Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 129“graceful proportions.” And any white mistress, Douglass tells the reader, is wracked
by resentment and her own jealous feelings in such circumstances. “She is never
better pleased,” we learn, than when she sees those whom she suspects to be the
“mulatto children” of her husband “under the lash” – especially when she suspects
her husband of showing those children favors that he withholds from his other
“black slaves.” What adds a further edge of bitterness to all this is the sheer hypocrisy
involved: the constant violation of barriers between one race and another that are
supposed to be absolute, impenetrable. Like many other, later writers, Douglass saw
miscegenation as the suppressed myth of the slave system and an extreme instance
of what that system as a whole entailed – the human use of human beings.
The hypocrisy was all the greater, Douglass explains, among the masters who
claimed to be religious. “The religion of the south is a mere covering for the most
horrid crimes,” he tells the reader; “of all the slaveholders with which I have ever met,
religious slaveholders are the worst” because they are “the meanest and basest, the
most cruel and cowardly.” Among those religious slaveholders whom Douglass
encountered was a man called Edward Covey, a notorious “Negro breaker” to whom
he was hired out at the age of 16. It was while working for Covey, we learn, that
Douglass found the basic means necessary to be himself. The discovery forms a central
moment in the Narrative. Covey kept his slaves under constant surveillance: by
adopting the habit of creeping up on them unexpectedly, he made them feel that he
was “ever present,” that they were ever watched. He submitted everyone to an
unremitting regime of “work, work, work” in all weathers, starving them always and
beating them whenever he thought necessary. Nevertheless, he prayed and pretended
to be devotional, apparently thinking himself “equal to deceiving the Almighty.” Under
the brutal hand of Covey, Douglass remembers, “I was broken in body, soul, and
spirit”; “the dark night of slavery closed in upon me, and behold a man transformed
into a brute!” But then came the turning point, introduced by a memorable rhetorical
strategy. “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” Douglass confides to the reader.
“You shall see how a slave was made a man.”
How Douglass is “made a man” is simple. He stands up for himself. When Covey
tries to beat him, he resists; they fight an epic fight “for nearly two hours”; Covey gets
“entirely the worst end of the bargain” and never tries to beat Douglass again. “This
battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave,” Douglass says.
“It rekindled the few 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.” As in Walden, the recovery of selfhood is described as a
rebirth. “It was a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery,” Douglass recalls, “to
the heaven of freedom.” And just as Thoreau, after his spiritual rebirth, talks about
the return of the heroic ages, so Douglass equates his own spiritual rebirth with the
restoration of heroism. His emergence as an individual, capable of mental and emo-
tional freedom now and literal freedom not long after, is the consequence of a fight
worthy of one of the heroes of ancient legend. And it coincides precisely with his
emergence as a man. Douglass was to spend a further four years in slavery after this.
And, in describing those years, he still has plenty to tell the reader about the brutalityGGray_c02.indd 129ray_c 02 .indd 129 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM