dean Howells at the turn of this century. In outline, the idea these thinkers shared was that blacks could never assume their full humanity until they mastered the fine art of writing. As Hume put it in 1753, “I am apt to suspect the negroes . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made our original distinction betwixt these breeds of men.” It is Hegel’s reformulation of Hume which most compels. Hegel believed that the African, cast into silence by his own loss or absence of voice, could have no history, no meaningful text of blackness itself, since he had no true self-consciousness, no power to present or re-present this black and terrible self. There could be no presence of the African in history without this power of representation. Possessing no true self-consciousness, the black remained invisible for Hegel, absent from history not because he had no face, but rather because he had no voice. Voice, after all, presupposes a face. That alone which separates the subject from the object is, for Hegel, the absence or presence of the voice, the phenomenological voice; the blackness of invisibility is the blackness of this silence. Without a voice, the African is defaced. “Literacy,” in this grand sense, was a figure used to conjure with by the Enlightened philosophers of Europe, at the African’s expense. As Diderot wrote of Samuel Richardson upon reading Clarissa, “It is he [the writer] who carries the torch to the back of the cave. . . . He blows upon the glorious phantom who presents himself at the entrance of the cave; and the hideous Moor whom he was masking reveals himself.” “The Dream of Reason,” Goya inscribed on his Caprichos, “breeds monsters.”

As a direct result of this curious, arbitrary reasoning, abolitionists and ex-slaves conspired to break the resounding black silence by publishing the narratives of the ex-slaves. And this written language of the ex-slave, to borrow an idea from Jacques Lacan, “signified for someone” even before it signified something. For, above all else, every public spoken and written utterance of the ex-slave was written and published for a potentially hostile auditor or interlocutor, the white abolitionist or the white slaveholder, both of whom imposed a meaning upon the discourse of the black subject. Again to borrow from Lacan, what seems to be at work in this complex relationship between the subject and his interlocutor is that “the subject progresses only by whatever integration he attains of his [particular] position in the universal: technically by the projection of his past into a discourse in the process of becoming,” a phrase by which we can aptly characterize the slave narratives. The black ex-slave had to demonstrate his language-using capacity before he could become a subject, a social and historical entity. In short, the slave could inscribe his “self” only in language. (Implicitly using Hegel’s opposition of subject and object, incidentally, Robert Stepto in From Behind the Veil has turned Hegel on his head and developed a penetrating theory of black narrative, which has as its origins the structure of the texts of the slave narratives, and which turns upon Stepto’s analysis of subject and object as aspects of narration, generally, and “narrative control,” specifically, as objects become subjects, and subject interacts with other subjects.)

If Frederick Douglass was the nineteenth century’s Representative Man, it was so primarily because of his remarkable mastery of spoken and written language. Douglass himself seems to have preferred the spoken to the written word. As he wrote in 1849, “Speech! Speech! The live, calm, grave, clear, pointed, warm, sweet, melodious, and powerful human voice is [the] chosen instrumentality” of social reform. While writing served its purpose, some matters were of such urgency that the spoken word was demanded: “humanity, justice, and liberty,” wrote Douglass, “demand the service of the living human voice.”

We can perhaps begin to understand Douglass’s preference for oral expression by considering Jacques Derrida’s radical analysis of voice which is published in English as Speech and Phenomena. As Derrida argues:

. . . no consciousness is possible without the voice. The voice is the being which is present to itself in the form of universality, as consciousness; the voice is consciousness. . . . To speak to someone is doubtless to hear oneself speak, to be heard by oneself; but, at the same time, if one is heard by another, to speak is to make him repeat immediately in himself the hearing-oneself-speak in the very form in which I effectuated it. This immediate repetition is a reproduction of pure auto-affection without the help of anything external. This possibility of reproduction, whose structure is absolutely unique, gives itself out as the phenomenon of a mastery or limitless power over the signifier, since the signifier itself has the form of what is not external. . . . The signifier would become perfectly diaphanous due to the absolute proximity to the signified. This proximity is broken when, instead of hearing myself speak, I see myself write or gesture.

His speaking voice gave Douglass the illusion of greater control over the antislavery arena than did his writing, because by speaking one forces one’s audience to repeat the same words over in their same order. Significantly, Douglass appended speeches to two of his three autobiographies. Despite his mastery of the written word, this notion of voice and the illusion of control was of the utmost importance for Douglass, as John Blassingame makes clear in his excellent introduction to Volume One of The Frederick Douglass Papers, the fourteen volumes of which will include more speeches than any other form.

Even in his novella, The Heroic Slave, a fictional rendering of the slave revolt aboard the slave-ship Creole in 1841 led by a black slave called Madison Washington, Douglass placed a major emphasis on the powers of the human voice, which he calls “that unfailing index of the soul.” Indeed, it is Madison Washington’s voice, speaking deep in the woods on the evils of slavery, which converts a northern traveler who chanced to hear it into an abolitionist. As the narrator describes the effect of this soliloquy, when the converted abolitionist later encounters Madison at a most propitious moment, “Mr. Listwell at once frankly disclosed the secret; describing the place where he first saw him; rehearsing the language which he [Washington] had used; referring to the effect which his manner and speech had made upon him; declaring the resolution he there formed to be an abolitionist; telling how often he had spoken of the circumstance, and the deep concern he had ever since felt to know what had become of him; and whether he had carried out the purpose to make his escape, as in the woods he declared he would do.”

“‘Ever since that morning,’ said Mr. Listwell, ‘you have seldom been absent from my mind, and though now I did not dare to hope that I should ever see you again, I have often wished that such might be my fortune; for, from that hour, your face seemed to be daguerreotyped on my memory.’” Not only is this episode a model of the function that all of the slave narratives were to have upon their American and European audiences, but also it was just this vision of a face, “daguerreotyped on memory,” which the strong black speaking voice was intended to create. Whether speaking or writing, the function of the black slave’s “voice” was a major function indeed.

Long after the issues for which he struggled so ardently have become the concerns of history, Frederick Douglass will continue to be read and reread. And surely this must be the literary critic’s final judgment of Douglass: that he was Representative Man because he was Rhetorical Man, black master of the verbal arts. Douglass is our clearest example of the will to power as the will to write. The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author, but also the “self,” as it were, of the race. Indeed, in part because of Douglass’s literary successes, blacks in general compensated for the absence of a collective written history by composing a remarkable number of individual histories, which taken together begin to assume the features of a communal, collective tale. In literacy was power; as Ishmael Reed says in his satirical novel about slavery, Flight to Canada, the slave who was the first to read and the first to write was the first to run away. For the critic, Frederick Douglass does not yet exist as a three-dimensional person; rather, he exists as a rhetorical strategy.

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What have his biographers done with Douglass? In general, they have used him to illustrate and promote various social programs and ideals, all of which turn upon several ideas of social equality for blacks. Each uses his idea of Douglass for a more general purpose, making him representative of much more than the nineteenth century. Douglass biographers see him as he insisted on being seen, and in this sense they have written authorized biographies, their shape controlled and determined by Douglass himself. Almost never does Douglass allow us to see him as a human individual in all of his complexity; accordingly, in these biographies he comes to exist only as an historical force or presence and not as the multifaceted and intensely human person he undoubtedly was.

For Booker T. Washington, Douglass was a John the Baptist who roamed the deserts of antebellum and Reconstruction America clearing the way for that great deliverer, Booker T., sanctioning Washington’s social program and Washington himself as the true ideals for turn-of-the-century Afro-America. Washington himself inadvertently reveals his idea of their relationship in Washington’s own autobiography, Up from Slavery: “Frederick Douglass died in February, 1895. In September of the same year I delivered an address in Atlanta at the Cotton States Exposition.” Through this act of language, of course, Washington intends to subsume Douglass, as well as to use him to sanctify the passing of the mantle of black leadership.

For Charles Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass is the black man’s most cogent response to fin de siècle America’s pseudo-scientific social darwinism. Above all else, Chesnutt draws upon Douglass both to claim the Negro’s inherently equal innate “capacity” and to refute arguments against the role of environment in the shaping of intelligence—a racist discourse in nineteenth-century natural and physical scientific thought so compelling that virtually all black intellectual thought between 1880 and 1930 can be read as a complex response to it. As Chesnutt writes, “If it be no small task for a man of the most favored antecedents and the most fortunate surroundings to rise above mediocrity in a great nation, it is surely a more remarkable achievement for a man of the very humble origin possible to humanity in any country in any age of the world, in the face of obstacles seemingly insurmountable, to win high honors and rewards, to retain for more than a generation the respect of good men in many lands, and to be deemed worthy of enrolment among his country’s great men. Such a man was Frederick Douglass, and the example of one who thus rose to eminence by sheer force of character and talents that neither slavery nor caste prescription could crush must ever remain as a shining illustration of the essential superiority of manhood to environment.” Of Douglass’s poignant descriptions of his painful mastery of reading and writing, Chesnutt writes that he “thus again demonstrated the power of the mind to overleap the bounds that men set for it and work out the destiny to which God designs it.”

In Benjamin Quarles’s biography, as Peter Walker points out, “Douglass is a black Ragged Dick. . . . Indeed, Quarles represents Douglass to be the black incarnation of Andrew Carnegie’s Wealth.” For Quarles, Douglass is the classic example of the potential of black upward social mobility, unfettered by the laws of segregation. “Douglass advocated the gospel of wealth,” writes Quarles. “His financial independence was another illustration of his preachments squaring with his practices.” Citing a number of Douglass’s notions on this subject, Quarles concludes with the following quotation: “‘Aristotle and Pericles are all right,’ writes Douglass; ‘get that, too; but get money besides, and plenty of it.’” Quarles’s Douglass is an achiever and would have been even had the abolition movement not afforded him ready access to an international platform.

For Philip Foner, Walker argues, Douglass is the first great black general in the “Marxian warfare between social classes, a war in which Douglass enlisted first to free the Negro ‘masses’ from chattel slavery, then after emancipation fought to free them from an oppressive capitalism.” For Foner, he concludes, “Douglass must be foresworn while he was still a slave to undertake a mission that accorded with the design of history. He must escape slavery in order to lead a racially defined class struggle for freedom.” Foner’s Douglass simultaneously accepts a racial and a class identity.

Curiously enough, as Walker points out, both Quarles and Foner take at face value Douglass’s claims in his three autobiographies that his identity and his self-conception were completely formed when he escaped from slavery and remained unchanged thereafter. Even Walker, who otherwise reads closely, fails to see that Douglass’s image of himself as a fixed self (in the 1845 Narrative, for example) is contradicted by the fluid and dynamic character who shines through the text. Despite a valiant attempt to account for these crucial formative years in Douglass’s life, which he describes in lively, almost novelistic, language, Nathan Huggins, a recent Douglass biographer, squeezes a quarter-century of a human life into sixteen factual pages, culled almost to the last detail from Douglass’s own autobiographies. Huggins, like most Douglass biographers, would have us assume, as Douglass so wished, that Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey sprang from slavery full-blown, like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter, completely whole and undiminished by the horrors of his past. His identity was perfected by 1838, when he escaped from Baltimore to New York at an age no older than twenty. This is perhaps one of the most profound fictions ever shared by subject and biographer alike, for it suggests paradoxically that the self of the enslaved had suffered no essential damage (thus leaving the authority of the narrator intact) and simultaneously that slavery did indeed inflict great harm upon all who came within its reach. Douglass’s solution was that while slavery prevented the slave from developing his native abilities, it did not in fact destroy those abilities.

For Huggins, whose title, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass, echoes both Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen and Ralph Korngold’s Citizen Toussaint, Frederick Douglass is the questing man-of-color-and-consciousness in the public arena. In Huggins’s view, Douglass saw his own life as a sublime revelation of the “potential within other black men and women. . . . Through the story of this life one could glimpse human potentialities, and indeed human perfectibility, a testament for an American faith.” As Huggins concludes, Douglass “lived his life, even as an agitator and radical, so as to exemplify the perfectibility of the black man and the slave, and to expose the idiocy of a social system that would treat him, and people like him, as pariahs.” To what end this exemplification of perfectibility? Nothing “less than recognition of citizenship rights for Afro-Americans throughout the country.” This, above all else, is Huggins’s Douglass, the pragmatic black nationalist fighting consistently for the full perquisites of American citizenship from 1841 to 1895.

It is fairly simple to show that these lives of Douglass have at their foundation the idealistic premise of the individual belonging to them realm of the transcendent, beyond further analysis. All of the biographies share this fiction of Douglass as a unified and consistent subject, precisely because they take him at his word—or rather fail to take him to task for altering his words—about his life as a slave generally, about his relations with his mother and with his father, and, as we shall see in moment, about finding and losing his voice.

The sign of a great biography of Douglass is the space devoted to his life as a slave, from his birth to his escape from slavery in 1838. A full quarter of Douglass’s life transpired between these dates. If Nathan Huggins’s concern is with the public Douglass and the proposed opposition between “slave” and “citizen,” then Dickson J. Preston’s concern is with the private Douglass-as-slave, with the life and times of Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey—the name that his mother, Harriet Bailey, gave to him at his birth, and by which he was known until his escape from slavery in 1838. Preston has at last been able to recreate in convincing detail the years of Douglass’s youth and adolescence, those experiences and seminal influences which have eluded even the most diligent and well-trained historians. Preston’s is the first biography of Douglass to presume that Douglass’s several social programs, coupled with the human limits of memory, render his depictions of slave life on the eastern shore of Maryland suspect, at the least, and sheer invention rather frequently.

Preston’s work is full of remarkably detailed and documented names and dates and places and events, the milieu in which young Frederick grew up. These details answer questions that have plagued historians of Douglass for almost a century. (Indeed, they reveal that Douglass never succeeded in establishing accurately his own chronology.) We know now that he was born in 1818; we know that he moved to Fells Point in Baltimore in March 1826, and that in November of that year the white man who most probably was his father died. We know that he was sent from Baltimore to Hillshore to be divided with the other slaves as part of Anthony’s estate on October 18, 1827. We know that Sophia Auld taught him his letters in 1827, and that in 1831 he both underwent a profound religious conversion and bought the book from which he would learn the fine art of rhetoric, The Columbian Orator. These and many other chronological details, which eluded both Douglass and his other biographers, Preston now firmly establishes.

Most important, Preston publishes as an appendix the “Genealogy of Frederick Douglass,” which he has pieced together from the records of the Anthony, Skinner, and Rice families of Talbot County, Maryland. Preston’s genealogy begins with Douglass’s great-great grandparents, born in 1701 and 1720, and traces the Bailey family to its sixth generation, the generation of Frederick Douglass’s five children. As Preston concludes of Douglass’s heritage, “He had not sprung full-grown out of nowhere, as his contemporaries seemed to think; his black ancestors, for a century or more before his birth, had been a strong and closely knit kin group with family pride and traditions that were handed on to him by his part-Indian grandmother, Bestsey Bailey.” His roots were anchored deeply in the earliest American experience. Indeed, when the newly-free Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey renamed himself first Frederick Bailey, then Frederick Stanley, then Frederick Johnson, and ultimately Frederick Douglass, he self-consciously, and ironically, abandoned a strong matrilineal black heritage of five generations, and with equal irony appropriated the name of a Scottish character called Douglass in Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.

Despite a tendency to wax a bit too poetic about the splendors of the Eastern shore of Maryland, and despite an equally disturbing tendency to diminish speculation on the suffocating atmosphere of even the most benign prison-house of slavery, Preston has given us in this major biography a more three-dimensional, a more human Frederick Douglass, because he “tried to look behind [Douglass’s] own account to see how much of what he said could be verified—or disproved—by independent evidence.” To detailed family and county records, Preston adds the marginalia written in Douglass’s autobiographies by descendants of his master’s family, thus recording a kind of dialogue between Douglass and his white owners. One, Harriet Lucretia Anthony, wrote in the margin of My Bondage and My Freedom that “Several years before Fred’s death I sent him from my great grandfather’s records the date of his birth,” which means that Douglass’s conversation with Dr. Thomas Edward Sears could only have been designed to verify information already available to him. Preston’s remarkably thorough documentation now makes every other account of the first quarter of Frederick Douglass’s life either suspect or inaccurate.

Preston’s fact-finding mission not only shows that Frederick Douglass took wide liberties with the ordering and narrating of the “facts” about his experiences as a slave; it also reinforces a more subtle reevaluation of Douglass as a language-using, social, historical, and individual entity. Indeed, to many literary critics and historians, “Frederick Douglass” has come to be seen as his language itself: for example, both Peter Walker’s three stunning chapters on Douglass in Moral Choices and John W. Blassingame’s brilliant introduction to Volume One of the Douglass Papers clearly define Frederick Douglass first and last by his uses of spoken and written language.

Why is this development such a remarkable one in black historiography? Because the single most pervasive and consistent assumption of all black writing since the eighteenth century has been that there exists an unassailable, integral, black self, as compelling and as whole in Africa as in the New World, in slavery as without slavery. What’s more, this self was knowable, retrievable, recuperable, if only enough attention to detail were displayed.

Perhaps the one unshakeable assumption of historians of Afro-America has been the belief that great black men and women have made great black history. Accused by Hegel and others of having no history, Afro-Americans created the genre of the slave narratives—autobiographical accounts of lordship, bondage, and escape—to render in detail not only the horrors of human enslavement but also the exact features of a single, transcendent, black, sufficient self. This belief in the fundamental integrity of the speaking black subject has undergirded all theories of black cultural nationalism, and it has remained the great unspoken and unchallenged fiction even of contemporary black literary and historiographical scholarship as well.

This analysis of the black subject, which is only an extension of an idealistic notion of self, arises not from historians eager to dispel the notion of individual actors in black history, but rather from those eager to convey the complexity of black history and of the actors who played crucial roles in it. By close readings of Douglass’s texts, Preston, Blassingame, and Walker have for the first time called into question the myth of the eternally knowable and unchanging black and integral self. Nor is it surprising that these critiques begin with Frederick Douglass, for it is he, above all other black historical selves, who most openly invites—indeed demands—a close reading of his three autobiographies. Anyone who writes more than one autobiography must be aware of the ironies implicit in the re-creation of successive fictive selves, subject to manipulation and revision in written discourse. Douglass, furthermore, invites such an analysis because the self he invented in 1845 differs conspicuously in its character and origins from the selves he reinvented in 1855 and in 1881 for the sake of consistency with the “Frederick Douglass” he then intended to reveal to his readers.

All autobiography, after all, is a figure of a figure, the repetition in language of a human figure. From the Latin Middle Ages on, Europeans have attributed all manner of “essences” to the nature of blacks. To put the matter in terms of a black folk rhyme: to figure like a nigger was not to figure at all. To refute these European notions about the “essences” of blackness, Douglass substituted his own myth of essence and of origins by altering key elements in his lost past. By rejecting the name his mother gave him, he not only rejected his most obvious link to five generations of black, but enslaved, forebears, but he also made of his past a tabula rasa on which he could inscribe critically whatever name or face he chose to, at any point in his life.

Blassingame’s contribution to this analysis of the black subject is very important. Not only have Blassingame and his fellow editors of the Douglass Papers project recreated the hundreds of speeches that Douglass delivered, but Blassingame’s masterful introduction is nothing less than a full treatment of what he calls “Douglass’s rhetorical theory.” Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Volume One is its “partial itinerary” of Douglass’s public speaking engagements between 1841 and 1846, which reveals Douglass as an indefatigable servant of the antislavery cause. Juxtaposed with the texts of these speeches, pieced together from thousands of press reports, are detailed headnotes, which provide factual contexts for the speeches. As a result, we begin to understand in splendid detail how fully Douglass worked and reworked his text of antislavery, and how often different commentators took the occasion of Douglass’s eloquence to remark upon its implications in a new assessment of the “Negro’s place in nature,” as the cliched phrase went. Acutely aware of this function of language, Douglass throughout these speeches calls attention to his own mastery of language and its ramifications for all subsequent evaluations of the black slave and ex-slave. As Blassingame writes, “Lecturing on the unity of the races in Cincinnati, Douglass ‘claimed that the Negro exhibited all the elements of a man—he laughed, he wept, he walked, he knew the use of fire and he acquired and retained knowledge. No animal but man had these qualities. Even the dogs saw it, and followed the Negro as they did the white man, and in these days of doubt, a dog’s testimony was worth something.’” As Douglass put the relation between language acquisition and freedom, “all the education I possess, I may say, I have stolen while a slave. I did manage to steal a little knowledge of literature, but I am now in the eyes of American law considered a thief and robber, since I have not only stolen a little knowledge of literature, but have stolen my own body also.” And as one Edward Smith maintained in his introduction of Douglass to an English audience, Douglass’s rhetorical skills alone would make unnecessary “any further argument to convince them whether or not the slave is endowed with powers of intellect.”

Peter Walker contributes to our understanding of Douglass as a creature of language a bold reading of those passages from the three autobiographies in which Douglass discusses his mother and father, supplemented by a revealing analysis of Douglass’s accounts of finding and losing his “voice” between 1841 and 1847.

Walker’s argument about Douglass’s “voice” is complex, but it can summarized. In each of his autobiographies, Douglass claims that he escaped from slavery both completely whole and fully formed, knowing exactly the contours of his identity. Walker argues that this assertion is a rhetorical strategy designed to establish “the former slave as a functioning member of a free labor society; that is, it argues that the slave experience, regardless of its brutalities and deprivations, did not inhibit the development of a slave’s essential characteristics as a human being. . . . He is not psychologically crippled. Second, it permits Douglass to move straightaway to attack social conditions in the free society that inhibit the former slave from being what he already is.” What Walker does not say is that this rhetorical strategy enables Douglass to displace a negative idea of identity—of the slave as lazy and debased—with an equally fictitious idea of an identity which exists before the individual enters the social relations of a free society. Douglass here substitutes one ideal essence for another, and “idealism depends upon notions of ‘human essence’ which somehow transcend and operate (indeed, cause) the social systems.”

What Walker’s analysis reveals, however, is much of the irony implicit in Douglass’s successive myths of origins. Douglass, writing in the 1845 Narrative, describes his moment of true freedom not as his escape from Baltimore to New York, but rather when he (in Robert Stepto’s apt phrase) first “rose and found his voice.” The setting was an antislavery convention at Nantucket, in August 1841, three years after his escape. Called upon, and “strongly moved to speak,” Douglass gives this account of his conversion experience: “It was a severe cross, and I took it up reluctantly. The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren. . . .” When he rewrote the description for My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass expanded on his description in this way, and allowed it to stand in the Life and Times (1881; 1892): “Young, ardent, and hopeful, I entered upon this new life in the full gush of unsuspecting enthusiasm. The cause was good, the men engaged in it were good, the means to attain its triumph, good. . . . For a time I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped." Juxtaposed with his rejection of his mother’s name, and as we shall see, her memory, Douglass’s “conversion” can be read as his escape not only from slavery but also from his black mother’s heritage, thereby grafting himself onto his nameless white father’s heritage—and that of the white Garrisonians. As Walker suggests, “it is the passive, not the active, voice that speaks in this keening passage. . . . All of a sudden, and very briefly, he becomes the passive participant in his own drama. Power over self was lost and control over his life—the very definition of self—passes to others, in this case the Garrisonians.” To buttress this reading, Walker cites a curious phenomenon that happened when Douglass at last broke openly with Garrison: just as he had found his voice at Nantucket six years earlier in the full company of Garrison and the Garrisonians, so now did he “lose his voice,” remaining unable for an extended time to utter even one syllable. In an oratorical career that extended from 1841 to 1895, Walker was unable to find any other example of this sort of loss of voice.

Douglass provides a remarkable example of the manner in which he manipulated his own blank past as “a representation of the present” in his accounts of the identity of his mother and father. Three times in the first chapter of his 1845 Narrative, Douglass writes that “my master was my father”: “My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of that opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me.” Just ten years later, writing in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass qualifies the unequivocal claim made in the Narrative: “I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate. Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families. . . . The order of civilization is reversed here. The name of the child is not expected to be that of its father, and his condition does not necessarily affect that of the child. . . . My father was a white man, or nearly white. It was sometimes whispered that my master was my father.” A few pages later, Douglass comments on his father again: “. . . my mother died without leaving me a single intimation of who my father was. There was a whisper, that my master was my father; yet it was only a whisper, and I cannot say that I ever gave it credence. Indeed, I now have reason to think he was not . . .” In the two editions of the Life and Times, Douglass has this to say of his father: “Of my father I know nothing.” As Walker concludes, “as an identifiable man his father had ceased to exist.”

If Douglass’s reduction of his father from a white master to a nonentity is curious, his narrative accounts of his mother are even more so. In the 1845 Narrative, Douglass can barely recall his mother, from whom he was “separated when I was but an infant.” “I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. . . . I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. . . . Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.”

Just ten years later, however, in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass repeats that his knowledge of his mother is “very scanty,” but notes it has become as well “very distinct.” As Douglass writes, “Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall, and finely proportioned; of deep black, glossy complexion; had regular features, and, among the other slaves, was remarkably sedate in her manners.” As he concludes in 1855, “It has been a life-long, standing grief to me, that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her. The counsels of her love must have been beneficial to me. The side view of her face is imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of hers treasured up.” Not only has Douglass fairly suddenly recalled his mother’s appearance, but he also has come to feel for her death “life-long, standing grief,” when just ten years earlier her death struck him as would have the death of a total stranger.

Moreover, Douglass has, in these ten intervening years, stumbled upon a picture of a person whom he claims resembles his mother. The picture, which is to be found on page 157 of James Prichard’s Natural History of Man, remained throughout the final editions of his autobiographies that of his mother, Harriet Bailey. As Douglass himself states, he found in Prichard “the head of a figure . . . the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones.” The ironies of this attribution are legion: in the first place, Prichard says that the picture is that of the “head of a statue supposed to be that of Rameses,” which represents the ideal racial type he calls “the Indian.” Prichard calls “the general expression” of the head “calm and dignified,” which echoes Douglass’s description of his mother as “remarkably sedate and dignified.” Rather obviously, however, the figure is not, and could not be, “deep black” or ”glossy.” As Walker suggests, to find this figure in Prichard, Douglass had to pass over an abundant supply of illustrations that accompanied Prichard’s description of several “African races.” And, most ironically of all, the head is that of a man, and not a woman at all.

If Douglass’s black and glossy mother’s picture is that of an “Indian” male, Douglass’s various mothers also become progressively more articulate. Although his mother’s literacy is ignored in the 1845 Narrative, by 1855 Harriet Bailey has become "the only one of all the slaves and colored people in Tuckahoe who enjoyed” the “advantage” of reading. What’s more, Douglass “fondly and proudly ascribe[s] to her an earnest love of knowledge.” Accordingly, he now sees fit “to attribute any love of letters I possess, and for which I have got-despite of prejudices—only too much credit, not to my admitted Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother—a woman,” he concludes, “who belonged to a race whose mental endowments it is, at present, fashionable to hold in disparagement and contempt.”

Of these startling assertions and revisions, Peter Walker’s conclusions are most telling:

With these changes Harriet Bailey’s metamorphosis was completed. The dark woman who in the Narrative passed through Douglass’ life almost literally a stranger in the night becomes the sable, tall, fine-featured, impressive dignified mother. . . . She becomes a mother who made him feel like a prince, and who endowed him with the preeminent quality of language. It was she alone who enabled him to become a writer and speaker; she gave Douglass his “voice.” No factitious reading of these passages is required to understand what Douglass was doing. Through the continued development and refinement of the autobiographical mother, Douglass was also developing and refining his own conception of self. He was driving himself deeper and deeper into a proud identification with Harriet Bailey who above all else was a black slave.

Walker’s close readings of Douglass, coupled with Preston’s fact-finding and with Blassingame’s detailed exposition of Douglass’s rhetorical theory, together offer a major insight into that stolid black “self” which Frederick Douglass willed to history. Walker’s scholarship especially unravels the historical Frederick Douglass, just as one stray thread, pulled properly, can unravel the weave of a whole cloth. With the publication of these volumes, we must now insist upon the recognition and identification of the black autobiographical tradition as the positing of fictive black selves in language, in a mode of discourse traditionally defined by rather large claims for “the self.” The “self,” in this sense, does not exist as an entity, but as a coded system of signs, arbitrary in reference. This is not to argue against the existence of the self, but only to argue that any attempt to “recreate” or “represent” an historical self in language is marked from the start by burdensome ironies. Indeed, it may be said that Douglass’s legacy to contemporary black letters is his masterful use of the trope of irony. American liberals since the abolitionists have fostered the myth of the equality of the properly speaking subject. To speak properly was to be proper. But to attempt to employ a Western language to posit a black self is inherently to use language ironically. The relation of the speaking black subject to the “self” figured in these languages must by definition be an ironical relation since that self exists only in the “non-place of language,” and since these languages encoded figuratively the idea that blackness itself is a negative essence, an absence.

A great work of scholarship remains to be done—one which can create a life of Frederick Douglass that somehow gives us a sense of the complexities of the man and of the contradictions among the three public selves he recorded so eloquently in his autobiographies. Perhaps a perceptive scholar can restore to the life of Frederick Douglass its decidedly human face. Perhaps our generation of scholars can eschew earlier needs to forge a distinctly Afro-American mythology, complete with our own mythic figures, and we can learn to portray our heroes and antecedents with all of their weaknesses as well as their strengths. And such a biography could at least begin with a fact about Douglass that he himself never learned. For John Blassingame found, in a long lost record that Captain Aaron Anthony had maintained, and in which he recorded only the barest details of “My Black People[’s] Ages,” that Frederick Douglass was indeed born in February of 1818. Just as Blassingame has given to Douglass that fact for which he searched to his death in vain, so perhaps will he give us the face of Frederick Douglass, as resplendently as he has given us, through his speeches and writings, Douglass’s great and terrible voice.

Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Letters, by Peter Walker, Louisiana State University Press.

The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Volume I: 1841–1846, edited by John W. Blassingame and associates, Yale University Press.

Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass, by Nathan Irving Huggins, Little, Brown and Company.

Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years, by Dickson J. Preston, The Johns Hopkins University Press.