The creative artistic personality is thus the first work of the productive individual, and it remains fundamentally his chief work, since all his other works are partly the repeated expression of this primal creation--Otto Rank Art and Artist (1932)
THE 1845 NARRATIVE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS REMAINS THE BEST KNOWN of the self-representations in which he chronicles his experiences as a slave, obscures his escape to freedom, and sketches the formation of his early identity as child and man. His unforgettable opening declaration, "I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland" (12), situates the text within the narrative context of mid-nineteenth century first-person literary productions--Poe's fictional narrators; the persona of Emerson's essays; Thoreau's journals; Whitman's Song of Myself, Melville's Ishmael; Hawthorne's Coverdale. Identity and origin are the subjects of this essay, which will examine the essential circularity inherent in the exchange between white and black social identity in the South--particularly as it bears on the phenomenon of "respect."
A number of critics have already done interesting work in examining the different strands of identity found in the Narrative: Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr., writes that in the Narrative Douglass "created an individual identity for himself firmly based on the entitling power of biblical precedent" (67). While Robert B. Stepto agrees that the Narrative's "linguistic model is obviously scriptural," he and other more recent scholars have focused on the discursive identity implicit in the work--in short, on Douglass's identity as author. Stepto puts it succinctly: "Douglas is about the business of discovering how personal history may be transformed into autobiography" (22). For William L. Andrews, the emphasis lies in how Douglass may endeavor to tell a "free story" while negotiating the constraints of Garrisonian discourse, that "crucial parameter in the text that dictated ... the range of Douglass's thinking about some key questions and the rhetorical form of his expression of that thinking" (217). Bertram Wyatt-Brown points us in the direction I would like to take with the Narrative in his analysis of the enslavement of the remarkable Abd-al-Rahman Ibrahima. Wyatt-Brown observes of slave behavior that the "identification with the owner's perspective rather than with their own suggests the mimetic feature of dependence" ("Mask" 31) and uncovers in the story of Ibrahima the slave a deployment of the owner's perspective against himself: "an acceptance of the master's power involves adaptation to his ways" ("Mask" 31). The self-representation of the Narrative, however, reveals how Douglass adapts his master's ways in order to deny the master's power. Further, the form of identity articulated in the text, I will argue, has no single point of origin in American culture but arose out of a continuous interaction between owner and owned, a rocking back and forth in the Foucaldian sense between white Southerners who drew on European traditions of personal honor and sought to maintain class position and authority over slaves through violence on the one hand, and, on the other, the ever-present absence of physical liberty and potential for fatal defiance in the experience of the slave. This is the crucible Douglass so ably depicts in the Narrative, and we can trace the emergence of his identity out of the call and response of these two sets of conditions.
We are familiar in contemporary culture with the form of identity that flourishes in the Narrative under the designation "respect," and it is the distinguishing characteristic of what has come to be known, somewhat misleadingly, as inner-city culture. "Respect" is an exaggerated version of ordinary self-respect and has been studied in many historical contexts, from the Mediterranean to Japan. (1) While "respect" uses physical and psychic violence to police the territorial boundaries of the self, in a crucial sense it requires the insult, the offense, as the means for its self-assertion. "Respect" does not tolerate disrespect, and as a form of identity utilizes active disrespect of others to lay claim to power and the boundaries of that power. Wyatt-Brown places this feature of "respect" in the context of slavery when he writes: "The very debasement of the slave added much to the master's honor, since the latter's claim to self-sufficiency rested upon the prestige, power, and wealth that accrued from the benefits of controlling others" (Honor and Violence ix). Richard Nisbet and Dov Cohen have argued that "cultures of honor" (i.e. respect) invariably arise in communities in which an individual's reputation for strength and toughness are essential to his status. (2) In recent popular culture "respect" has been overwhelmingly associated with (and represented by) inner-city African American males. "Hip hop" culture broached the national consciousness in the 1990s, when a wave of films including Boys in the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), Juice (1992), and Menace II Society (1993) introduced the term "respect" into the American popular lexicon. These films and other pop cultural representations, especially music videos like those of the late Tupac Shakur, the late Biggie Smalls, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre, depict an urban milieu in which "respect" is the commodity par excellence, the indispensable first condition on which all else--wealth, pleasure, and power--depends.
More recently, "respect" has figured in a territorial dispute originating in academe but spilling over into the larger media culture. Most observers, I believe, would concur that the power struggle between Harvard president Lawrence Summers and then Harvard University Professor Cornel West made its way from behind the schoolhouse to a national stage because of its racial subtext--the white boss dressing down the black subordinate for alleged inattention to duty. However, it was the fact that the confrontation played out as an issue of "respect" that gave the racial subtext its energy and interest. "The one thing I do not tolerate is disrespect," West told Tavis Smiley on National Public Radio (West). Whatever events and grievances, real or imaginary, were at issue in the controversy that led to West's departure for Princeton, what found representation in media venues as diverse as The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vanity Fair, and The National Review was a struggle for "respect," appropriately restrained within an academic setting but nevertheless indicative of a process whereby identity is constituted by a diligent maintenance of the surface markers of dignity and self-worth. Unwillingness to tolerate disrespect and the calculated giving of offense as an assertion of worth and power are the essential features of "respect." Frederick Douglass's account of his fight with the slave-breaker Edward Covey provides a literary prototype for the identity configuration of "respect," a formula for being in the world constituted by the dynamics of power in the relations between slaves and their masters.
In the 1845 Narrative of Frederick Douglass are two competing authorial personae: the fugitive slave who seeks to transform himself into the slave's opposite, the free man; and the de facto free man regarding his former life as a slave from the safe distance of the memoirist. By signing his name and address to the published Narrative, Douglass stages a literary confrontation with his would-be pursuers, the slave-catchers who can by law return him to the Aulds. Douglass's biographer William S. McFeely has raised serious questions about the accuracy of some of Douglass's claims, but scholarship on the issue of Douglass's factual accounts remains divided (158-60). (3) Stepto contends that in one place in the Narrative "Douglass is reproducing his language from memory, and there is no reason to doubt a single jot of his recollection" (24). Dwight A. McBride views passages in the Narrative that move "back and forth from what he knows and what he does not know" as evidence that he is "a reliable witness" (159). Houston Baker begins an essay on the Narrative promisingly by noting the "egotism and self-consciousness" conspicuous in the American intellectual tradition, but nevertheless treats the events of Douglass's work as historical record rather than literary representation (94). Andrews offers one solution to the problem in these terms:
Today our sensitivity to the relativistic truth value of all autobiography and to the peculiar symbiosis of imperfect freedom and imperfect truth in the American autobiographical tradition makes it easier for us to regard the fictive elements of black autobiography as aspects of rhetorical and aesthetic strategy, not evidence of moral failure. (3)
While there is most certainly a rhetorical strategy at work in the Narrative, McFeely's observation concerning Douglass's "fertile mind, constantly fashioning itself' is more to the point of this essay, and it seems clear that a similar "fashioning" takes place with narrative fact to achieve narrative effect. The 1845 Narrative continues to be one of the most widely read nineteenth-century texts and is indeed, in Bland's phrase, "a double act of self-creation." But while Bland focuses on Douglass's freedom rhetorically to create the events of his life--i.e. his self-creation as an author--what remains to be explored is the authorial creation of a social identity modeled on the pattern of the master.
An important step in the self-making of the Narrative involves Douglass's creation of an embedded consciousness--what Bland calls "a middle-ground persona who observes, who has been both within and outside the circle"--to narrate several highly stylized events. One highly relevant example in the Narrative of literary stylization is the account of the whipping of Douglass's Aunt Hester by his master Captain Anthony, an event Douglass calls the "blood-stained gate" (15). The child as unseen witness to an act of sexually charged sadism receives power from its operating within nineteenth-century sentimental discourse. The brutal whipping of his Aunt Hester introduced Douglass to a consciousness of his slave status, a social fact of which he was previously unaware. Douglass attributes the whipping to Anthony's sexual jealousy and remarks: "The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush" (15). When punishment diverges from correction as it does in this scene, we are reminded of George P. Rawick's commentary on slave discipline: "Whipping was not only a method of punishment. It was a conscious device to impress upon the slaves that they were slaves" (Rawick 59). In the Narrative, this scene marks a momentous change in Douglass's life and forms an important symbolic juncture in the text. But it is significant on another level as well. His aunt's whipping constitutes an extreme version of identity-related violence. Each blow of the whip instructs both victim and audience (Douglass) about the logical premise of slavery. To be a slave, the whipping makes clear, means that one cannot hinder physical insult or violation; the territorial integrity of the body by which we conceive our most basic sense of self does not apply. The lesson of Captain Anthony's "text" is that the slave body may be violated with impunity, the somatic limits in which selfhood gains a footing disrespected at will. Hester's whipping ushers young Douglass into the institution of slavery and his condition of slave, a condition marked by the inability to respond to disrespect. For the slave, these intrusions were fundamentally physical since the legal fact of slavehood, to be un-free, begins with a loss of ownership over one's body.
The conception of "free" that Douglass assembles in the Narrative, and its consequences for his successful quest for liberty, owe a considerable debt to the white-master consciousness that had enslaved him. The antithesis of "slave" is "free," but this new condition requires some clarifying weight, an identity more psychologically and socially concrete than merely not-slave. Douglass has available to him in his repertoire of identity options the self-made man, the Franklinian owner and proprietor of the self, and if any person literally realized the conception "self-made" it would be a self-freed slave. Once Douglass escapes from Maryland into Massachusetts he characterizes a similar revolution in his condition, a new life defined by a willingness to work hard at any dirty job ready to hand; to subscribe to newspapers; to participate in civic life; to bring Anna, his wife, north to join him; and to support his family by the labor of his hands. This persona, however, cannot contend for significance in the Narrative with the psychic energy and drama of the "free" man.
The "free" man Douglass becomes, based on the evidence of autobiography and biography, both draws from and contributes to the identity model of the white slaveholder, a social group whose definition of liberty was hardly synonymous with good citizenship or hard work. (4) The social being of the slaveholder in an honor culture, in which worth is predicated on reputation, resides necessarily on an exaggerated self-respect and a readiness for violence. Eugene D. Genovese speaks aptly of the slaveholder's "touchiness," (116), while Wyatt-Brown usefully connects identity and liberty in his description of the white Southerner:
When Southerners spoke of liberty, they generally meant the birthright to self-determination of one's place in society.... If someone, especially a slave, spoke or acted in a way that invaded that territory or challenged that right, the white man so confronted had the inalienable right to meet the lie and punish the opponent. Without such a concept of white liberty, slavery would have scarcely lasted a moment. (Southern Honor 371)
I contend that the concept of "white liberty," in Wyatt-Brown's coinage, is crucially indebted to the presence of slaves who in physical confrontations with their masters provoked the assertion of "white liberty" and provided the possibility of "free" for white Southerners. Orlando Patterson calls our attention to the constant wakefulness of "respect," and in this vigilance we survey an entire mode of being in the world: "the free and honorable person, ever alive to slights and insults, occasionally experiences specific acts of dishonor to which, of course, he or she responds by taking appropriate action" (11). To be "free and honorable," Patterson asserts, means erecting prickly defenses on a highly territorialized sense of self. Indeed, as Wyatt- Brown suggests, this hyper-sensitivity defines "free" in the antebellum South because it is necessary to maintain the dialectic of power between master and slave. The experience of slavery for Douglass was so intimately bound with its corollary, respect-conscious freedom, that Douglass internalizes the slaveholder's honor as he forges his new identity. Richard D. Webb, an English antislavery publisher and acquaintance of Douglass, attests to this appropriation: "F. Douglass was a very short time in my house before I found him to be absurdly haughty, self possessed, and prone to take offense" (qtd. in McFeely 121). Webb has more to say about his houseguest: "In all of my experience of men, I have never known one not insane so able and willing as he is, to magnify the smallest cause of discomfort or wounded self esteem into insupportable talk of offense and dissatisfaction" (qtd. in McFeely 122). "Offense" and "dissatisfaction" are key terms in the language of honor. Douglass clearly made an impression, and his inclination to take offense and his choice of a career as an antislavery activist are at least in part responses to the violation of identity he had received as a slave. Within the Narrative there is an objective correlative to his assumption of the slaveholder's identity formula, of his realization of a sense of liberty defined by an unwillingness to tolerate slights. That moment, what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., rightly calls the "structural center" of the Narrative, is the physical encounter with the slave-breaker Edward Covey (90).
The Narrative vividly depicts the "blood-stained gate" episode that inducted a small boy into consciousness of his bondage. The fight with Edward Covey, drawn with equal mimetic power, marks Douglass's second transformation. Borrowing a device from the genre of sentimental fiction, as he often does in the Narrative, Douglass addresses the reader directly: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man" (47). For this pivotal scene to carry the significance of the hero's transformation, a suitable villain was necessary to stand in synechdochally for the institution of slavery. Douglass devotes greater space in his first autobiography to the portrait of Covey than to any other character, black or white. Douglass's antagonist conveniently embodies all of the despicable qualities of the slaveholding class--and more, for ironically Covey is a poor man, despicable enough for a slave owner, but more to be despised in his practice of breaking recalcitrant slaves for other masters. Douglass depicts Covey as a deceptive, cunning man, "the snake," who works his slaves relentlessly day and night and, worst of all, typifies the sexual hypocrisy of the slave owner and the slave system as a whole. Douglass's nemesis in his transformation scene is "a professor of religion--a pious soul--a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church" who according to the Narrative purchased a slave woman as a "breeder," locking her in a cabin at night with a married slave man (42, 45). In the language of honor, ostensibly the language of the slave-owning class but now brought to bear on slavery itself, Douglass "gives the lie" to slavery, unmasking its claim to uphold moral virtue and the Christian sanctity of marriage. In his essay on the Narrative Gates employs a structuralist analysis to explain Douglass's inversions of the "system of signs we have come to call plantation culture" and how those inversions unravel its logic (86). We must add to Gates's critique that some of Douglass's inversions are themselves couched in that same system of signs of plantation culture--i.e., in the language of honor (respect)--and thus can unravel at best only a part of slavery's logic. Douglass's "giving the lie" to Covey's hypocrisy marks an ideological challenge to slave-owning culture as a whole, and the gesture is formally intrinsic to power relations in a system of honor relations. "Giving the lie" is an example of what Andrews describes as "the appropriating of empowering myths and models of the self from any available resource" (7). I suggest that the model of the self Douglass appropriates came about as the product of daily interaction between master and slave. The habit of mind revealed by this appropriation, rhetorically marked in the text by the repetition of short sentences and the use of plentiful exclamation marks and italics for emphasis, bears all the hallmarks of the pugnacious Southern gentleman of the kind Mark Twain satirizes in Pudd'nhead Wilson.
With regard to narrative structure, it is important that the fight with Covey occur at a moment when Douglass has hit rock bottom in his life as a slave: "I was broken in body, soul, and spirit," he tells us. "My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!" (45). On the day of the climactic fight Douglass had collapsed from heat exhaustion and failed to perform a piece of work he had been given. The Narrative describes Douglass's seeking out his owner/father Thomas Auld, who had rented him to Covey, asking permission to leave Covey's employ. Refused in this request, Douglass resists the slave-breaker's physical assault on his return: "at this moment--from whence came the spirit I don't know--I resolved to fight" (50). The autobiography of a slave here represents a claim to "respect" where according to law, custom, and the ideology of honor there should be no claim. Writing on the subject of the sexual coercion of slave women, for instance, Genovese reports that "many black men proved willing to die in defense of their women" (423). Wyatt-Brown observes similarly that "Male honor was richly prized in the slave quarters, and defense of it established rank among fellow slaves" ("Mask" 43). In theory, slavery denies the slave every tenet of humanity, but historians paint a more complex picture of the reality of slave life. For any oppressed person, the breaking point at which resistance arises, even in the likelihood of death, bears a relation to the boundary dimension of "respect" that establishes an array of acts and conditions which are not to be tolerated no matter the risk. Of the African tribes from which African American slaves were bought or kidnapped, some like the Dahomey were warrior cultures with conceptions of honor as ancient and highly evolved as any to be found in Ulster or Prussia. So we must allow that the form of "respect" underwriting masculine relations in the antebellum South--and the ground for representational reality in this pivotal scene in the Narrative--was the product of no one group or culture but a process of exchange in a set of social conditions; these conditions included the "honor" of the slaveholder, the constant presence of human beings in legal bondage who lacked liberty, and the slave struggle for respect and dignity as it sought to gain traction amid a daily negotiation of intimidation, compulsion, and violence.
The fight between slave-breaker and the slave to be broken lasts two hours, a duration McFeely believes to be hyperbole intended to reinforce Covey's humiliation, and the length of the fight certainly adds an epic dimension to this life-changing conflict in the life of the slave Douglass (47). In the end, both are exhausted, but Douglass has clearly overcome: "This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free" (50).
Freedom and manhood meaningfully intersect in this passage, as they do in what Douglass tells us of his thought processes after the fight: "My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place.... 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" (50-51). Speaking of this particular passage in the Narrative, Richard Yarborough asserts that "the term manhood comes to stand for the crucial spiritual commodity that one must maintain in the face of oppression in order to avoid losing a sense of self-worth" (160). Yarborough's assessment clearly requires some modification in that within the symbolic structure of this work, Douglass reacquires his "manhood" not to endure slavery but precisely in order that he might resist his captors and ultimately escape to freedom. To repeat Douglass's own words: "It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free" (50). It is no disservice to Douglass to consider that his reflections are rhetorical and a part of the Narrative's literary function for the "free" Douglass in establishing his new identity. Douglass may well have fully appropriated this model of identity, this new "respect" complete with "bold defiance" only after his escape to freedom. That the text may resist a single interpretation on this point, that both factual particulars of the fight and private resolves thereafter are unknown, should give us no serious concern if we stress the self-creative dimension to Douglass's Narrative. This passage, in short, like the famous apostrophe to the ships in the Chesapeake, which has been characterized by Bland as "allegorized, figurative fiction," might be better understood as effect rather than cause, as a "free" man's response to the violation of slavery. One thing is certain: as his contemporaries observed, the "free" Douglass brooked no further disrespect in his life, and he endows the persona of the Narrative with an intolerance of disrespect that is hardly compatible with physical survival in slave culture but serves instead as the key to an archetypal wakening that opens the door to his deliverance.
The persona of the Narrative of 1845 demonstrates the cultural transfer between the "touchiness" of the slave owner and the slave's diminished but very real capacity for "respect." Patterson usefully highlights one aspect of this transfer when he contradicts the premise of Samuel Johnson's famous remark about American slavery: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" (454). Patterson counters, "[T]hose who most dishonor and constrain others are in the best position to appreciate what joy it is to possess what they deny" (94). As a prototype of the existential hero, Douglass's persona "comes to himself' as a result of the fight, acquiring an inflected meaning of liberty from those who would deny it and from those who helped establish its connotation. "Slaves," as Patterson asserts, "were always persons who had been dishonored in a generalized way," and in the Narrative Douglass claims to put an end to the generalized dishonoring he had suffered by grounding a new identity in the sanctity of his person (10).
The transformation from slave to the equivalent of "free"--i, e. worthy of "respect"--is an astonishing feat in antebellum Maryland, and Douglass registers his wonder that he was not simply taken to the constable after his rebellion and whipped. He writes: "[T]he only explanation I can now think of does not entirely satisfy me," and goes on to suggest that Covey feared the loss of his reputation as a slave-breaker and thus did not seek outside help (51). By offering no satisfactory explanation for his lack of punishment, Douglass implicitly opens a door for a providential interpretation of his fight with Covey. Here as elsewhere in the Narrative Douglass expresses the idea that "divine Providence" has intervened in his personal history and aided in his ultimate deliverance. Nancy Clasby defines this feature of autobiography in general and Douglass's in particular as "the puer hero's completion of the passage from anonymity to singularity to universal significance" (354). On the subject of being sent to Baltimore, for example, Douglass speculates:
I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor.... From my earliest recollections, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace. (28)
The persona of the Narrative has a destiny, not merely to win his own freedom but to champion the cause of the oppressed through the literary recreation of his life. It is no modest claim that Providence has taken a special interest in his affairs, but the idea runs throughout the work and permeates his interpretation of the symbolic contest with Covey. The reader complicit in Douglass's design comes to see the subject of the Narrative as emboldened, strengthened, and spared the consequences of his radical insubordination by a Providence that has ordained him for the higher cause of abolition. Thus, Douglass inscribes the persona of the Narrative within the great providential tradition of American literature that begins with the Puritan accounts of Winthrop and Rowlandson and continues into the twentieth century with characters like Faulkner's Isaac McCaslin, who, justifying his desire to relinquish his inheritance, makes the extraordinary claim that all human history has been a preparation for his gesture (246-48). Providential self-representations are frequently variations on a theme of good versus evil, and American history has framed the conflict of good and evil in terms of long familiar oppositions: settlement versus wilderness, Puritan versus Indian, faith against unbelief, North against South, rum and temperance, native and immigrant, freedom opposed to slavery. The Narrative pivots on the struggle between slave-breaker and slave that allows Douglass to adopt a heroic character in the "the dark night of slavery" and likewise invoke a heroic discourse suitable to titanic struggles in this tradition. Although the Narrative validates an identity dynamic substantially indebted to the social relations of slavery, what it loses in discursive coherence with the ideology of abolition it recovers in rhetorical power by invoking the imagery of good versus evil.
The contemporary culture of "respect" that spans white, Hispanic, Asian as well as African American communities has undoubtedly emerged from a confluence of distinct historical discourses, including antecedents in the African American traditions of call and response and "the dozens." Nevertheless, the evidence suggesting a dialectical origin involving the psychology of the slaveholder and the object of slave domination--the living, breathing, recalcitrant humanity of the slave--reinforces a useful lesson about influence. At a time when the culture of "respect" continues to register with many commentators as a somehow anomalous disturbance in normative social relations, tracing "respect" back to its intersection with the fine old propriety (and amour propre) of the "master" reminds us of our common culture as Americans and exemplifies what Stephen Greenblatt has called "metissage," the mixing and cross-influences in shifting communities of race, class, and culture (61). Going beyond the appropriation of "empowering myths and models of the self," Douglass goes on record by appropriating himself in an act of justifiable self-ownership and similarly takes hold of a model of identity premised on taking and giving offense. But there is a final irony concerning the evolution of Douglass's literary persona. Writing about Douglass's final installment of his life story, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1893), Houston Baker describes the emergent persona of that later work as "a man determined to put readers at ease by assuring them of his accomplishments (and the sterling company he keeps) in language that is careful not to offend readers' various sensibilities" (106). Giving offense, giving the lie to the legal institution of slavery and its apologists, has given way to Victorian decorum. It would be left to Ida B. Wells to give offense to the American realities of race in the 1890s.