128 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865built her a little hut in the woods and then left her there to fend for herself, “thus
virtually turning her out to die!” There was no respect for her selfhood, still less any
sense of personal or familial obligation: only the assumption that she was now
worthless property. Family ties were being destroyed under the slave system, Douglass
insisted; and the notion that white masters and black slaves formed an extended
familial or pseudo-familial unity was an absurdity. All there was, was use, the
exploitation of one race by another, and naked, unrestricted power.
Douglass learned to write in a Baltimore shipyard to which he was hired out and
where he learned the trade of caulking. With that, the preliminary education that he
saw as “the pathway from slavery” was complete. He found time to teach his fellow
slaves to read and write. With some of them, he planned an escape that proved
abortive when one of their own betrayed them. Then finally, in 1838, he escaped to
pursue his vision of freedom in the North. Shortly after arriving in the North, he
renamed himself: his mother’s slave name was Bailey, now he was called Douglass,
after a character in The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott. He also began reading the
radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, published by William Lloyd Garrison.
This was his first step toward becoming an abolitionist leader himself and, by 1841,
he had begun a career as a black leader and lecturer dedicated to the “great work” of
black liberation. Encouraged by his success on the antislavery circuit, Douglass
published an account of his life as a slave, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
an American Slave (1845). It was circulated widely, translated into several languages,
and quickly helped to establish Douglass as one of the leading spokespeople for his
cause. Like other slave narratives, it was primarily addressed to a white audience in
the first instance; and it was mediated by white writers – William Lloyd Garrison
supplied a preface and another white abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, provided an
introductory letter. Like them, too, but also like Walden, it presents itself as at once a
representative autobiography and a testament to the creed of self-emancipation. It
shows how its protagonist, who is also its author and narrator, is at once extraordinary
and typical – and how he found, or rather made, the means to become himself.
Some of these means have been suggested already, since the preceding summary
of Douglass’s early life is all taken from the Narrative. Ignorance is countered by
education. The divisive tactics of the whites are countered by the communal,
collective tactics of the blacks, learning to read or planning to escape together.
Douglass is particularly forthright, when it comes to outlining the evils of slavery,
about sexuality and religion. His master was probably his father, he recalls, and that
was not uncommon: “the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the
double relation of master and father.” The sexual and social tensions this and other
aspects of slavery disclose or even generate are subtly negotiated in a narrative that,
after all, was written at a time when discussion of such matters was virtually taboo.
One slave master, for instance, is described getting a strange kind of satisfaction
from whipping a semi-naked slave woman (“the louder she screamed, the harder he
whipped”). Another whips a similarly semi-naked slave woman, Douglass’s own
“Aunt Hester,” out of what is plainly jealousy: she has been discovered “in company”
with a male slave, after the white master has made clear his own interest in herGGray_c02.indd 128ray_c 02 .indd 128 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM