aggression against the slaveholder who tried
to prevent the slave’s ever learning to read and
write; and it is implicitly an act of assertion
and aggression against abolitionists who were
too often inclined to confuse sponsorship with
authorship. (Olney, 5)Equally significant is Douglass’s self-identifica-
tion as an American and a slave also mentioned
in the title, simultaneously calling attention to the
hypocrisy being practiced in the birthplace of the
Declaration of Independence, where human be-
ings were held as chattel, and to his identity and
rights as an American citizen. Douglass’s very act
of writing was revolutionary. It represents “the
most radical, the most aggressive, the most thor-
oughgoing challenge imaginable to the very idea
of the American nation... that proclaimed and
summoned into existence the ‘United States of
America’ ” (Olney, 6).
In the end, Douglass wanted to do more than
merely indict the American system of chattel slav-
ery with his Narrative. At the core of his Narrative
he records the story of a self-made man—a man
who, though converted into a brute once again be-
came a man, for the most part on his own accord,
despite “the bitterest dregs of slavery” (Douglass,
75) he was made to drink. Douglass, in providing
a text that became the paradigm for the slave nar-
rative genre, identifies three significant turning
points in his personal movement from slavery to
freedom. First, he was sent to live in Baltimore,
which, he explains, “laid the foundation and
opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosper-
ity” (46–47). Second, his new slave owner, Mrs.
Auld, initiated his formal education before her
husband forbade her to do so, warning her that an
educated slave would be “unfit” to be a slave, lead-
ing Douglass to conclude that, indeed, education
was “the pathway from slavery to freedom” (49)
and to find ways to become self educated.
Douglass’s final turning point was the two-
hour fight he had with Robert Covey, “an odd but
vicious overseer” (Stepto, 21) whose primary task
was to teach the previously almost benevolently
treated Douglass what it really meant to be a slave
by attempting to whip him into shape. Douglass
confesses that, at first, Covey succeeded in break-
ing him physically and spiritually: “the dark night
of slavery closed in upon me” (75). However, by
resolving to fight back physically, Douglass was
able to rise from “the tomb of slavery to the heaven
of freedom” (83), overthrowing his oppressor and
enslaver. He resolved, “however long I might re-
main a slave in form, the day has passed forever
when I could be a slave in fact” (83).
With Narrative of Frederick Douglass, An Amer-
ican Slave, Written by Himself, Douglass made at
least two unmatchable contributions to the Afri-
can-American literary tradition. In his introduc-
tion to Great Slave Narratives, ARNA BONTEMPS
notes that, on the one hand, Douglass added his
voice to the ongoing 19th-century debate about
the “condition of man on earth” (vii), which
Douglass’s personal history seemed to epitomize;
on the other hand, Douglass provided the gen-
esis of “the spirit and the vitality and the angle
of vision responsible for the most effective prose
writing by black American writers from WILLIAM
WELLS BROWN to CHARLES CHESNUTT, from W. E. B.
DUBOIS to RICHARD WRIGHT, RALPH ELLISON, and
JAMES BALDWIN” (Bontemps, x). To Bontemps’s list
can be added TONI MORRISON, PAULE MARSHALL,
SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS, CHARLES JOHNSON, and
many others.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bontemps, Arna, ed. Great Slave Narratives. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself.
New York: New American Library, 1968.
Olney, James. “The Founding Fathers—Frederick
Douglass and Booker T. Washington.” In Slavery
and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah
E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, 1–24. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Stepto, Robert. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-
American Narratives. Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 1979.Wilfred D. Samuels382 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself