1. Never Again
The Day Frederick Douglass Became a Free Man
Rich Junker
Presented at
Brandon Toastmasters
May 29, 2012
2. Dreams of Freedom
If ye have belief as a mustard seed…
Rich Junker
Presented at
Brandon Toastmasters
XXX YY, 2012
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15. Sources
Fighter for Freedom: The Frederick Douglass Story
http://www.frederickdouglassfoundation.com/fdbio.html
Character Analysis
http://www.shmoop.com/life-of-frederick-douglass/edward-covey.html
Chapter 10 of Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of... an American Slave
http://academic.reed.edu/english/courses/english341nn/studpages/david/index.html
Hinweis der Redaktion
Newt Gingrich is “Mr. Covey” in Frederick Douglass’ storyhttp://www.jackandjillpolitics.com/2011/05/newt-gingrich-is-%e2%80%9cmr-covey%e2%80%9d-in-frederick-douglass%e2%80%99-story/dougl234a-184x300/14May2011 Author: rikyrahAnother gem from zizi2:Gingrich is “Mr. Covey” in Frederick Douglass’ storyPosted by Zizi2 on May 13th, 2011Aha! I knew that he reminded me of a very familiar slimy character. Newt Gingrich is a replica of Mr. Edward Covey, the pathetic slave breaker in Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. Like Covey, Gingrich is a has-been deluded about his relevance to society. Like Covey, Gingrich is a sadist. Like Covey, Gingrich is a hypocrite and ethically challenged on all fronts. But unlike Covey, Newtie is not gonna be nobody’s slave breaker here. Oh no. Not gonna happen in these United States, in this or any other lifetime!Newt can scream all the Obama-is-a-Kenyan-anticolonialist-Mau-mau-sympathiser-so –outside-our –comprehension-conman-destroyer-of-America-as-it-has-been-for-the-last-400 years…..blah blahblah all he wants, but he cannot bring PBO down. Neither will he even have the chance to debate the President on any stage, real or imagined.Douglass fights CoveyHere’s a little historical/literary refresher for those not very familiar with who Covey was: In Chapter X of his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave”, Frederick Douglass recounts the lowest point of his life as a slave, when he was sent to Edward Covey by his master Thomas to be “broken”, because he was considered incorrigible. Covey was a down-on-his-luck white overseer who owned no real slave estate of his own, but fancied himself a mean whip-cracker who could bring any slave to his knees. As Douglass recounts about Covey:He seldom approached the spot where we were at work openly, if he could do it secretly. He always aimed at taking us by surprise. Such was his cunning, that, we used to call him, among ourselves, “the snake.”Covey was also well practiced in the black arts of Christian hypocrisy, chanting the loudest devotional pieties, while satisfying his carnal appetites through adultery.Mr. Covey’s FORTE consisted in his power to deceive. His life was devoted to planning and perpetrating the grossest deceptions. Every thing he possessed in the shape of learning or religion, he made conform to his disposition to deceive. He seemed to think himself equal to deceiving the Almighty. He would make a short prayer in the morning, and a long prayer at night; and, strange as it may seem, few men would at times appear more devotional than he…, I do verily believe that he sometimes deceived himself into the solemn belief, that he was a sincere worshiper of the most high God; and this, too, at a time when he may be said to have been guilty of compelling his woman slave to commit the sin of adulteryDouglass’ description of his sojourn with Covey is embroidered with all the imaginable literary flourishes of an adrenaline pumping and testosterone oozing heroic tale. Of course, since all we have is Douglass’ version of the story, no wonder he seizes all the poetic license he can find to fashion Covey into a giant literary piñata, a perfectly vile vessel to freight the final existential showdown between good and evil. As Douglass states it “you saw how a man was made a beast. Now you will see how a beast was made a man.” Covey provides Douglass with the perfect foil to slo-mo (slow motion)through one of the heightened mano-a-mano, edge-of-your-seat, veins popping, sweat-beading climatic moments in the American Slave Narrative genre.My resistance was so entirely unexpected that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to Hughes for help. Hughes came, and, while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs…. his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer. … I seized him with both hands by his collar, and brought him by a sudden snatch to the ground. ..Bill came….Covey said, “Take hold of him, take hold of him!” Bill…left Covey and myself to fight our own battle out.. Covey at length let me go… saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him.The terms of the relationship with Covey are critical to understanding the dynamics of what Douglass did to break both physical and psychological chains that the weasel tried to crush him with. First, it was significant that Covey DID NOT OWN Douglass. The absence of the slaveowner/property equation meant that try as he might Covey could not legally “thingify” Douglass. Covey could not sell him or kill him. Covey had the slave-breaker’s whip but he did not have POWER over Douglass’ life. He could not fetter Douglass’ yearning to reclaim his manhood. In the fight, both men were stripped to their raw primal essence and Covey is revealed for the coward that he is. For Douglass, that battle with Covey was “the turning point “ in his life as a slave. He recalls how it:It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom…My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.The moral to this story is that we have encountered demagogues like Newtie before. African American forbears fought them and won that fight against all odds. Gingrich can fantasize all he want about returning this country to some fangled 17th century nirvana in his loopy imagination, nobody here, least of all President Obama, is remotely about to kowtow to him. Of course that doesn’t stop him from imagining himself some slave breaker ready to take on the one he calls the “con-man” in the White House. He’s turned into a perverse Don Quixote tilting at the windmills. So where Trump spectacularly failed, Gingrich thinks he can pick up the dog-whistle and run with it on a blitzkrieg lit with his phony academic mumbo jumbo, acrid ethics and loud mouth.That Gingrich fancies himself to be an “intellectual” anchor in the conservative movement is more than laughable. And it says a lot about those whom he bamboozles than it does about him. Watch the exchange between Chris Matthews and Politico”s Jennifer on the Hardball last night, to see how those supposed to be journalists get hoodwinked by Gingrich’s pseudo-intellectualism.He is nothing but a two-bit carnival barker with a Ph.D, having written a dissertation defending Belgian colonial policies in the Belgian Congo (which is the Democratic republic of Congo today). Now, for anyone to find any merit in the colonial administration of King Leopold’s brutal rubber kingdom in the Belgian Congo, is morally frightening, let alone intellectually defensible. So I took the trouble to pull up the full text of his 1971 dissertation titled Belgian Education Policy in the Congo on the Proquest UMI electronic archives (available if you have access to Proquest academic databases).Even by whatever academic standards that existed in 1971, this was just bad scholarship, and a freight car for the seeds of his wingnut ideology. How does one write a 308 page dissertation about Belgian colonial education policy, draw conclusions about how beneficial it was, and not talk to a single Congolese who directly or indirectly experienced said benevolent education? On the mechanics of dissertation writing, this is a dissertation that has no information about research methodology, nothing about where and how information was gathered, and a supervisor signed off on it? In 1971, these were all essential to crafting an acceptable dissertation. The supervisors who signed off on this work ought to be mocked to no end.In the text itself, Gingrich emerges as nothing but a dyed in the wool apologist for colonial rule; i.e Europeans as civilizers. He writes:Within the beliefs of twentieth century American liberalism, European colonialism is an unacceptable political policy. But what did it mean to the natives? Did colonial powers perform a painful but positive function in disrupting traditional society and so paving the way for more rapid modernization? Even if they did was the price of colonial exploitation too high?…Belgian colonialism left Congo with a solid infrastructure…but a pathetically inadequate leadership cadre…Furthermore, understanding the Congolese heritage is a task that requires the participation of European as well as African historians.(3)But of course Gingrich does not cite a single contemporary African historian nor Congolese Education policymaker. The dissertation’s stated aim to “shed light” on “societal development in the Congo under Belgian rule” does nothing of the sort. What thrilled him was that the Belgians’ “centralized their colonial government more than the British and French” and that the “result was a colonial system more methodical” the result of which:“was a solidly built, carefully packaged, system of government that was regarded as a model of colonial administration until it disintegrated in 1960…a model of technocratic government. It analysed and planned for Congolese economic development with a thoroughness that virtually none of the now independent African states can match”Gingrich states without questioning, that European colonialism is derived from the logic of Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” a feature of what he called “the Darwinian calculus” that automatically propelled a “seemingly universal movement among Caucasian nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”, whose political discourse was being driven by the belief in a “white world racial supremacy and national expansion” as a new Law of survival. See, in order to thrive, white folks just had to subjugate other peoples. Kinda like breathing. It just happened. Laws of nature and all that. No surprise that he would parrot Dinesh D’Souza’s diatribe about President Obama possessing anti-colonialist Mau Mau sympathies. For Gingrich colonial rule was a benevolent need, if not necessary evil., to “civilize” Africans.This is a pathetic swan parade that Gingrich is currently on. His world is coming to a crashing fizzle demographically, culturally, symbolically, and there is nothing he can do about it. So he is riding a wave of self-pumped hot air to grab cash from the rubes like a bandit. The louder he squeals, the deeper his assured failure. His screech is this:“I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [his grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”In spite of his political failures his megalomania knows no bound. In a 1989 Washington Post interview, he rationalized his boorish behavior towards his second wife in these words: “It’s not even that it matters to me. It’s just the habit of dominance, the habit of being the center of my staff and the center of the news media.” To top that he recently claimed that his super duper ultra-patriotism made him cheat on his wife:“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”Hey psst, Newtie, let me join the already loud and growing chorus to tell you: fugeddaboutit. You ain’t EVER EVEREVER going to be President of these United States. Take that to the bank! Jim Crow is dead. That ship real and metaphorical has long since sailed. We ain’t going back.Frederick Douglass fights for his humanityTHANK YOU, ZIZI.You nailed him.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2805540Rumsfeld owns "Mount Misery" plantation (where Frederick Douglass was sent to be tortured)Edited on Sun Nov-26-06 04:31 PM by philosophie_en_rosesurprised?http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/293201_amy22.html...Frederick Douglass, the renowned abolitionist, began life as a slave on Maryland's Eastern Shore. When his owner had trouble with the young, unruly slave, Douglass was sent to Edward Covey, a notorious "slave breaker." Covey's plantation, where physical and psychological torture were standard, was called Mount Misery. Douglass eventually fought back, escaped to the North and went on to change the world. Today Mount Misery is owned by Donald Rumsfeld, the outgoing secretary of defense.It is ironic that this notorious plantation run by a practiced torturer would now be owned by Rumsfeld, himself accused as the man principally responsible for the U.S. military's program of torture and detention. Rumsfeld was recently named along with 11 other high-ranking U.S. officials in a criminal complaint filed in Germany by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. The center is requesting that the German government conduct an investigation and ultimately a criminal prosecution of Rumsfeld and company. CCR President Michael Ratner says U.S. policy authorizing "harsh interrogation techniques" is in fact a torture program that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorized himself, passed down through the chain of command and was implemented by one of the other defendants, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. Torture is a noxious, heinous practice and should not be tolerated. Slavery was once legal and tolerated in the U.S. (it is still practiced in some parts of the world). But people fought back, organized and formed the abolition movement. Pioneering legal and human-rights organizations, such as CCR, aggressively and creatively are working to stop torture, and to hold the torturers and their superiors accountable. Ultimately, it will be the U.S. populace -- not the German courts, not the U.S. Congress -- that stops the U.S. torture program. Frederick Douglass summed it up most eloquently -- in 1849:"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."The owner of Mount Misery should take heed.
http://academic.reed.edu/english/courses/english341nn/studpages/david/index.htmlDavid Stalder English 341: Nation & Narration Reed College May 6, 1997 Life of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American ManMr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment -- from whence came the spirit I don't know -- I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. (Douglass 112, chapt. 10) In Chapter 10 of Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of... an American Slave, Douglass describes an important incident in which he forces backward the standard master-slave hierarchy of beating privileges against his temporary master, Mr. Covey. The victory proves for Douglass a remarkable source of renewed yearning for freedom and of self-confidence; as he "rose" physically, standing up to fight, he "rose" in spirit. Covey did not "have" Douglass in the sense of either fighting or ownership, and could not "do what he pleased." The description of the internal and external results of the fight displays a clear degree of signification in order to convey to the reader the highly personal nature of the triumph--signifying being described by Roger D. Abrahams as a "technique of indirect argument or persuasion" and "a language of implication" (Gates 54). Douglass explains, "He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery" (113, chapt. 10). The overt statement describes a unique feeling arisen from relatively unique circumstances; but the implication tacked on to the statement might be phrased as: "Such a one is most probably not you, the reader." What is the use of constructing this implied distance between the narrator and the reader? The fact that Douglass has taken up writing as an articulate method of communication seems in many ways to indicate an adoption of the "white" voice, but ultimately he stands on his own, apart to a controlled extent from his white audience. An examination of the Narrative through a signification-sensitive lens, as defined by Abrahams and discussed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The Signifying Monkey, with attention to narrative detail, will reveal how Douglass both achieves and reflects through his Narrative a powerful independence of self and spirit which itself is independent of both Northern allies and legal and bodily freedom. Many would argue with justification that Frederick Douglass has adopted, to forge his narrative voice, a strong tool of the white, educated society which, in its Southern substantiation, has held him captive. Douglass in part takes the reins of his destiny by (eventually and initially nervously, according to the Narrative) addressing an audience which would once have been unaddressable. When Douglass was a slave the most contact he had with the abolitionists was, at best, their addressing of him, in small, distant doses, through the literature of which Douglass managed to get a hold. A slave can take orders from Southern whites and occasionally receive information or ideas from Northern whites (or abolitionists), but a certain degree of power or status, springing out of ability and freedom to articulate, is required to address them in return. The power to address is, in a small way, a sign of equal intellectual and social footing. Literacy and articulation are very closely linked for Douglass. During his struggle to learn how to read, he says, some anti-slavery arguments "gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance... The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts" (84, chapt. 7). The acts of reading and writing, together one of the major explicit themes of the Narrative, are even more important than audience, for while the latter develops for Douglass once he is free, the former are necessary for that freedom. Upon having learned what literacy is, Douglass "now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom" (78, chapt. 6). The pathway, that of learning to read and write, is paved with the ability to address through the written medium, the potential to gain vast stores of knowledge and ideas, the opportunity to clarify thought and reflect, the possibility of forging one's own free pass, and other wonderful prospects. The importance of literacy is not at all subjectively delineated; the very idea was sparked by Mr. Auld, who "gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read" (79, chapt. 6). The mutual recognition of the "advantage" of literacy held by the white slaveholder over the black slave is but one indication that, when Douglass takes the reins of this vehicle to freedom, he is adopting the voice of a white society. Another such indication is that Douglass has ostensibly published an abolitionist tract in the form of his narrative. Abolitionist literature, while speaking on behalf of the black oppressed, is still a "white" voice, coming as it does primarily from white Northerners and addressed to an educated audience made up mostly of other whites. Furthermore, the very act of writing is a public act, and participating in the world of literature sets Douglass up as a player in a world dominated by whites, as opposed to the literarily silent, experiential world of the black slave; as Houston Baker, Jr. explains, "By adopting language as his instrument for extracting meaning from nothingness, being from existence, Douglass becomes a public figure" (Baker 251). To end, however, with the statement that Douglass adopts the voice of a white society in order to achieve and reflect upon his freedom would be both an oversimplification of the Narrative and an undermining of the true nature of independence. Douglass says that winning his fight with Covey "rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood" (113, chapt. 10). His association of freedom with both developing manhood and the aspiration to literacy, present throughout the Narrative, turns a public fight for a socially and politically determined freedom into a private one. The quest for liberty is parallel, and even dependent on, the quest for self-definition. Baker says that the whole of the Narrative "serves to illustrate the black autobiographer's quest for being" (Baker 245). He argues the importance of the definitive, reflective and expressionistic aspects of the language control attained by Douglass in his move towards freedom and self-awareness: When clarified and understood through language, the deathly, terrified nothingness around him reveals the grounds of being. Freedom, the ability to chose [sic] one's own direction, makes life beautiful and pure. Only the man free from bondage has a chance to obtain the farthest reaches of humanity. From what appears a blank and awesome backdrop, Douglass wrests significance. His subsequent progression through the roles of educated leader, freeman, abolitionist, and autobiographer marks his firm sense of being. (Baker 248) Baker here defines freedom as "the ability to choose one's own direction," sentiments expressed well by the first point of the original Black Panther Platform and Program; "We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny" (Seale 66). Douglass was an important abolitionist, but if the Narrative demonstrates that he simply escaped from slavery and joined the "other side," to what extant has he actually determined his own destiny? It is true that his decisions were all entirely of his own volition (it must be assumed), but must he confined, then, entirely to the voice of an abolitionist in the white tradition? In the preface to the NarrativeWilliam Lloyd Garrison praises Douglass to no end almost entirely in terms of ideals most common among educated, upper class whites. Baker notes that Douglass, as described by Garrison, "Obviously... was of inestimable 'public usefulness' to the abolitionist crusade," and becomes "part of [the abolitionist audience's] conceptual, linguistic and rhetorical repertoire" (Baker 252). This image of Douglass would point towards an assimilation of his voice into that of the white abolitionist movement, which is dangerously close to undermining the struggle for self-definition and internal independence. He does, of course, gain a great deal from the transition from slavery to freedom no matter how one looks at it, but Baker explains that "the roles he projects for himself in the latter part of his Narrative... are all in harmony with a white, Christian, abolitionist framework" (Baker 250). He wrongfully determines that Douglass develops these roles at the cost of an older, less literate identity; "...once literacy has been achieved, the black self, even as represented in the Narrative, begins to distance itself from the domain of experience constituted by the oral-aural community of the slave quarters" (Baker 253). Douglass does not in the narrative submit so wholly to such distancing. A writer is always a certain distance away from the written subject, even if that subject is the earlier writer, but Douglass demonstrates a continued attachment to his personal history in ways which are not done justice solely by Northern abolitionist sentiments. The imagery Douglass evokes to describe the conditions of slavery demonstrates the tangible and emotional, if saddening, connection of continuous experience the literate black man has with his past as a slave: "My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes" (72, chapt. 5). Douglass' pen, or his self as defined by literate communication and thought, does find a painful foundation in the "gashes" left by slavery. Douglass thus displays a mature sense of his own continuing association with the Narrative's subject; namely, Douglass himself in his "Life [as]... an American Slave" (title). Ellwood Parry describes black auto-artistic expression of the Civil War era, compared to white depictions of black subjects, as potentially much freer from stereotypes and strategy, the latter being the editing of subject to "suit [one's] own purposes." Regarding the black artist who created a wood carving of a Boy holding a Bucket, "the free Black man who created the statue was transmitting a cultural image of much greater dignity through the sober, erect, and self-contained posture of his subject--without the slightest trace of caricature or social distance between maker and subject" (Parry 100-101). Such a description can well be applied to Douglass' study of his own life. Parry's claim of a lack of distance between the black subject and the black artist contrasts sharply with Baker's view. Douglass himself closes the gap in many places in the Narrative between himself at the time of his writing and freedom and his previous, experiential self. In Chapter 2 he discusses the importance of the slave song, examining an oral form of communication through a written medium. He does not deny a certain separation, consisting of temporal distance, impartial reflection and situational subjectivity: "I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear" (57, chapt. 2). The songs are emotional communication, and relied more on both signification and tacit perception than on the overt "understanding" associated with writing. Douglass may, at the time he writes the Narrative, "understand" them better, but the experiential effects of the songs carry over into his post-slavery life. In his youth, "The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness," and when free, "The mere recurrence of those songs, even now, afflicts me... Those songs still follow me" (58, chapt. 2). Even though years may separate him from these songs, Douglass is permanently attached to them by the bittersweet cords of experience and emotion he wore under the chains of slavery. The songs Douglass discusses represent a world quite distant from a Northern abolitionist audience while still close to a former slave. They themselves are a form of signification which implicitly excludes whites; "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" (57, chapt. 2). Gates explains that the singers "were literally defining themselves in language, just as did Douglass" (Gates 67). The signification and exclusiveness inherent in the songs and present in the Narrative in the context of these songs help delineate a type of defining language which is free from obedience or allegiance to "white" language. The songs are, of course, powerful enough so that anyone should be able to feel their message upon analyzing them, but it must be done "in silence" (58, chapt. 2), which may signify a method of passive understanding not normally embraced by activists who, by definition, speak out on topics of import, either to understand or combat. Douglass' audience appears to be composed of those who seek narration, discourse and action, not silence, to learn and spread the whole truth about slavery. Douglass also speaks of the shock of finding Northerners who believe the songs to be signs of contentment. Doing so, besides simply remaining true to his own discourse, functions as an effective signification aimed indirectly (through the third person) at any members of his readership who have been fooled or convinced by the mistaken belief. Rather than a developing between Douglass and his "black" self, a distance begins to grow between the audience, for the most part presumably white, Northern, and subject to shortcomings of interpretation, and that same "black" self and his world. This plays against a basic function of a narrative--namely, to bring the reader closer to the subject. Douglass' strategies further distinguish themselves from sentimental literature and anti-slavery propaganda such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and advertisements for the education of former slaves (Parry 108-109). It was these types of writing, usually representing a "white" Christian abolitionist voice, which tended to edit depictions of blacks to "suit their own purposes"; those purposes being to strategically draw open sympathy from white readers. Such methods included an emphasis of social distance between writer and subject, portraying of slaves as undereducated victims who would be able to think, act and pray just as whites do, if only they were allowed freedom and proper learning. Social distance was therefore used to gain sympathy and draw the audience closer to the subject in sentiment. While Douglass makes no definite assertions as to any inherent differences between ethnicities, he moves the subject of his narrative in the opposite direction from his audience and towards the writer, showing that black slaves are more than merely underdeveloped, socially alienated, darker-skinned whites. The distance is made explicit by the assertion alluded to earlier that, regarding the triumph of "whipping" Covey, "He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery" (113, chapt. 10). The message is, in a subtle, accepting fashion, one of "You weren't there and therefore can not truly know." Being in the affirmative, however, this sentence is not reproachful of its audience, and even encloses a double signification: it refers to the potential reader who is him- or herself an ex-slave who may have once tangled with a master. In this way Douglass signifies in a positive sense, directed at one who might already come from "his world," a world which presumably excludes most of his readers. Such signification points to the importance of the slave and slave experience as active guiding forces of the Narrative, rather than being confined to the passive display cage of white-oriented sentiment present in much abolitionist literature. Although Gates, in his discussion of the "Trope of the Talking Book," sees Douglass' voice as fully garbed in abolitionist clothing, what he says of Douglass' freedom from traditional Christian sentiment and images of naïve blacks can be broadly applied: Because Douglass and his black contemporaries wish to write their way to a freedom... they cannot afford [the] luxury of appealing... primarily to the Christian converted. Douglass and his associates long for a secular freedom now. They can ill afford to represent even their previous selves--the earlier self that is transformed, as we read their texts, into speaking subjects who obviously warrant full equality with white people--as so naive as to believe that books speak when their masters speak to them. (Gates 167) The slave's narrative independence of white standards, demonstrated by the distance between audience and subject, reflects upon the narrator, who bridges the gap between the two and can signify back and forth, demonstrating a controlled loyalty to the latter even while physically removed from it. Independence is asserted in part by denial of the audience, such as in the withholding of the satisfaction of the details of Douglass' escape from the South. His reasons are important ones, and quite regrettable in more than one way. He must protect with his silence both those who helped him escape and those who may try to escape in the future. These reasons are but one more restatement that slavery is still in effect at the time the Narrative is written, and is also frustrating to the "curiosity, which I know exists in the minds of many" (137, chapt. 11). Even though revelation of the details would be a "pleasure" for the writer as well as the reader, when Douglass does describe them in an article written some time after the Civil War, he notes that "even since the abolition of slavery, I have sometimes thought it well enough to baffle curiosity by saying that while slavery existed there were good reasons for not telling the manner of my escape, and since slavery had ceased to exist, there was no reason for telling it" (Douglass 1881:126). In a small way Douglass is signifying on his audience, by effectively telling them, "You don't need to know, you could never really know, and ignorance rather suits you." Douglass' personal world of experience, while painful, has given him a certain autonomous superiority over the removed, ignorant yet curious white audience. When he does reveal his methods of escape, therefore, it is entirely on his own terms. Even while surrounding himself in and utilizing the articulate "white" medium of writing, Douglass continues to hold on to his roots, which in opposition to articulation are encoded as a particular, meaningful silence. The silence adhered to out of honor and loyalty to slaves and friends from the slave's world mirrors the "silence" necessary during analyzation of slave songs in order to grasp their message. By raising the issue of the continuing plight of slaves in the South, Douglass proclaims his own connection to them despite his own deliverance: "We owe something to the slaves south of the line as well as to those north of it" (138, chapt. 11). The Narrative depicts as much of an internal struggle for freedom and manhood as a social one, and similarly, the above insistence reflects both a publicized faithfulness to other human beings who are where Douglass has been, and an individual identification with those human beings. In a sense, Douglass works towards his ends as a Northern black man but also owes something to his own, internal Southern slave. He honors the non-literate (although far from dumb) silence of the slave as well as the continuing presence of emotions rooted in his Southern experience; the latter being revealed by his reaction upon hearing slave songs. The broad implication of this continued identification with the slave is that Douglass at the time of the Narrative's writing has not, in fact, "switched voices," or adopted a completely new one, but speaks through an old, long-developing voice with additional perspective and articulation. He is, after all, the same person as he once was, only more literate, mature, fully-realized and free to choose his destiny. He is free to signify back and forth between two worlds, and although he addresses the newer one, many of his loyalties, both personal and narrative, still lie with the older. The distinction is even slightly blurred on occasions. The main body of the Narrative ends with the beginning of Douglass' free, abolitionist, oratory and public life--basically, the one which he leads as he writes (much as though the Narrative took place in a sort of semi-mythic past which continues in a semi-mythically distant realm). At this turning point, Douglass admits an understandable hesitation: "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" (151, chapt. 11). The lingering slave-like feelings are not perpetrated by those around him but come from inside, in a place that has been under construction since he was born. He still feels like a slave and dreads speaking because the person he always was and voice he always had are still with him, and he must set about the task of updating and broadening them. The "degree of freedom" he feels is not the exact freedom Douglass has always sought, for that was not to be attained ultimately be a speech, although it is related, and may be a "degree" of that freedom. It is more simply a freedom from self-inhibition after years of the societal inhibition of slavery, and an entrance into the active side of a world of articulate communication. Douglass stands before a white audience, feeling somewhat a slave, his "black self" (in the words of Baker) not in fact terribly distanced from its past experience. He seems to stand, in both identity and narrative voice, with one foot on each side of the Mason-Dixon line. Because the division between the slave Douglass and the writer Douglass is not absolute, the question is raised of how much the physical escape to the North affected the division. Becoming free seems to have added a new dimension to his voice rather than having caused him to adopt a new one. Indeed, learning to read and write while still a slave was a much larger step towards freedom of the intellect than is addressing a crowd of abolitionists as a free man. Numerous other such steps are taken in slavery, and a the very nature of freedom is called into a positive questioning. Using powerful imagery to describe his victory over Mr. Covey, Douglass says, "It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place, and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact" (113, chapt. 10). This victory, combined with the achievement of literacy and other factors, such as the will to escape and attempt to teach others, point to a sense of inner, "factual" freedom which develops while Douglass is still a slave according to the law and in the public eye. Just as the Narrative is a personal story set within a framework of social relevance, the striving for freedom is personal before it is physical and external. In spirit and sense of self Douglass becomes free while still a slave, even if that freedom makes his more tangible bonds all the more painful. Because he fought for this freedom long before being ranked among free Northerners, Douglass maintains, in his narrative for the white abolitionist movement, an inner independence of social and legal definitions of slavery and freedom. David Stalder English 341: Nation & Narration Reed College May 6, 1997 Life of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American ManMr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment -- from whence came the spirit I don't know -- I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. (Douglass 112, chapt. 10) In Chapter 10 of Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of... an American Slave, Douglass describes an important incident in which he forces backward the standard master-slave hierarchy of beating privileges against his temporary master, Mr. Covey. The victory proves for Douglass a remarkable source of renewed yearning for freedom and of self-confidence; as he "rose" physically, standing up to fight, he "rose" in spirit. Covey did not "have" Douglass in the sense of either fighting or ownership, and could not "do what he pleased." The description of the internal and external results of the fight displays a clear degree of signification in order to convey to the reader the highly personal nature of the triumph--signifying being described by Roger D. Abrahams as a "technique of indirect argument or persuasion" and "a language of implication" (Gates 54). Douglass explains, "He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery" (113, chapt. 10). The overt statement describes a unique feeling arisen from relatively unique circumstances; but the implication tacked on to the statement might be phrased as: "Such a one is most probably not you, the reader." What is the use of constructing this implied distance between the narrator and the reader? The fact that Douglass has taken up writing as an articulate method of communication seems in many ways to indicate an adoption of the "white" voice, but ultimately he stands on his own, apart to a controlled extent from his white audience. An examination of the Narrative through a signification-sensitive lens, as defined by Abrahams and discussed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The Signifying Monkey, with attention to narrative detail, will reveal how Douglass both achieves and reflects through his Narrative a powerful independence of self and spirit which itself is independent of both Northern allies and legal and bodily freedom. Many would argue with justification that Frederick Douglass has adopted, to forge his narrative voice, a strong tool of the white, educated society which, in its Southern substantiation, has held him captive. Douglass in part takes the reins of his destiny by (eventually and initially nervously, according to the Narrative) addressing an audience which would once have been unaddressable. When Douglass was a slave the most contact he had with the abolitionists was, at best, their addressing of him, in small, distant doses, through the literature of which Douglass managed to get a hold. A slave can take orders from Southern whites and occasionally receive information or ideas from Northern whites (or abolitionists), but a certain degree of power or status, springing out of ability and freedom to articulate, is required to address them in return. The power to address is, in a small way, a sign of equal intellectual and social footing. Literacy and articulation are very closely linked for Douglass. During his struggle to learn how to read, he says, some anti-slavery arguments "gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance... The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts" (84, chapt. 7). The acts of reading and writing, together one of the major explicit themes of the Narrative, are even more important than audience, for while the latter develops for Douglass once he is free, the former are necessary for that freedom. Upon having learned what literacy is, Douglass "now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty--to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom" (78, chapt. 6). The pathway, that of learning to read and write, is paved with the ability to address through the written medium, the potential to gain vast stores of knowledge and ideas, the opportunity to clarify thought and reflect, the possibility of forging one's own free pass, and other wonderful prospects. The importance of literacy is not at all subjectively delineated; the very idea was sparked by Mr. Auld, who "gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read" (79, chapt. 6). The mutual recognition of the "advantage" of literacy held by the white slaveholder over the black slave is but one indication that, when Douglass takes the reins of this vehicle to freedom, he is adopting the voice of a white society. Another such indication is that Douglass has ostensibly published an abolitionist tract in the form of his narrative. Abolitionist literature, while speaking on behalf of the black oppressed, is still a "white" voice, coming as it does primarily from white Northerners and addressed to an educated audience made up mostly of other whites. Furthermore, the very act of writing is a public act, and participating in the world of literature sets Douglass up as a player in a world dominated by whites, as opposed to the literarily silent, experiential world of the black slave; as Houston Baker, Jr. explains, "By adopting language as his instrument for extracting meaning from nothingness, being from existence, Douglass becomes a public figure" (Baker 251). To end, however, with the statement that Douglass adopts the voice of a white society in order to achieve and reflect upon his freedom would be both an oversimplification of the Narrative and an undermining of the true nature of independence. Douglass says that winning his fight with Covey "rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood" (113, chapt. 10). His association of freedom with both developing manhood and the aspiration to literacy, present throughout the Narrative, turns a public fight for a socially and politically determined freedom into a private one. The quest for liberty is parallel, and even dependent on, the quest for self-definition. Baker says that the whole of the Narrative "serves to illustrate the black autobiographer's quest for being" (Baker 245). He argues the importance of the definitive, reflective and expressionistic aspects of the language control attained by Douglass in his move towards freedom and self-awareness: When clarified and understood through language, the deathly, terrified nothingness around him reveals the grounds of being. Freedom, the ability to chose [sic] one's own direction, makes life beautiful and pure. Only the man free from bondage has a chance to obtain the farthest reaches of humanity. From what appears a blank and awesome backdrop, Douglass wrests significance. His subsequent progression through the roles of educated leader, freeman, abolitionist, and autobiographer marks his firm sense of being. (Baker 248) Baker here defines freedom as "the ability to choose one's own direction," sentiments expressed well by the first point of the original Black Panther Platform and Program; "We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny" (Seale 66). Douglass was an important abolitionist, but if the Narrative demonstrates that he simply escaped from slavery and joined the "other side," to what extant has he actually determined his own destiny? It is true that his decisions were all entirely of his own volition (it must be assumed), but must he confined, then, entirely to the voice of an abolitionist in the white tradition? In the preface to the NarrativeWilliam Lloyd Garrison praises Douglass to no end almost entirely in terms of ideals most common among educated, upper class whites. Baker notes that Douglass, as described by Garrison, "Obviously... was of inestimable 'public usefulness' to the abolitionist crusade," and becomes "part of [the abolitionist audience's] conceptual, linguistic and rhetorical repertoire" (Baker 252). This image of Douglass would point towards an assimilation of his voice into that of the white abolitionist movement, which is dangerously close to undermining the struggle for self-definition and internal independence. He does, of course, gain a great deal from the transition from slavery to freedom no matter how one looks at it, but Baker explains that "the roles he projects for himself in the latter part of his Narrative... are all in harmony with a white, Christian, abolitionist framework" (Baker 250). He wrongfully determines that Douglass develops these roles at the cost of an older, less literate identity; "...once literacy has been achieved, the black self, even as represented in the Narrative, begins to distance itself from the domain of experience constituted by the oral-aural community of the slave quarters" (Baker 253). Douglass does not in the narrative submit so wholly to such distancing. A writer is always a certain distance away from the written subject, even if that subject is the earlier writer, but Douglass demonstrates a continued attachment to his personal history in ways which are not done justice solely by Northern abolitionist sentiments. The imagery Douglass evokes to describe the conditions of slavery demonstrates the tangible and emotional, if saddening, connection of continuous experience the literate black man has with his past as a slave: "My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes" (72, chapt. 5). Douglass' pen, or his self as defined by literate communication and thought, does find a painful foundation in the "gashes" left by slavery. Douglass thus displays a mature sense of his own continuing association with the Narrative's subject; namely, Douglass himself in his "Life [as]... an American Slave" (title). Ellwood Parry describes black auto-artistic expression of the Civil War era, compared to white depictions of black subjects, as potentially much freer from stereotypes and strategy, the latter being the editing of subject to "suit [one's] own purposes." Regarding the black artist who created a wood carving of a Boy holding a Bucket, "the free Black man who created the statue was transmitting a cultural image of much greater dignity through the sober, erect, and self-contained posture of his subject--without the slightest trace of caricature or social distance between maker and subject" (Parry 100-101). Such a description can well be applied to Douglass' study of his own life. Parry's claim of a lack of distance between the black subject and the black artist contrasts sharply with Baker's view. Douglass himself closes the gap in many places in the Narrative between himself at the time of his writing and freedom and his previous, experiential self. In Chapter 2 he discusses the importance of the slave song, examining an oral form of communication through a written medium. He does not deny a certain separation, consisting of temporal distance, impartial reflection and situational subjectivity: "I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear" (57, chapt. 2). The songs are emotional communication, and relied more on both signification and tacit perception than on the overt "understanding" associated with writing. Douglass may, at the time he writes the Narrative, "understand" them better, but the experiential effects of the songs carry over into his post-slavery life. In his youth, "The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness," and when free, "The mere recurrence of those songs, even now, afflicts me... Those songs still follow me" (58, chapt. 2). Even though years may separate him from these songs, Douglass is permanently attached to them by the bittersweet cords of experience and emotion he wore under the chains of slavery. The songs Douglass discusses represent a world quite distant from a Northern abolitionist audience while still close to a former slave. They themselves are a form of signification which implicitly excludes whites; "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" (57, chapt. 2). Gates explains that the singers "were literally defining themselves in language, just as did Douglass" (Gates 67). The signification and exclusiveness inherent in the songs and present in the Narrative in the context of these songs help delineate a type of defining language which is free from obedience or allegiance to "white" language. The songs are, of course, powerful enough so that anyone should be able to feel their message upon analyzing them, but it must be done "in silence" (58, chapt. 2), which may signify a method of passive understanding not normally embraced by activists who, by definition, speak out on topics of import, either to understand or combat. Douglass' audience appears to be composed of those who seek narration, discourse and action, not silence, to learn and spread the whole truth about slavery. Douglass also speaks of the shock of finding Northerners who believe the songs to be signs of contentment. Doing so, besides simply remaining true to his own discourse, functions as an effective signification aimed indirectly (through the third person) at any members of his readership who have been fooled or convinced by the mistaken belief. Rather than a developing between Douglass and his "black" self, a distance begins to grow between the audience, for the most part presumably white, Northern, and subject to shortcomings of interpretation, and that same "black" self and his world. This plays against a basic function of a narrative--namely, to bring the reader closer to the subject. Douglass' strategies further distinguish themselves from sentimental literature and anti-slavery propaganda such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and advertisements for the education of former slaves (Parry 108-109). It was these types of writing, usually representing a "white" Christian abolitionist voice, which tended to edit depictions of blacks to "suit their own purposes"; those purposes being to strategically draw open sympathy from white readers. Such methods included an emphasis of social distance between writer and subject, portraying of slaves as undereducated victims who would be able to think, act and pray just as whites do, if only they were allowed freedom and proper learning. Social distance was therefore used to gain sympathy and draw the audience closer to the subject in sentiment. While Douglass makes no definite assertions as to any inherent differences between ethnicities, he moves the subject of his narrative in the opposite direction from his audience and towards the writer, showing that black slaves are more than merely underdeveloped, socially alienated, darker-skinned whites. The distance is made explicit by the assertion alluded to earlier that, regarding the triumph of "whipping" Covey, "He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery" (113, chapt. 10). The message is, in a subtle, accepting fashion, one of "You weren't there and therefore can not truly know." Being in the affirmative, however, this sentence is not reproachful of its audience, and even encloses a double signification: it refers to the potential reader who is him- or herself an ex-slave who may have once tangled with a master. In this way Douglass signifies in a positive sense, directed at one who might already come from "his world," a world which presumably excludes most of his readers. Such signification points to the importance of the slave and slave experience as active guiding forces of the Narrative, rather than being confined to the passive display cage of white-oriented sentiment present in much abolitionist literature. Although Gates, in his discussion of the "Trope of the Talking Book," sees Douglass' voice as fully garbed in abolitionist clothing, what he says of Douglass' freedom from traditional Christian sentiment and images of naïve blacks can be broadly applied: Because Douglass and his black contemporaries wish to write their way to a freedom... they cannot afford [the] luxury of appealing... primarily to the Christian converted. Douglass and his associates long for a secular freedom now. They can ill afford to represent even their previous selves--the earlier self that is transformed, as we read their texts, into speaking subjects who obviously warrant full equality with white people--as so naive as to believe that books speak when their masters speak to them. (Gates 167) The slave's narrative independence of white standards, demonstrated by the distance between audience and subject, reflects upon the narrator, who bridges the gap between the two and can signify back and forth, demonstrating a controlled loyalty to the latter even while physically removed from it. Independence is asserted in part by denial of the audience, such as in the withholding of the satisfaction of the details of Douglass' escape from the South. His reasons are important ones, and quite regrettable in more than one way. He must protect with his silence both those who helped him escape and those who may try to escape in the future. These reasons are but one more restatement that slavery is still in effect at the time the Narrative is written, and is also frustrating to the "curiosity, which I know exists in the minds of many" (137, chapt. 11). Even though revelation of the details would be a "pleasure" for the writer as well as the reader, when Douglass does describe them in an article written some time after the Civil War, he notes that "even since the abolition of slavery, I have sometimes thought it well enough to baffle curiosity by saying that while slavery existed there were good reasons for not telling the manner of my escape, and since slavery had ceased to exist, there was no reason for telling it" (Douglass 1881:126). In a small way Douglass is signifying on his audience, by effectively telling them, "You don't need to know, you could never really know, and ignorance rather suits you." Douglass' personal world of experience, while painful, has given him a certain autonomous superiority over the removed, ignorant yet curious white audience. When he does reveal his methods of escape, therefore, it is entirely on his own terms. Even while surrounding himself in and utilizing the articulate "white" medium of writing, Douglass continues to hold on to his roots, which in opposition to articulation are encoded as a particular, meaningful silence. The silence adhered to out of honor and loyalty to slaves and friends from the slave's world mirrors the "silence" necessary during analyzation of slave songs in order to grasp their message. By raising the issue of the continuing plight of slaves in the South, Douglass proclaims his own connection to them despite his own deliverance: "We owe something to the slaves south of the line as well as to those north of it" (138, chapt. 11). The Narrative depicts as much of an internal struggle for freedom and manhood as a social one, and similarly, the above insistence reflects both a publicized faithfulness to other human beings who are where Douglass has been, and an individual identification with those human beings. In a sense, Douglass works towards his ends as a Northern black man but also owes something to his own, internal Southern slave. He honors the non-literate (although far from dumb) silence of the slave as well as the continuing presence of emotions rooted in his Southern experience; the latter being revealed by his reaction upon hearing slave songs. The broad implication of this continued identification with the slave is that Douglass at the time of the Narrative's writing has not, in fact, "switched voices," or adopted a completely new one, but speaks through an old, long-developing voice with additional perspective and articulation. He is, after all, the same person as he once was, only more literate, mature, fully-realized and free to choose his destiny. He is free to signify back and forth between two worlds, and although he addresses the newer one, many of his loyalties, both personal and narrative, still lie with the older. The distinction is even slightly blurred on occasions. The main body of the Narrative ends with the beginning of Douglass' free, abolitionist, oratory and public life--basically, the one which he leads as he writes (much as though the Narrative took place in a sort of semi-mythic past which continues in a semi-mythically distant realm). At this turning point, Douglass admits an understandable hesitation: "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" (151, chapt. 11). The lingering slave-like feelings are not perpetrated by those around him but come from inside, in a place that has been under construction since he was born. He still feels like a slave and dreads speaking because the person he always was and voice he always had are still with him, and he must set about the task of updating and broadening them. The "degree of freedom" he feels is not the exact freedom Douglass has always sought, for that was not to be attained ultimately be a speech, although it is related, and may be a "degree" of that freedom. It is more simply a freedom from self-inhibition after years of the societal inhibition of slavery, and an entrance into the active side of a world of articulate communication. Douglass stands before a white audience, feeling somewhat a slave, his "black self" (in the words of Baker) not in fact terribly distanced from its past experience. He seems to stand, in both identity and narrative voice, with one foot on each side of the Mason-Dixon line. Because the division between the slave Douglass and the writer Douglass is not absolute, the question is raised of how much the physical escape to the North affected the division. Becoming free seems to have added a new dimension to his voice rather than having caused him to adopt a new one. Indeed, learning to read and write while still a slave was a much larger step towards freedom of the intellect than is addressing a crowd of abolitionists as a free man. Numerous other such steps are taken in slavery, and a the very nature of freedom is called into a positive questioning. Using powerful imagery to describe his victory over Mr. Covey, Douglass says, "It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place, and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact" (113, chapt. 10). This victory, combined with the achievement of literacy and other factors, such as the will to escape and attempt to teach others, point to a sense of inner, "factual" freedom which develops while Douglass is still a slave according to the law and in the public eye. Just as the Narrative is a personal story set within a framework of social relevance, the striving for freedom is personal before it is physical and external. In spirit and sense of self Douglass becomes free while still a slave, even if that freedom makes his more tangible bonds all the more painful. Because he fought for this freedom long before being ranked among free Northerners, Douglass maintains, in his narrative for the white abolitionist movement, an inner independence of social and legal definitions of slavery and freedom.
