Source Citation: MacKethan, Lucinda H. "From Fugitive Slave to Man of Letters: The Conversion of Frederick Douglass." Journal of Narrative Technique. 16.1 (Winter 1986): 55-71. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Russel Whitaker. Vol. 141. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 55-71. Literature Resources from Gale. Gale. Alabama Virtual Library Remote Access. 17 Nov. 2009 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRG&u=avlr>.

[(essay date winter 1986) In the following essay, MacKethan explores Douglass's struggle to establish mastery over language and literature as a means of achieving full human and civil rights.]

To be an "American slave" was to be a man denied manhood in a country which defined men as beings endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to freedom. To be a "fugitive American slave" was to be a man seeking to claim title to the specifically American definition of man by finding a "territory" where that definition would legally apply. And to be a "fugitive American slave narrator" was to be a man seeking in a written document to prove that the free territory had successfully been appropriated through language, so that the American definition of man and the American concept of freedom could no longer be denied to himself or by logical extension to any other slave. Yet what the titles of the fugitive slave narratives enact and name is as much a drama of continuing denial as it is of successful appropriation. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; The Fugitive Blacksmith; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave; and Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave are titles of a struggle with, and not a victory over, an enslaving cultural definition. Like their titles, the narratives themselves are made taut by the pull of two distinctly named purposes which are interdependent but also contradictory--their need to act both as quests for and proofs of the entitling powers of language.

The right to create a new language, to make new names, was crucial to the destiny of America, according to Thomas Jefferson. In a letter of August 16, 1813, he told John Waldo that, as an American, he found it necessary to be a "neologist" and not a "purist" in respect to language. "Certainly so great growing a population," he explained, "spread over such an extent of country, with such a variety of arts, must enlarge their language to make it answer its purpose of expressing all ideas, the new as well as the old." A transformation of status, such as the one all Americans experienced through the Revolution, required new names; as Jefferson saw it, "The new circumstances in which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects." The right to name, then, was understood by Jefferson to be an especially important characteristic of a republic, for it reflected the power to order reality: "And should the language of England continue stationary," he boasted, "we shall probably enlarge our employment of it until its new character may separate it, in name as well as in power, from the mother tongue" (1294-1300).

Jefferson's idea of language was congenial to the romantic spirit of the age that produced America's first great flowering of literature in the three decades that followed his death. Whitman's application of Emerson's ideal of "The Poet" as namer to the specifically American situation sounds closely Jeffersonian: his call for a new literature in the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass reasoned that "Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest." The Preface itself illustrates Whitman's idea of the process of naming America's new objects, both spiritual and material, for in it Whitman makes a long list of "objects and qualities" belonging to "his country's spirit, ... its geography and natural life." It is significant that when he names and thereby "incarnates" the diverse objects of the American scene, Whitman lists slavery last, giving it both a name and a gloss: "slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease" (456). Through untiring speech acts, then, the American poet could command slavery itself, and by the naming of it, defeat it. As a vision of American realities, "the expression of the American," Whitman thus insisted, "is to be transcendant and new." Through the titles of their narratives, the names that they fashioned for themselves, the letters that they addressed to their masters, the figures that they shaped to name their experiences, and the literary forms that they imposed upon their narratives, the fugitive slave narrators appropriated in Whitman's own time the function that Jefferson defined for American language and Whitman defined for the American poet. Their express purpose was to enlarge the common and accepted employments of language as a primary means of bestowing on all aspects of the American experience, but especially upon American slavery, "its fit proportions neither more nor less," as Whitman put it.

Booker T. Washington gave the process that Jefferson and Whitman envisioned a wonderfully apt name when he told, in Up From Slavery, how black freedmen and women insisted on creating their own surnames after the Civil War. A "John" or a "Susan" belonging to a white man named "Hatcher" would feel "that 'John Hatcher' or 'Hatcher's John' was not the proper title by which to denote a freedman; and so in many cases 'John Hatcher' was changed to 'John S. Lincoln' or 'John S. Sherman,' the initial 'S' standing for no name, it being simply a part of what the coloured man proudly called his 'entitles'" (37-38). One's "entitles" gave one not only identity but rights. For the slave, however, "entitling" signified a central paradox; one had to know one's letters in order to be free, but in America, one had to be free in order to learn one's letters. In this double bind the fugitive slave found the greatest challenge to his achievement of full human status. It is the challenge that was illuminated for Frederick Douglass when he overheard his master's objections to his learning to read; it is the challenge that James W. C. Pennington framed when he wrote that although he was technically free in his Quaker sanctuary in Pennsylvania, "It cost me two years' hard labor, after I fled, to unshackle my mind" (246); it is, finally, the challenge that is expressed in Thomas Wentworth Higginson's description of the black ex-slaves in his Union army regiment attempting to spell out their letters, a feat, he said, "which always commands all ears,--they rightly recognizing a mighty spell, equal to the overthrowing of monarchs, in the magic assonance of cat, hat, pat, bat, and the rest of it" (24-25).

Frederick Douglass's first autobiography, the 1845 Narrative, made the slave narrative form into a weapon of words to establish the right to letters as a basic human and civil right. His strategy involved forging a bond between the familiar image of the slave narrator as preacher of an abolitionist version of Christianity and an entirely new image of the slave narrator as American poet in the Jeffersonian sense--that is, as one who controls and orders national realities by his ability to name. The slave narratives of the eighteenth century had been consciously shaped to the purposes of the protestant spiritual autobiographies; they tended to become quite literally both conversion and captivity narratives. It is not surprising that in the 1830s, when the slave narrative form became a tool in the abolitionist drive to make slavery a national sin, the resulting productions would adapt the conversion and captivity modes to the antislavery aim. Richard Slotkin describes the Christian progression that usually occurred in the nineteenth century slave narratives: "Revulsion from sin frees the black soul of its spiritual bondage to slavery; the aid of Christian men frees his body as well; and the redemption of the soul is followed by the rescue of the body, as in the classic captivity of Mary Rowlandson" (442).

Like many of the slave narrators before him, Frederick Douglass had been led by his unusual educational opportunities to a religious vocation. As a slave he had taught Sabbath schools for other blacks when these were infrequently allowed; once he was free, he became a class leader and local preacher among "a small body of colored Methodists" (275), as he tells us in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Douglass used this background, as Thomas Couser has shown, to present "something with which his audience was not directly familiar--the experience of slavery--in terms of something with which they were presumably familiar," the experience of conversion. "He was familiar with the experience and the terminology of conversion," Couser shows, and he "forcefully adopted those models to his own purposes" (53). His most important purpose, it seems to me, was to connect conversion to literacy in the minds of his readers in order to establish the power of the slave writer to alter reality. By setting the achievement of literacy within a spiritual frame of reference, the slave becomes a consecrated man of letters, "entitled Man," Master. Literacy, then, for Douglass, conferred entitlement with specific application to the right to liberty, and this right meant "salvation" in a literal sense which borrowed but also mocked the white Christian valuation of being "saved." The conversion analogy that he appropriated for his narrative was a way of visualizing for his audience not just slavery as sin but the slave's mastery of the white man's world through the word.¹

Douglass put the scenes of his life dealing with his attainment of literacy into a variety of sacramental contexts, from baptism to conversion to confirmation to ordination. Simultaneously, he made his narrative an exploration of ever-expanding dimensions of the term "letters." We move from letters as symbols in the alphabet, to letters as components gathered into names, to letters as written communications, to letters as literary culture, the world of learning. In the widest sense, through the equation of conversion (assurance of grace) with literacy (assurance of the word), Douglass was able to adopt for his own design as writer the Christian connotation of "the Word" as Logos, the revealed design of God. For himself and his narrative, "In the Beginning was the Word."

Douglass's Narrative is arranged to give the significance of the conversion process to the acts of appropriating, deciphering, and then encoding letters. The protestant version of the process has been described in ways very useful to our discussion by G. A. Starr in his book, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, which defines the motivations, content, and organization of spiritual autobiography in seventeenth century England. Particularly in its organization, Douglass's work seems to adopt the "natural pattern" that the seventeenth century autobiographers used to shape the story of their inner lives. Starr begins his discussion of this pattern with a comment that we might apply as an explanation, at least in part, of the formulaic quality of slave narratives: he says of his own texts that

 

these autobiographies found significance in all sorts of actions and situations by regarding them in a spiritual context. Careers that were totally unlike in their outward character turned out to be basically similar when viewed in this way.

If one were thinking primarily of "spiritual purpose and plight," then it would be logical to assume that "souls underwent identical stages of development. ... Spiritual striving (and for that matter spiritual decay as well) seemed to obey a pattern of its own." Organizing the story of one's life according to "recognizable phases" of the soul's development proved the most serviceable arrangement for the spiritual autobiography; the stages were "at once temporal and thematic; their progression was regular and determinate." Moreover, they stressed "inner contours" of development which "obeys no calendar, and seldom tallies with changes in one's outward affairs" (38-39).

As Starr traces this pattern in a representative autobiography he notes that "Conversion is clearly the pivotal phase in the sequence. ... Everything is seen as happening before, during, or after conversion" (40). In his example ("Memoirs of the Rev. James Fraser of Brae," 1670), the spiritual progress is, typically, "by no means steady or uninterrupted." Some episodes brought Fraser "nearer conversion, others put it off; nor does he attempt to conceal these fluctuations. What he does is to weigh each in terms of its effect on his conversion" (43). Starr also notes that "Conversion, then, brings no immunity to further spiritual vicissitudes, but it does supply a new orientation from which to face them, and a new strength with which to endure or overcome them" (46). Fraser's conversion, "far from ending his spiritual turmoils, opens the way to many. ... He is now forced to cope with impulses which conversion itself cannot eradicate, but rather brings painfully to the surface" (47). Starr tells us that one other prominent feature of Fraser's narrative is "a record of his reading." Overall, the memoirs "deal at some length, then, with his struggle to retain and extend the effects of conversion, but one finds the impetus to this spiritual exertion coming as often from things read as from things done" (48). All of these remarks offer valuable insights into the patterns governing Douglass's autobiography. As we shall see, he arranged his life story according to the stages of development connected to the "unshackling" of his mind; the movement to conversion began with the moment of recognition that literacy is grace, "the pathway from slavery to freedom"; conversion was assured at the moment that Douglass could say, "Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write"; and conversion as literacy remained thematically the touchstone of all experience thereafter, down to Douglass's final written words: "solemnly pledging myself anew to the sacred cause,--I subscribe myself, Frederick Douglass."

Chapters One through Five of Douglass's Narrative take Douglass from his birth on a large, isolated plantation in eastern Maryland to his removal, at around the age of eight, to the city of Baltimore. Starr's comment that the spiritual autobiography "obeys no calendar" has ironic fitness for the life of the slave as Douglass portrays it in his early remark that he had "no accurate knowledge of [his] age" and could "not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday" (18). Douglass's move to Baltimore came as a result of his being given to a relative of his master to be a companion to a white boy near his own age; he interprets this event retrospectively as a kind of early sign of special redemption, a recognition of election as it was often dramatized in Puritan narratives: "I regarded the selection of myself as somewhat remarkable," he says. "There were those younger, those older, and those of the same age. I was chosen from among them all, and was the first, last, and only choice" (45). What he was chosen for is made quite clear in Chapters Six and Seven, which form the center of the Narrative and deal exclusively with Douglass's personal discovery of the power of words.

In the chapters that come before the two central "literacy" ones, Douglass shows himself being indoctrinated into the ways of a world in which word-wielding is an effective form of "mastering" granted exclusively to whites. He does not show himself as understanding but as observing with a child's eyes the power of language as exhibited by various overseers and masters. What he takes particular care to note is a use of physical force almost always accompanied by a manipulative language strategy. The overseer Mr. Severe, for instance, was not only a "cruel" man but a "profane swearer" who used words in the same manner and to the same effect that he used his whip: "It was enough to chill the blood and stiffen the hair of any ordinary man to hear him talk" (26). When Douglass speaks of Severe's "cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing" among the slaves, he is giving us an equation which makes physical and verbal abuse equivalent forms of torture. Douglass begins his description of this overseer with a pun that signals the language emphasis: "Mr. Severe was rightly named" (my italics), he comments; "he was a cruel man." When measuring Mr. Severe against another overseer, Mr. Hopkins, Douglass says not only that the latter was "less cruel" but also that he was "less profane, and made less noise, than Mr. Severe" (27). Immediately after this comparison, he inserts his discussion of the "wild songs" of the slave, whose words "would seem unmeaning jargon," an indication of their powerlessness in relation to the power residing in the profanity of overseers.

Speaking of his old master, in Chapter Three, Douglass shows that denying slaves the power of speech was a means of exerting control. Colonel Lloyd, when rebuking his slaves, allowed no verbal replies: "To all these complaints, no matter how unjust, the slave must answer never a word." When the Colonel spoke, "a slave must stand, listen, and tremble" (32). Another overseer, Mr. Gore, "could torture the slightest look, word, or gesture, on the part of a slave, into impudence." The overseer could, in a word, translate and redefine the slave's language. A "grave man" himself, Mr. Gore "indulged in no jokes, said no funny words" (Douglass makes an effective contrast of himself with Gore in this sentence with his pun on "grave"). In Gore's case, the sparing use of carefully chosen words controlled effectively: "His words," says Douglass, "were in perfect keeping with his looks, and his looks were in perfect keeping with his words." In case his mocking manipulations of Mr. Gore are not made "perfectly clear" by the balance of this empty sentence, Douglass adds more: "He spoke but to command, and commanded but to be obeyed; he dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with his whip" (37). We can note that Gore's name, like Severe's, is also in "perfect keeping" with his acts; it must have pleased Douglass greatly that "Gore" and "Severe" worked metonymically, as synechdoches actually, to fix the identity of overseers in their brutal function.

By the time we come to Chapters Six and Seven, Douglass has already established, through his catalogue of overseers, the concept of word-wielding as a form of mastering. These two chapters are carefully prepared for in other ways as well. In Chapter Five, Douglass was told to bathe in preparation for his new employment in Baltimore; he responded by scrubbing off not just the "mange" of his past life but almost "the skin itself" in a kind of ironic baptism to make himself worthy of the "election" by white masters that he next infers. By concentrating on literacy, the gift identified and then denied by his new owners, Douglass makes it the trial and then the proof of his status as a chosen one. In Chapter Six, Sophia Auld, like a ministering angel, offered the keys of the kingdom, as it were, when she undertook the task of teaching Douglass "the A, B, C," his first symbols. With this initiation accomplished, she began to teach him to spell words of three or four letters. At this point, Mr. Auld stopped the proceedings; at the same time, however, he gave Douglass his most important lesson. Douglass explains that Auld's objections constituted a "special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things," and that they worked a change that he signifies by a language transformation: "Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master" (47). Douglass's coy disclaimer, "the merest accident," is contradicted by this scene's dramatic evocation of the Puritan experience of election and conversion.

Mr. and Mrs. Auld, as presented in Chapter Six, acted with equal importance to introduce Douglass to the means of his salvation from slavery. Armed with the knowledge they had bestowed, "I set out," he says (like any good Mr. Christian), "with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read" (47). Chapter Seven records the pilgrim's progress. First Douglass bribed hungry white street urchins with bread, "who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge" (51). It is significant that Douglass does not name these little children who led him, these "dear little fellows" who gave him aid; he explains that they needed his protection from "this Christian country" where it is "almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read" (52). Literacy becomes here a sacred although forbidden fruit through Douglass's allusion to Christ's scriptural injunctions to his disciples to "become as little children" and "Suffer the little children to come unto me." In his not naming of the "dear little fellows," moreover, we see the indicting, accusatory function attached to his very emphatic naming of overseers and owners.

Douglass's preliminary lessons in the street are presented as a kind of "first communion" experience complete with consecrated bread. The scene ends with his young teachers offering special comfort: they would "console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free," he says (52). In the following scene, a "something" does occur, and it is significant that Douglass places his age at the time as "about twelve years." The age reference puts him within the context of Christ's youthful visit to the elders of the temple, where He both received and gave instruction. It also associates him with the time when Protestant children undergo the preparatory rites for confirmation. Douglass shows himself, then, at the "perfect" age for receiving, as if by divine intervention, his own sacred text. "I got hold of a book entitled 'The Columbian Orator,'" he says, and "Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book" (52).

By this simple "confirmation" of his ability to read, Douglass announces the onset of his conversion from illiterate to literate being. However, as Starr noted in his discussion of Rev. Fraser, the recognition of the converted state by no means gives immunity to further "spiritual vicissitudes," but actually "opens the way to many." The "book" that Douglass could read for himself at age twelve operated as a pentecostal empowering; the antislavery propaganda that Douglass found in "The Columbian Orator" "gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul" and "enabled me to utter my thoughts" (53). Yet, as with traditional Puritan conversions, the discovery of knowledge of the certainty of salvation paradoxically brought discontent. Douglass frames this development in a passage remarkable for its biblical rhetoric and its careful documentation of the great change that he has "suffered:"

 

behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It had opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but no ladder upon which to get out. ... I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. ... The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever.(53)

When we compare this passage to one from Jonathan Edwards' Personal Narrative, we see better the tradition that Douglass's Narrative adopts. Edwards was writing of feelings that came to him after he had "met with that change by which I was brought to those new dispositions, and that new sense of things, that I have since had." He tells us that

 

I have had a vastly greater sense of my own wickedness, and the badness of my heart, than ever I had before my conversion. It has often appeared to me, that if God should mark iniquity against me, I should appear the very worst of all mankind; of all that have been, since the beginning of the world to this time; and that I should have by far the lowest place in hell.(66)

Edwards' classic expression of paradoxical Puritan spiritual experience is not very different from Douglass's account of the mixture of joy and horror that literacy brought. But the fugitive slave narrator was exhibiting for his own designs the loathsomeness of "natural man," the fate in the pit of the unredeemed, the awakening of the elected soul to a new state ("everlasting thinking"), and the confirmed "appearance," not just the promise, of "freedom ... to disappear no more forever."

Reading from "the book" signalled the occasion of Douglass's conversion, as reading scripture did for Edwards, but Douglass, at least, still needed the "ladder upon which to get out." His process of a conversion to literacy was not quite complete, at age twelve, for it would involve not just reading but writing. Just as conversion in the spiritual sense would involve not only the reception of grace but also the power to act in new modes through grace, so literacy involved not only the ability to read words but the power to write them. Thus after reading in "The Columbian Orator" and receiving its light, Douglass had to go seeking again. When he says in this section, "The light broke in upon me by degrees" (54), he indicates the progressive nature of what was happening to him. Immediately after making this statement, Douglass tells of meeting two strange men, Irishmen at that, "down on the wharf of Mr. Waters." He went, "unasked," and helped them to unload stones from a boat, whereupon they expressed sorrow at his condition and recommended that he run away. While he "feared they might be treacherous," Douglass took their words to heart. The references to stones, boats, water, and two alien messenger figures are all New Testament signs of transformation rites--of baptism, the call to discipleship, the Last Supper, and the Resurrection. Within this context of dramatic religious change, Douglass goes on to indicate that he at that point knew what his "way" would be: "I wished," he concludes, "to learn how to write, as I might have occasion to write my own pass. I consoled myself with the hope that I should one day find a good chance" (55).

Douglass concludes Chapter Seven and completes his description of his conversion experience with an almost step-by-step account of how he learned to write. Significantly, in the long last paragraph of this chapter, names and alphabet letters figure prominently, as do the words "book" and "write." It is as though Douglass were "calling up" in a kind of litany the instruments (in a double sense) of his conversion. His initiation into the process of learning to write takes place in a shipyard, and not just any shipyard but one bearing his own last name at that time (during these years his name was Fred Bailey, and the Baltimore shipyard is "Durgin and Bailey's"). Starr tells us that seventeenth century spiritual autobiographies often used seafaring terms and experiences as a means of communicating religious processes (23-24). In the Narrative, Douglass was able to watch ship carpenters write the letters "L" for larboard side, "S" for starboard side, "F" for forward, and "A" for aft on pieces of timber in order to indicate the side of the ship for which each board was intended. Letters in this connection become symbols of larger words which are themselves signs to name direction and placement. In the process of ship-signing, Douglass rehearses the expansions of meaning inherent in all lettering. In the shipyard letters combine to make a craft; in the Narrative they combine to compose a text.

Douglass combines naming and lettering in this paragraph when he says, "I soon learned the names of these letters and commenced copying them, and in a short time was able to make the four letters named" (56). In the rest of the paragraph, the words "copying," "writing," and "book" are linked repeatedly in varying combinations that make a rich tapestry:

 

During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I learned mainly how to write. I then commenced and continued copying the Italics in Webster's Spelling Book, until I could make them all without looking on the book. ... When left [alone in the house], I used to spend the time writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas's copy-book, copying what he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.

Douglass becomes in this passage writer, editor, publisher, and bookbinder, transforming fences, walls, and pavements into texts. He names and thus assimilates other books, most importantly, perhaps, his master's copy-book. The final sentence evokes both trial and triumph; this moment marks the completion of the transformation that his master feared: he is now "forever unfit ... to be a slave."

In the last paragraph of Chapter Seven, Douglass repeats the word "copy" five times. What are we to make of his remark that he spent his time "writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas's copy-book," of that he "could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas"? "The spaces left" and the "master's hand" surely speak of restrictions, not only in terms of the means he could adopt to learn to write but also in terms of the matter that he could produce with his own "hand." Given what Douglass would say in his later autobiographies, these restrictions seem a kind of coded prophecy of what the fugitive slave narrator as writer was to find; he would always be "bound" to concerns, expectations, and methods defined by whites. As Houston Baker has pointed out, "the light of abolitionism is always implicitly present" in Douglass's Narrative, "guiding the narrator into calm, Christian, and publicly accessible harbors." This consideration, Baker says, means that Douglass "is comforted, but also restricted, by the system he adopts" (38-39). What allows Douglass to escape the imputations of dictation and imitation, what keeps his signature from being only a dark copy of a white hand, is the way that the last sentence of the paragraph goes back not just to his master's earlier words but to his own. When Douglass says that he "finally succeeded in learning how to write," we hear the echoes of the words that originally (in two senses) announced his purpose: "I wished to learn how to write, as I might have occasion to write my own pass."

Writing his own pass, for the slave narrator, involved the appropriation of the master's hand, the master's grasp of language, and the master's symbols, including his religious ones. Chapters Six and Seven explain how a black slave became a man of letters in a country where letters--the ability to make them and make meaning of them--were exclusively a white man's domain. Mastering letters enabled Douglass to write his "pass" and to "pass" into a world where he could no longer be named a slave. We can question what he might have had to give up in order to become what Houston Baker calls "a sharer in the general public discourse about slavery" (43), yet we cannot doubt the historical necessity of his conversion or the historical gains that he made through the process.

While his conversion seems to have been assured when Douglass could announce his ability to write, he still had before him the matter of the nature of his salvation to account for, as the end toward which conversion gradually moves. Using the scheme of Christian progress, Douglass makes conversion analogous to literacy and salvation analogous to freedom; literacy is the sign, the "pass," to freedom, as conversion, for the Puritan, is the sign of salvation. The events that take place after Chapter Seven relate to literacy in ways that, according to Starr, events after one's conversion relate to the moment in the arrangement of spiritual autobiographies; the spiritual autobiographer struggled "to extend the effects of conversion;" the final extension, beyond the boundaries imposed by the narrative itself, was the autobiographer's salvation. For Douglass, whose salvation was freedom, the moment of liberation would be both a literacy-confirming and literacy-confirmed event, the natural extension of his learning to read and write.

In the Narrative there are several scenes which extend the effects of Douglass's conversion. Each of them partakes of the literacy theme as a naming, writing, or speaking event or as a stylistic event carefully designed to dramatize the fruits of literacy. The famous fight scene with Covey is an instance of the latter strategy.² The struggle with the "slave breaker" duplicates for the physical realm Douglass's struggle in Chapters Six and Seven to seize control of the world of the mind. While conversion is the "spiritual" medium used in those chapters to express the power of literacy to liberate the mind, resurrection language is called upon in Chapter Ten to show the value of Douglass's defeat of Covey:

 

I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose ... and I now resolved that, however I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.(81)

Douglass juxtaposes and balances the worlds of the damned and the world of the saved. Through his explicit language, Covey is named "the snake," and God is called upon to "save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free!" (74). Balance extends even to sentence shapes; very early in the chapter, Douglass writes, for instance, "behold a man transformed into a brute" (73); then, during a long sabbath litany he questions, like Job, "O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute!" (74). After his prayer, as he turns to the events which constituted his deliverance from the "hottest hell of unending slavery," he announces, "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man" (75). The statement is crucial not only because it transforms the terms "man" and "slave" but also because of Douglass's use of direct address to a reading audience: "You have seen ... you shall see." The transformation is a linguistic event, accomplished by language in a territory that demands and so invokes readers to witness and thus confirm the transaction.

Three episodes following Chapter Seven deal explicitly with literacy; they frame an act of writing, an act of naming, and finally an act of speaking to direct the state of conversion into the sacrament of ordination. In the first part of Chapter Ten, Douglass defeated Covey by a physical act which confirmed and strengthened his sense of conversion; he left Covey's "service" on Christmas Day and began the "new year" as a hired slave to Mr. Freeland, whose name's implications are not lost on him. During this time he conducts a Sabbath school, which turns into a freedom school, as Douglass decides to file his claims upon the title of free man that he earned first through his achievement of literacy and then through his defeat of Covey. Among the slaves attending his school, Douglass "commenced early," he says, "to embue their minds with thoughts of freedom" (90-91). The escape plot that he devises is a fulfillment of the Irishmen's prophecy and of his wish "to write my own pass." Within the text of the Narrative, he includes the wording of the actual passes that he wrote for himself and his friends, "copying," as it were, his own "original," which is a parody of what the master would have written. Religion is part of the code of the "pass" in which "the undersigned" certifies that "the bearer, my servant," has "full liberty to go to Baltimore, and spend the Easter holidays." The pass is "Written with mine own hand," signed "William Hamilton."

In spite of Douglass's ingenious written device, his escape plan failed, and thus the passes designed to take his brave band to freedom became incriminating evidence. Betrayed and captured by their owners, the slaves had to devise a way to destroy the words which proved their intention to be free. The full implications of the writer's vocation, its risks as well as its powers, are clarified in this section which, like the Covey scene, is rhetorically framed in a way that makes language the message as well as the medium. In another of his richly layered passages, Douglass makes the passes, proofs of his literacy as well as agents of his freedom, into the sacrament of the Last Supper, the Pre-Easter, Passover ceremony constituting a Holy Communion of the Word:

 

When we got about half way to St. Michael's, ... Henry inquired of me what he should do with his pass. I told him to eat it with his biscuit, and own nothing; and we passed the word around, "Own nothing;" and "Own nothing!" said we all.

In terms of Douglass's design, it is important that the Covey scene and the abortive escape plot both occur in Chapter Ten. This arrangement reflects the scheme of the spiritual autobiographers of Starr's study who grouped events according to stages of religious growth and change. While the fight with Covey is outwardly an extremely important event, it is only a part of a process, used to posit one example and one result of the converted man's struggle with the "natural" or "unredeemed" world. The episode with the passes is another such example, and both are placed within the explicit context of Christian progress, from the Christmastime birth of the man out of his brutish surroundings to the Holy Communion rite of eating "the word" during a pre-Eastertime captivity.

Chapter Ten ends, as did Chapter Five, with Douglass being sent by his owner to Master Hugh Auld in Baltimore. In Chapter Six that move enabled Douglass to free his mind from ignorance about his condition; in Chapter Eleven, the return to Baltimore is the first step in a journey to physical freedom through an actual escape whose details Douglass does not reveal. Robert Stepto among others has attached great significance to Douglass's omission of his escape. In From Behind the Veil, Stepto says that "This marvelously rhetorical omission or silence both sophisticates and authenticates his posture as a participant-observer narrator" (25). Although this is a perceptive interpretation of Douglass's intentions, we might also infer that, in terms of the organizing principles of the conversion narrative paradigm, the actual physical removal would not have the inner spiritual significance of certain other events. In Douglass's design of Chapter Eleven, the omission of how he got to New Bedford, Massachusetts, allows the greatest weight of this final chapter to fall upon two acts that connect directly to his conversion as assured in Chapters Six and Seven. The first of these acts involves the taking and also shedding of names while the second involves the taking up of a vocation.

Douglass showed very early in his Narrative his awareness of the importance of naming; his narrative demonstrates Gilbert Osofsky's point that "the right to proscribe letters or command a man's name is understood as the power to subordinate ..." (41). When Douglass called out the names of Mr. Severe, Mr. Hopkins, Colonel Lloyd, Mr. Gore, Edward Covey, and Mr. Freeland--and worked puns upon their names--he was doing more than just putting them in their place; he was binding them to his space. His attitude toward his own name, a subject he saves for his last chapter, reflects something of Booker T. Washington's explanation of Black "entitles" but is, not surprisingly, more intensely concerned with multiple meanings of letters.³ In Chapter Eleven Douglass explains that his mother had given him the name "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey." Lloyd W. Brown has written that "the choice of historical surnames conforms with the mythologizing process which ... allowed the black American to identify his personal emancipation with a broad ideology of social liberty" (19). In conferring upon her son two heroic middle names, Douglass's mother might have been attempting to "entitle" her son to his white father's heritage. Booker T. Washington "expropriated" his last name, Brown theorizes, "in accordance with this custom" (19). Yet Douglass dropped both "Augustus" and "Washington" before he left Maryland, perhaps with something of the same feelings that Ralph Waldo Emerson Ellison much later expressed concerning his childhood feedings about his two middle names: "It was as though I possessed some treasure of defect, which was invisible to my own eyes and ears; something which I had but did not possess, ... which was mine but which I could not have until some future time" (152).

When Douglass left Baltimore, he started out with the name "Stanley;" arriving in New York, he became "Frederick Johnson," but found in New Bedford that there were too many other "Johnsons." In New Bedford he came under the protection of Mr. Nathan Johnson, a free black man "worthy of the name" of abolitionist, we are told. To Nathan Johnson Douglass gave "the privilege of choosing me a name," or at least a surname. Douglass insisted on keeping "Frederick" "to preserve a sense of my identity," he said. Yet surnames, it seems, could easily be changed and for many different reasons. The name "Douglass" that his mentor selected and he approved came from a book that Nathan Johnson was reading, Sir Walter Scott's long rhyming tale, Lady of the Lake. "Douglass" was a heroic though shadowy figure of Scott's story, a noble Scottish chieftain exiled in the Highlands. Frederick Douglass accepted the name, perhaps finding a compliment in its reference to such a manly hero, but also, we might speculate, pleased simply to enter the world of literary letters through a new "title."⁴ All he says of the matter in the Narrative is that he kept the name "Douglass" because he became in time "more widely known by that name" (115). The power to take a name, any name, for himself was surely what mattered most. That the name was an allusive one extending into a heroic text would only increase its value. Douglass would himself call up aspects of Scott's tale in his melodramatic novella, "The Heroic Slave" (1853).

The act with which Douglass chose to close the Narrative is introduced by another "book" reference. We recall that it was reading "The Columbian Orator" which made the young Douglass feel, first, despair and then the determination to become, in his own very special sense, a writer. In Chapter Eleven, reading William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator led Douglass to attend an anti-slavery meeting where he felt, first, a great reluctance to take up the "severe cross" of "speaking to white people" and then a "degree of freedom" so that he "said what I desired with considerable ease" (120). The word "degree" goes in many directions. It takes us back to Douglass's explanation in Chapter Seven of the progressive nature of his conversion: "the light broke in upon me by degrees." It is also a qualifying term, indicating that there are many variables attached to freedom, both in the North as in the South. Most importantly, as a culminating statement for his narrative as a whole, the word "degree" involves the idea of an academic title, with Douglass emerging as a student who has successfully completed a course of study. It is certainly fitting that the last text in his curriculum was the Liberator, which in name as well as content announced the subject in which Douglass was taking his "degree."⁵

The mention of the Liberator takes us back to the "Preface" of the Narrative which is a letter written about Douglass's accomplishments by none other than Garrison. The letter is a testimonial, the kind which might accompany the conferring of a title or degree, and it makes many claims for the merit of the Narrative, one of them being that "Compressed into it is a whole Alexandrian library of thought, feeling, and sentiment" (10). Garrison's letter, Robert Stepto has pointed out, does an "extraordinary thing" when it "acknowledges the tale's singular rhetorical power." Stepto's study shows that most slave narratives were accompanied by letters from white "guarantors" who functioned to authenticate the reality of the narrator, whose very existence, to say nothing of his story, might not be believed otherwise. Yet Garrison becomes most important to Douglass's Narrative not as authenticator but as responsive reader of Douglass's text; finally, says Stepto, Garrison "remains a member of Douglass's audience far more than he assumes the posture of a competing or a superior voice" (19). In the context of the conclusion, Garrison was playing a key but subsidiary role in Douglass's graduation ceremony.

One other aspect of Garrison's letter figures importantly in the impact of Douglass's conclusion. The editor of the Liberator was explicitly concerned with Christianity and found Douglass's Narrative valuable in proving the "religious profession" of southern masters to be "pernicious" (13). Douglass's degree, then, might be considered as a kind of "Doctor of Divinity"; at the very least, what seems to be happening as he takes up the "severe cross" of speaking at an anti-slavery meeting is a ceremonial confirmation of his leadership role in the abolitionist movement, which he has helped to shape into a new and true form of Christianity. This finale records, as Thomas Couser has pointed out, "not only his conversion but also his ordination as a minister" (59).

Douglass's ordination as a minister in an Abolitionist Christian Church is ratified in a striking manner not only by Garrison's Preface but by the appendix that Douglass added to the Narrative. He introduced the Appendix with this explanation:

 

I find, since reading over the foregoing narrative, that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion.(121)

By these words he made himself a reader of his text who, very much like Garrison in the Preface, could note its religious content and go on to make a critical distinction between "the slaveholding religion of this land" and Christianity "proper": "I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land" (121).

What is most remarkable, considering all that has gone before, is the way that Douglass concludes his appendix. The narrative proper was given no decisive closure, for in it Douglass simply announced that "From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren" (120), a statement that ties past and present time to the future of the "cause." The appendix, however, does have a definitive ending which indicates that one critical struggle of Douglass's life and narrative has been completed successfully--the quest for letters. "I conclude these remarks," Douglass writes,

 

by copying the following portrait of the religion of the south, (which is, by communion and fellowship, the religion of the North,) which I soberly affirm is "true to the life," and without caricature or the slightest exaggeration.(125)

Here the American slave appropriates the function and strategies of his white guarantor, authenticating the truth and the tone of a poem written by a "northern Methodist preacher" which he then inserts into the text. It is significant that he is back to his old game of "copying" here, copying not just the minister's poem but Garrison's way of glossing his own text. The northern minister's poem is entitled "A Parody," a name particularly interesting because Douglass introduced it as a work "without caricature." In the poem the "pious priests" of the South are lampooned: "They'll bleat and baa ... array their backs in fine black coats, then seize the negroes by their throats, and choke, for heavenly union." By appropriating a northern minister's poem which criticizes southern hypocritical religion, Douglass completes a portrait of himself as a priest of a true Christianity. Converted from illiterate slave into literary master, Douglass ends his "little book" with "A Parody" within a parody. Then he offers a bold benediction:

 

Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds--faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice, for success in my humble efforts--and solemnly pledging myself anew to the sacred cause,--I subscribe myself, Frederick Douglass.

Through the signing of his name, Douglass harnesses Christian symbolism to the cause of sacred freedom and at the same time transforms patronizing white sponsors into humble readers. The copier of others' books entitles himself to become the subscriber of his own biblical text, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself.