Learning to Write: The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Lecture notes of Music

Download Learning to Write: The Narrative of Frederick Douglass and more Lecture notes Music in PDF only on Docsity! Learning to Write: The Narrative of Frederick Douglass John Burt March 1, 2002 Frederick Douglass claimed that he began to become free when he learned to write. Part of what he meant was that in writing he found the means to see himself as himself rather than as his masters saw him.1 But he also meant that writing enabled him to cross between two different kinds of identity and two different kinds of world. One of these kinds of identity I will call “selfhood,” an identity governed from within by need and desire and from without by force and fortune. The other I will call “citizenship,” an identity which gives law to itself in the form of duty and law to others in the form of rights. Only this latter kind of identity can enter into deliberation with other people and live in a truly public world. In learning to write, Douglass discovers the identity of the citizen, as opposed to that belonging merely to the self; in the three autobiographies he produced between 1845 and 1892, he fashions that public identity for himself and for others. The first observation one must make about the Narrative of Frederick Douglass is that it is a romantic autobiography: in addition to serving the immediate political exigencies it was designed to answer, it concerns itself with the creation of a powerful literary identity. As such, Douglass’ book can be aligned as strongly with The Prelude or Song of Myself as with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Narrative’s participation in this genre, however, is compli- cated by the fact that it attempts several contradictory tasks: it must testify simultaneously to the barbarity of slavery and to the human strength which 1For studies which read Douglass this way, see the several readings of Douglass in Gates, Baker, Stepto, Andrews, and Olney. All citations to Douglass will be to Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings, Michael Meyer, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1984). 1 even slavery has not been enough to subdue. It must, like Song of Myself, simultaneously attest to and deny the uniqueness of its author, accounting for the individual power and eloquence of the author in a way which does not compromise the author’s ability to speak for others who have endured the same conditions. The Narrative speaks at once for the mass and for the most individuated of individuals—and in doing so it suffers a tension which perhaps inheres in the works of all those who take democracy seriously, and which only our own commitment to democracy prevents us from seeing as a tension. 2 The unique contribution of the Narrative consists in the fact that the identity it creates is not only the profound selfhood of other romantic works—that mysterious source of integrity, distinctness, and power—but also the identity of the citizen, who has a public role to play in a world of law and rights. Behind Douglass’ nineteenth-century ideal of private and unfath- omable selfhood stands an essentially eighteenth-century ideal of citizenship and public duty. Like other slave narratives, Douglass’ text attempts to show that slavery, bad as it is, has not disabled the slaves from ever taking part in American po- litical life; indeed, slavery has given them capacities and insights which they would not have come by in any other way.3 Thus the Narrative presents one 2The issue of “voice” in this work thus ties it directly into the mainstream ofAmerican romanticism. Henry Louis Gates, in Figures in Black, has noted the special tensions black writers surfer when they must speak for their race as a whole. A recent biographer of Douglass, Dickson J. Preston, noting Douglass’ almost obsessive concern for himself as a self-created public man, uses biographical evidence to reveal the extent of Douglass’ participation in a cultural life to which he seems very alien in his autobiographies. Preston notes, for instance, that although Douglass portrays himself as having no meaningful family ties; he was in fact the product of a five-generation stable matriarchy. In later works, Douglass treats his mother in more detail; apparently, despite his portrayal of her In the Narrative, she was not only a forceful personality but literate. Why Douglass should go to such lengths to detach himself from this past in the 1845 Narrative is worth pondering. 3William L. Andrews has argued that there is a strong difference between slave narra- tives written before and after the Civil War, a difference which can be accounted for by attending to the different rhetorical circumstances and aims of their authors. The pre-war authors were principally concerned with making their case against slavery in the strongest possible terms; for them, as a rule, slavery was a barbarous and vicious condition fraught with degrading consequences for both slave and master. The post-war authors of slave narratives were principally concerned with showing that, however hard their lives under slavery might have been, the former slaves were not warped to such an extent as to be unfit for citizenship. In fact, the post-war authors argued that slaves had learned, through the hard school of slavery, many of the very political skills which would enable them to live in peace with their former masters once they had adjusted themselves to new relations 2 First, slaves were quite capable of making their masters take seriously the force of their recalcitrance, if not their resistance. Recent students of slavery such as Eugene Genovese have shown how slaves were able to impose their own work rhythms upon their masters (a fact even Olmstead noticed), and how slaves used their awareness of their own economic value to force concessions out of their masters. They were too expensive to kill, and even frequent beating, as the slaveowners agricultural magazines argued, would usually prove a self-defeating practice. Douglass presents the power of recalcitrance most clearly in his famous de- scription of his fight with Covey, the notorious “slave-breaker” to whom Cap- tain Thomas Auld has leased him in hopes of rendering him more tractable. When Douglass finally comes to grapple with Covey it is a one on one fight— Covey’s white help being put out of action by a timely kick to the groin. Even his black help refuses to come to Covey’s aid: When Covey asks another slave to help him hold Douglass down, that slave refuses, saying with some dignity that he had been leased to Covey to work, not to whip, and Covey curiously seems to accept this. Covey and Douglass wrestle for two hours, at the con- clusion of which Covey lets go, pretending for public consumption to have beaten his slave squarely (although he has clearly gotten somewhat the worst of a basically equal match) and claiming with a great show of bravado that, had Douglass not resisted, Covey would not have whipped him half so much. This moment is interesting enough in itself, but what follows is even more interesting: Covey’s failure to call the instruments of state discipline to his aid. Douglass describes it in this way: It was for a long time a matter of surprise to me why Mr. Covey did not immediately have me taken by the constable to the whipping-post, and there regularly whipped for the crime of raising my hand against a white man in defense of myself. And the only explanation I can now think of does not entirely satisfy me, but such as it is, I will give it. Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker. It was of considerable importance to him. That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me—a boy of about sixteen years old—to the public whipping-post, his reputation would have been lost; so to save his reputation, he suffered me to go unpunished. (82) Douglass’ lesson here (echoed later by George Orwell in “Shooting an 5 Elephant”) is that force is itself alienating that the master is enslaved by his own picture of himself as a master and by the necessity of keeping that picture both before himself and before the world. Even when the masters are at their cruelest, their actions derive from a sense of their own weakness, a sense which their slaves are among the first to detect. Consider for a moment the famous scene in which Douglass’ aunt is brutally whipped by Captain Anthony, the scene in which Douglass, as a young child, first becomes acquainted with the violence of slavery. Douglass describes how his aunt’s cries of pain seem to arouse Captain Anthony to whip her more and more severely. His sadism, however, seems to arise from his sense that he cannot control her—as if he whips her harder because every lash reminds him of the impotence of the last one. His abuse of power here is a product of his weakness elsewhere: his inability to make Aunt Hester do what he wishes her to do, and, even more deeply—the bluntness with which Douglass says this is amazing—his inability to compete successfully for Hester’s sexual favors with her slave lover, Lloyd’s Ned. Even the master’s power to sexually exploit his female slaves turns into a variety of weakness in Douglass’ account of it. Notice the moral subtlety of Douglass’ account of how the master’s own power disables him: The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves [his mixed-race children], out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back: and if he lisp one word of disapproval, ills set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend. (20) The entanglements and ironies of the masters’ power reveal that power cannot be a sufficient end in itself, even when the power one has in mind is the power to resist the master; for power, even power over one’s own destiny, is not freedom. Freedom, in Douglass’ account, is something other than having enough power to do as one pleases. Douglass describes and criticizes a second means of power available to slaves within slavery. We might call this the power to be recognized as a 6 human being. It is important to be very clear on this point because one might at first assume that this sort of power is exactly what one cannot have as a slave. To be a slave, we almost want to say, is to be thought of as a thing, not as a human being. But we have to distinguish between the ability to recognize somebody’s humanity—to recognize that a person has feelings and thoughts deserving of consideration and respect, as well as a moral capacity to which that person is responsible—and the ability to recognize what I will call somebody’s citizenship, which is to say, somebody’s ability to stand with me in the public arena where we may make claims against each other about our rights and duties. It is on this distinction that Douglass’ indictment of slavery finally rests, for the slaveholders are generally capable of recognizing their slaves’ humanity but they are not, by definition, capable of recognizing their slaves’ citizenship. If we confuse these two things, humanity and citizenship, we are likely to miss the point of Douglass’ indictment of slavery. To confuse the slave’s private identity (as someone with whom the masters are in continuous and sometimes close relationships) and the slave’s public identity (as someone outside the confines of polity) is to transform the debate from one about the nature and rights of citizenship to one about the nature and intensity of the slave’s and the slaveholder’s feelings. Arguments about how people feel, about whether their feelings are genuine or not, are almost always point- less. Within the terms of such an argument, the slaveholders can defend themselves merely by testifying that, of course, they understand the human feelings of the slave and that, of course, they do as much as possible to con- sider those feelings. The fact of the matter is that slaveholders were forced in a thousand ways to grant the humanity of their slaves, and the fact that they did so makes not the slightest bit of difference about the morality of slavery. Looking hard at Douglass’ Narrative, one discovers that only once— immediately before the fight with Covey—does Douglass describe slavery as the confusion of persons with things. What is obliterated by slavery is not the slave’s connection to the world of human feeling, a connection which in one way or another most of Douglass’ masters seem very well aware of (and which Douglass himself—if his conversation with Thomas Auld on his deathbed many years after Emancipation is any indication—knew they were aware of); what slavery obliterates is the connection between the slave as a psychological and moral being and the slave as a political being, as some- one capable of deliberating, rendering public judgment, and pressing public 7 over from Africa and partly created for themselves. Interested as Douglass is in the folk culture of black people, he sometimes seems as detached from it as any white observer; he views that folk culture with a skepticism which must strike modern students of slavery as very strange. For example, the magic root which Sandy Jenkins gives to Douglass on the eve of the fight with Covey is treated with gentle comedy in the Narrative: Jenkins’ insistence that it was the root which enabled Douglass to hold his own with Covey comes off as a mild joke at Douglass’ expense. In the later version of this story, in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass leaves out the comedy, and instead ner- vously denies that he ever took Jenkins’ root with any seriousness, going out of his way to denounce such necromancy as foolish and even wicked. Rather than treating the root (as one might now) as an emblem of the integrity of black culture in the face of suffering (as, say, Ralph Ellison treats the sweet- potato pie in Invisible Man), Douglass treats it as a disabling diversion from the real question. Douglass is even more stern about the efficacy of music as a response to suffering. Partly, of course, this is because he has a simple task in front of him—he has to prove that the singing of the slaves is not a sign of their happiness in slavery—but his criticism of slave music goes beyond what this agenda would require. Douglass opens his description of slave singing with a bemused detachment rather unlike what one would expect from a former slave, but rather like what one would expect from a white observer of slave customs like Frederick Law Olmstead or Mary Chesnut: The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves, were peculiarly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting nei- ther time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound:—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they could manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly the following words:— 10 “I am going away to the Great House Farm! Oh, Yea! 0, Yea! 0!” This they would sing, as a chorus to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. (28) Douglass goes on to assert that he has only come to understand the meaning of these “rude songs” since he has found freedom: only now, but not then, is he able to see them as “testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” This strange assertion gives us pause. If the singing is really an expression of something, what does it mean for Douglass to tell us that, not only was he incapable then of saying what was being expressed in the songs, but that if he had been asked about the true content of the songs, he would probably have given, in good faith, a totally incorrect answer? I think the only way to sort all this out is to attend to Douglass’ powerfully mixed feelings on the subject And to discover the origins of these mixed feelings we need to attend to ’the mixed feelings which inform slave music itself. Douglass wants badly to see this music only as a cry of pain, as “the complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.” Yet what the music reveals to him is the entanglement of joy with pain, or rapture with pathos. In this entanglement of joy and pain, modern readers tend to find one of the means by which slaves mustered the human strength to resist being dehumanized by their condition; it is not only evidence of misery but also testimony that human beings bravely carried on with human life in the face of misery. But what Douglass finds in this music is quite different. To argue that slaves are able to muster enough of their human resources to resist giving way utterly to the cruelty of slavery would be in Douglass’ mind (if not in ours) to weaken the case Douglass wishes to make against slavery. To solve his problem he follows his description of the mixed feelings which interpenetrate each’ other in slave music with the claim that, despite the ambivalent description just given, slave music really is only a cry of pain and nothing else. Yet no sooner does he make this claim than it is undone in turn by the force of his own emotional response to the memory of this singing—as if, despite his presentation of slave music as enslaved music, he cannot help but be moved by it. The mixed feelings which Douglass will no longer allow to his enslaved brethren reappear as his own mixed feelings about their music. These mixed feelings give rise to Douglass’ distrust of 11 music, since they have the effect of entangling him in the very contradictions of feeling which he wishes to sort out. All three of the means of resistance I have just discussed are finally only means of power, not means of right, and all three are bound up in the futility which always afflicts exercises of power, whether they succeed or fail. All three can adjust the relations of power within slavery, but none of them can transform the question from a question of power to a question of right. So long as one is unable to manage this transformation, Douglass implicitly argues, anything one does is finally futile, no matter how effective it may seem to be. The only way to avoid futility in a conflict is by searching for a regulative abstraction to which both sides claim allegiance and which is the exclusive property or agent of neither side. The hope of being able to make this appeal to right renders conflict articulate, and distinguishes argument from scream- ing. This search for adjudicating principles finally defines what freedom is for Douglass as well—for freedom, in the Narrative, is not just the ability to do what one wishes (a freedom one never fully enjoys in any civil society but which few tyrannies can fully destroy), but the freedom to enter into articulate conflict with one’s opponents. Freedom is not the ability to have what one desires but the ability to stand with one’s opponents in the arena of principle. It is likely that nobody, not even Douglass, has a very secure grasp on what the right is—our particular ideas about the right have a peculiar way of reflecting our interests. But if we recognize that there is right (even though nothing we say does justice to it) and if we recognize that sometimes we are capable of discovering ourselves to be mistaken, we hold out the hope at least of not always being made fools of by our desires. We also hold out the hope of learning something from our enemies, who are similarly responsible to a perplexing sense of right they are not fully in possession of. This is perhaps why we cannot fairly argue with anyone unless we can provisionally imagine those common values in whose terms we argue. We cannot fairly argue unless we can imagine circumstances in which we would own ourselves to be beaten. We do not know what the right is. But we cannot argue in good faith with worthy opponents without accepting at least the conceivability of right, even as we deny that any particular claims we make about right, even claims we share with our enemies, can do full justice to right in itself. For unless a society can be assessed from an abstract point of view not entirely tangled up in the needs and desires of that society, our quarrels can never be about 12 possibly be persuaded to do something about it. He discovers it is possible to meet the master not only in the self-defeating arena of conflict over power or feeling but also in the far more promising arena of public and articulate conflict, conflict in which both sides have to search for arguments which will tell against each other. This hunger for a regulative principle explains two crucial actions of Dou- glass’ later political career. It explains, first, Douglass’ founding of the North Star against the advice of Garrison. Certainly Douglass, in writing for him- self, comes into the world more truly as himself than he would have done had he remained merely Garrison’s protégé: but it is also the case that writing itself—writing texts which have some permanence and can be read by any- body, as opposed to making speeches mainly heard by already sympathetic audiences—answers more fully to Douglass’ sense of himself as a citizen with public responsibilities. This same hunger explains Douglass’ far more controversial adherence to the U.S. Constitution at a time when most abolitionists, echoing Garrison, thought of that document as “an agreement with Death and a covenant with Hell.” The Garrisonians thought of themselves as secessionists, demanding “No Union With Slaveholders.” Part of Douglass’ criticism of the Garrisonian position arose from his sense of its inability to free anybody. Secession of the North might have freed New England from moral entanglements and delivered to New Englanders the clean hands we have generally valued above everything else, but it would have left the slaves in a state where there were no advocates for their cause. Douglass’ deepest objection to Garrison’s position, however, rested on his understanding of what the alternative to the Constitution would be. Garrison burned the Constitution because of the dirty compromises with which he felt it to be besmirched; in place of the Constitution he honored the unwritten and unwriteable imperatives which motivated that document but which, in his view, the Constitution betrayed. For Garrison, the alternative to constitutional law was “higher law.” If the Constitution is the letter that killeth, the higher law is the spirit that giveth life. And yet, in the final analysis, higher law produces moral compulsions about which we need not persuade ourselves or anybody else. To claim the warrant of higher law is not to shift the argument to some higher level of abstraction in search of a regulative principle; it is, on the contrary, to claim that the time for argument has passed and the time for shooting is about to begin. The higher law, being unwriteable and nonnegotiable, allows no one opposing us to find a way of 15 telling against us when they disagree with us. Douglass understood that the alternative to the Constitution was the endless entanglement of fights over power. For all its flaws, the Constitution was finally the instrument of freedom because it embodied principles to which the South had already declared its allegiance. These principles, Douglass argued, were incompatible with slaveholding. Freedom was for Douglass the ability to argue with others in a common arena, using common appeals, using those agreements one must already have with one’s opponents (if one is to argue with them rather than shoot them) as a way not only of persuading them but also of redeeming them. To burn the Constitution would be to burn the one thing which redeems our desires from futility, to burn our only instrument for translating our quarrel from a quarrel over force (in which the slaves were finally bound to lose) into a quarrel over right (in which, Douglass believed, even the slaveholders would be forced to reach his conclusions). What Douglass discovers when he learns “the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder” is not only a way to replace self-defeating force by more promising persuasion, but also a new kind of identity. For no longer is he merely his natural self—the child of an unidentified mother, born in cherry-blossom time rather than in March—nor even merely his social self—the slave of so-and-so, whom he can perhaps force not to beat him. He becomes also Frederick Douglass the citizen, not only the bearer of desires, wishes, and capacities of force, but also the bearer of rights and of duties, someone capable of appearing in the public arena and arguing with someone else on common grounds of persuasion. This new identity, citizenship, opens up the possibility of some response to the problem of enslavement which does not always and continuously un- dermine itself. It makes credible the possibility that we can enter into rela- tionships other than those of submission, force, and solidarity, that we can enter into relations of persuasion, articulate conflict, and respect. His en- try, through learning to write, into the world of this kind of relationship redeems Douglass from the futility to which every act which arises out of interest, need, or feeling is subject. It makes possible actions which are not futile because they tie themselves not to the metabolism of nature or to the metabolism of social process but to the governance of commonly held first principles. Furthermore, even as citizenship raises Douglass from futility, so it also raises his opponents, transforming them into people who can be appealed to—and redeemed from error—in terms of their own values. To say that one’s opponents are redeemable is to make a large claim, 16 and one must make that claim with precision, for it is the central claim of all rhetorical theory that is worth anything. When Douglass implicitly claims his opponents are redeemable he does not necessarily mean that he will inevitably have his way with them: nor does he necessarily mean even that he understands them fully. All he means is that he is resolved to attend to those higher agreements in whose terms all real disagreements are undertaken. The determining ground which will decide the conflict may not even exist, at least not yet, and he is under no illusions about the extent to which his opponents and he share a common world. But he is determined to attend to those higher agreements even in the face of his recognition that he and the masters may be living in different worlds, for he recognizes that those things which hold us apart, even if they clothe themselves with the appearance of utter certainty, areas provisional as any of our other beliefs. Learning to write, Douglass seeks admission to a common moral world in which he is bound up with his opponents and in which he can hope to reach them by attending, in a disciplined and critical way, to the sources of his own beliefs. Let us say that writing delivers us into a world where we are responsible to a history we didn’t make, where we are never quite free but also are never quite somebody whose story we already know all about. It delivers us into a world where we have a voice of our own, but where we speak to people who aren’t ourselves and who have needs, desires, and beliefs which we must address if not always agree with. Writing also delivers us into a world governed by values which neither we nor our enemies are fully in possession of, but which give us the hope of persuading each other and living together as we ought. Douglass paid a high price for this truth—among other things he gave up his own access to the cultural resources of his people. And at least at first glance it looks as if he did not get in return what his sacrifice was worth. For neither persuasion nor the Constitution finally freed the slaves; it took four years of war and a million lives. Of course Douglass did come to argue for violent resistance to slavery. Yet interestingly enough the nature of his argument seems to have protected him from undergoing that curious slide from pacifism to terrorism so characteristic of abolitionism in the late 1850’s. The ex-pacifists could only imagine violence of an apocalyptic sort; but for Douglass even bloodshed remained closer to politics than to religion. One sometimes wonders whether concepts such as the primacy of persua- sion over force or the necessity of principled disagreement can ever stand the blast of urgent human miseries in whose presence they look like niceties. But 17