Making His Own Medicine: Frederick Douglass' Self-Iconization As Cure for Cultural Duality

by Gerald Michael Rolfe


The African-American auto-biographical narrative is, among other things, a lesson in how one comes to terms with conflicting identities. While today we celebrate the diversity associated with our many “hyphenated-Americans,” we must still recognize that these Americans often face conflict between their cultural heritage and the dominant cultural milieu. For African-Americans, these conflicts have been especially troublesome. Those descended from African slaves have had to rebuild their heritage while simultaneously attempting to define and redefine their place in racist America. This process of cultural reclamation is, however, problematic to the individual. As Ronald C. Hall says, “the demands placed upon the individual by a black community reacting to the realities of racism often run counter to the needs of that individual in search of self-hood. This emerging identity is, therefore, both shaped by its community and at odds with it” (36). The result is a dual influence upon identity so difficult to integrate that W.E.B. DuBois described it as “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (45). Even those African-Americans whose Americanism began after the Emancipation, immigrants from around the world who usually arrive with cultural roots intact, are nonetheless dismayed when they discover that they, too, must come to grips with the mark slavery has made upon America. Not only do they face the stigma that racist American culture has forced upon African-Americans, but they must contend with the social pressures imposed by their ethnic community as well. In reading the stories written by African-Americans about their own lives, as well as the fiction informed by their cultural experiences, we discover that reconciling Americanism with Africanism is an elemental dilemma in self-identification.

It seems ironic, then, that the one narrative deemed to be the prototypical African-American autobiography is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Even putting aside the issue that African-Americans like Olaudah Equiano had written auto-biographical narratives long before Douglass (therefore casting a shadow on any claims to proto-typicality for Douglass’ work) there is still something noticeably different about Douglass’ narrative, something that makes it atypical as a work of African-American autobiography. While it is true that Douglass was known in his time as “ the ‘representative colored man’ of the [slave narrative] tradition” (Gates 47), this does not explain why historians later “seized upon Douglass’ life and works as subjects and as primary sources” (48). Frederick Douglass was a compelling man, and his legacy is more than worthy of our efforts to learn about it, but given the direction of African-American narrative in the time since his death, he can hardly be called a “primary source” of that tradition. Whereas subsequent autobiographical efforts by African-Americans have almost universally dealt with, to one degree or another, the problem of dual identity, Douglass obliterated this duality within himself, choosing instead to describe his life in much the same manner as Benjamin Franklin -- “as a model of American individuality and initiative” (Frederick 1747). The conclusion we might draw, then, is that it is not Douglass’ typicality as an African-American that forms the impetus for the enduring success of his narrative in American culture, but rather, the singularity of his Americanism, and the “success” he achieved in purging himself of his African identity in order to assimilate into the mainstream racist culture.

Twentieth-century African-American narratives, both fiction and non-fiction, are repeatedly suffused with the themes of community, roots, racial pride, and alienation from the dominant white culture. Their style is most often realistic, but many-textured nonetheless, and evoke feelings that have parallels in music. From the pathos of the blues and the anarchic spontanaiety of jazz, to the yearning sensitivity of soul and the outrage of gangster rap, African-American music, as an extension of the cultural narrative, is exemplary of the rich variety of experience that nonetheless is conveyed realistically, and that often springs thematically from the artist’s racial identity. Frederick Douglass’s narrative, then, far from being a prototype, is instead a conscious act of erasing his African-American duality. It is a narrative that, while being quintessentially African-American in its subject matter (unavoidably so, given the circumstances of Douglass’ life), is thematically about the creation of a single, heroic self. Douglass is not bound by a sense of duality -- in fact, rather than embracing his cultural heritage, his entire raison d’etre becomes a mission to transcend his racial identity, and to fight for a world where racial distinctions themselves become irrelevant. For example, upon noting that he takes great pride in the accomplishments of other African-Americans, Douglass said this was “‘not because I am a colored man, but because I am a man . . . I have no more reason to be proud of one race than another’” (Moses 81). As such, comparisons between Douglass’ narratives and African-American narratives that came later must be done with the realization that Douglass himself considered any distinctions according to his race to be meaningless at best, and “a positive evil” at worst (Moses 81).

Identity

Frederick Douglass was born a slave, the son of a slave woman and a white plantation superintendent. Douglass was not emotionally connected with his parents, and this may go far to explain the ease with which he eventually transcends, at least internally, his own ethnicity in the act of creating self. Douglass relates the conditions of his birth with a matter-of-factness that some would say denies the emotional debilitation he must have felt at having been deprived of the greater part of familial love. Regarding his feelings toward his mother, upon her death Douglass wrote, “Never having enjoyed . . .her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger” (Narrative 1758). It is not difficult to imagine that one who can feel no remorse over the passing of his mother, because she was a stranger, would similarly not mourn long over his own conscious decision to put his ethnicity to rest. Douglass, who was deprived of the nurture of his mother, who was stripped of any connection with an African cultural heritage, did not value his roots. This ambivalence toward his roots also can be seen in what Douglass says about his father: “The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose” (1758). Douglass looked at his parentage as nothing more than the terms and conditions of slavery. While this rootlessness, enforced as it was by an inhumane institution, may be touchingly sad to us today, it was not so to Frederick Douglass. Rootlessness was, however, a crucial influence upon his identity, an integral part of how he ultimately came to define himself as an American. In a country populated by immigrants who, in striving for a new life, had turned away from their roots and toward a limitless horizon, Douglass was, ironically, ideally situated to create an identity that very much embodied the self-reliant, individualistic American. Through the act self-liberation, Douglass embraced the very values that ostensibly lay at the heart of American ideals.

Philosophically, Frederick Douglass was a rational man who believed in the importance of the individual. An Enlightenment thinker, he lived in an age when Enlightenment principles transformed the material world, bringing an explosion of innovation and wonder. Despite our present-day popular disdain for 19th-century American capitalism, and despite the ease with which we now pass negative moral judgments upon upon those who built our present materialistic culture, the fact remains that more was done to alleviate human suffering in 19th-century America than had ever been done previously. Recognizing this, and seeing it as affirmation of the Enlightenment philosophy he embraced, Douglass proclaims:

The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway under the sea, as well as on Earth. Wind, steam and lightning are its chartered agents . . . The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. (“Fourth” 1722).

This personal philosophy was based entirely on the idea that man was supreme among the creatures of the world and that, through science, it was possible to know the nature of the universe and of God. Essential to the pursuit of knowledge, however, is liberty. To know the boundless universe, one must not be bound by slavery of any kind. Toward liberty, then, Douglass directed his young heart and took on his oppressor. bell hooks is only half right when she points out that Douglass “did not feel his manhood affirmed by intellectual progress . . . but when he fought man to man with the slave overseer” (90). It is true that Douglass defines the moment when he fought with Covey as “the turning point. . .[that] rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within [him] a sense of [his] own manhood (Narrative 1788). But hooks should have pointed out that this was only a starting point for Douglass, that before he could gain affirmation by intellectual progress, he had to gain the rudimentary freedom necessary for intellectual pursuit. One would be hard pressed to look at the entirety of Douglass’ life and not see that he gained affirmation for his manhood in abundance -- through his children, through his efforts as an abolitionist, as a fighter of discrimination against blacks and women, as a writer, and as a husband. By securing his own freedom first, Douglass was able to go on and fight for the rights of all individuals against oppression, and in this he was true to his principles throughout his life.

In that Frederick Douglass was a self-emancipated slave as well as a rational thinker in the mode of the Enlightenment, he personified the ideal American. In a country that supposedly flourished self-reliance, liberty, and freedom, Douglass was that country’s ideal son. Still legally a slave, and a fugitive, Douglass spoke to a crowd in Rochester, New York on July 4th, 1852, where he affirmed his belief in the ideals upon which America was founded -- “The principles contained in [the Declaration of Independence] are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost” (“Fourth” 1707) -- even as he was implicitly criticizing the hypocrisy of an America which allowed slavery even as it professed to great principles. Nothing is more “American” (unless we include the accumulation of great wealth) than standing on principle against an oppressor and against great odds. A country born of its own righteous insolence, the United States encouraged men like Douglass, even if it did not expect those men to be non-white. Of great Americans, Douglass said:

In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests. They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance, but that they knew its limits. They believed in order, but not in the order of tyranny. (“Fourth” 1708)

He was speaking of the American revolutionaries of 1776, but Douglass stood there as a man who had built himself on that model. As such, before the crowd whose country sanctioned slavery, the antithesis of its own ostensible ideals, the slave had claimed the moral high-ground, and seized the conscience of many in the nation. Douglass asserted himself before the country -- standing in defiance of unjust laws he stood instead for a higher law, and in that he was entirely, ideally, an American.

A fitting contrast to Douglass’ narrative is the essay “Notes of a Native Son,” by James Baldwin. Much of the difference between the two is exemplary of the differences between Douglass’ and most other African-American narratives of the twentieth-century. James Baldwin was born in Harlem, the son of a Baptist preacher and a home-maker. While his feelings for his mother seemed benignly filial, Baldwin’s relationship with his father was something else again -- it defined him utterly. Looking at that relationship, we can see the roots of Baldwin’s identity formation, and how Baldwin used those roots to reach for nourishment deep into the rich soil of his heritage. After his father’s funeral, Baldwin writes, “All of my father’s texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was his legacy, nothing is ever escaped” (“Notes” 113). Baldwin believed that his own identity was inextricably bound with those who had come before him, and his father was the direct link to that heritage. Unlike Douglass, this caused Baldwin to confront the duality of African-American existence, a duality he refused to relinquish, though it haunted him for the rest of his life.

At the end of his essay “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin concludes with what could easily be construed as an indictment, albeit a tacit one, against Frederick Douglass’ conscious decision to transcend his ethnicity. Baldwin criticizes what he calls “the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at all dishonourable, but, nevertheless, a dream” (45). He is referring to the dream held by many, most notably, perhaps, Martin Luther King, Jr., of a “color-blind” society. So convinced is Baldwin that the roots of African-American experience are integral to individual identity that he insists all efforts to transcend one’s ethnicity are tantamount to destruction and cultural homicide. As he says of the assumption that color-blindness is the key to a better way of American life:

This assumption once accepted, the Negro in America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience, surendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all over a darkening world. (45)

Baldwin insists, again and again, that the duality must remain with the African-American, not only proclaiming the inseverability roots, but claiming American identity as well. When all is said and done, Baldwin says that “Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny” (“Thousands 42). If that is the case, then, it would seem that a man like Frederick Douglass is an anomaly in the African-American experience.

According to Baldwin, Frederick Douglass simply could not have been. Or perhaps, Baldwin would say, Douglass’ life was lived in an attempt to escape that which proved to be inescapable. There is some evidence to that. After all, Douglass spent much energy trying to throw off the fetters of racial labeling. In Wilson J. Moses’ essay, “Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing,” we learn that “by 1889 [Douglass] was openly speaking against ‘the cultivation of race pride,’ saying, ‘I see in it a positive evil’” (80-81). Moses notes that, for all the success Douglass realized as a public figure, he owed much of that success to his origins as a slave and an abolitionist, and was thereby “able to achieve only a partial literary emancipation, and he was fated never to attain any public image beyond that of a racial writer and spokesman” (81). So Douglass, the self-made man, wrought in the image of Horatio Alger’s finest heroes, did not escape his ethnicity anymore than the transcendentalists could escape their flesh.

Gerald Michael Rolfe

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “Many Thousands Gone.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1984, 24 - 45.
---. “Notes of a Native Son.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1984, 85 - 114.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In American Literature, vol. 1. Ed. Emory Elliott, et al. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1991, 1750-1812.
---. “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol 2. Ed. Paul Lauter. Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1990, 1704 - 1723.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet, 1969.
“Frederick Douglass.” In American Literature, vol. 1. Ed. Emory Elliott, et al. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1991, 1747 - 1749.

Gates, Henry Louis. “Wheatley to Douglass: The Politics of Displacement.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 47-65.

Hall, Ronald C. “The Limitations of Community in the Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Parnassus, Vol. 6, Spring 1996: 36 - 41.

hooks, bell. “Reconstructing Black Masculinity.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992, 87 - 113.

Moses, Wilson J. “Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 66 - 81