130 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865and hypocrisy of the slave system – and, above all, about how that system dehumanizes
not only the slave but also the master. He also has plenty to say about how, neverthe-
less, slaves make a human space for themselves, through loyalty and love, bravery and
friendship. “We were linked and interlinked with each other,” Douglass recollects of a
time he spent with a slave community after his battle with Covey; “I loved them with
a love stronger than any thing I have experienced since.” But Douglass is right to pre-
sent this moment as central, since it was the moment when he was ready to express
his selfhood, his sense of his own worth and dignity, at the expense of his own life if
necessary (Covey might have killed him with impunity, a slave could be punished
with death for injuring a master). It is also the moment that expresses perfectly a
belief held in common with the Transcendentalists – although, of course, Douglass
was never a Transcendentalist himself: that a man could raise himself by conscious
endeavor, that he could and should struggle to live freely and truly.
After the publication of the Narrative, Douglass spent two years promoting the
antislavery cause in Britain. He returned to the United States, where he purchased his
freedom; and then, in 1847, established an antislavery journal, first called The North
Star and later retitled Frederick Douglass’ Paper. A second journal, Douglass’ Monthly,
began in 1858. Douglass contributed a large number of editorial essays to both these
publications. An enlarged autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, appeared in
1855, and a third autobiographical work, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in- In his later life, Douglass was an influential public figure. But it is for his three
autobiographical books that he is a major presence in American literature. They are
central texts in the linked traditions of slave narrative and American autobiography.
And much of the power and popularity of the Narrative, in particular, stems from
the way it appropriates the language and symbolism of a white, middle-class tradition
while denouncing the evils of slavery and racism and while exploring the trials of
Douglass’s life. Douglass talks of spiritual death and resurrection, of being reborn.
He also talks of a happy coincidence of divine and human purpose that both recalls
the histories of the early, white settlers and anticipates many other, later American
success stories: the fortunate moments in his early life, Douglass intimates, were all
due to “that kind providence which has ever since attended me” – and to his own
efforts, his readiness to work and fight on his own behalf. Above all, perhaps, he talks
of the American ideals of self-help and self-realization, and uses the rhetoric of the
American dream to distinguish between false and true Americans, between those
who would destroy the dream, like the slaveholders, and those who want not only to
affirm it but to live it. To that extent, the Narrative is a testament to the plurality of
America. It is not, in other words, just a central text in this or that particular tradition;
it is also an instance of how many great American texts exist at the confluence of
cultures – and of how those cultures talk to each other and themselves.
Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) also wrote at the confluence of cultures, but for her
those cultures were different. “I was born a slave,” Jacobs announces at the beginning
of her own book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). That
is the classic opening of slave narrative. Jacobs continues, however, in a different
vein: “but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.” Her
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