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Explanation:
Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative continues to be a popular pedagogical text for high school and college curricula for the didactic reason that Douglass is a strong advocate for the benefits of reading and writing. Responding to the rumor that he might have been a well-educated freeman masquerading as a runaway slave, the educational elements of Douglass’s autobiography were partially intended to explain the source of his eloquence—tracing his beginning lessons in penmanship with neighborhood boys in Baltimore to his clandestine reading of The Columbian Orator. By including the letter he forged in his first escape attempt, he implies the message that literacy set him free. Setting a precedent for many African American literary figures who came after him, including Ralph Ellison’s fictionalized Invisible Man and the real-life President Barack Obama, Douglass fashioned a compelling explanation of his coming-to-voice, which even competes with, and eventually eclipses, the drama of his escape in the book’s final chapters.
One of the most dramatic emblems of Douglass’s literary education is the moment he becomes moved to address the ships on the Chesapeake Bay—it is a picture in words of his oratorical birth. In William Lloyd Garrison’s preface to Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, he celebrates the theatrical scene: Reduced to total abjection by the brutality of his slavemaster Covey, Douglass retreats to the Chesapeake shore on Sunday, and gives a moving speech to the white-sailed ships on the horizon. Performing as if he were on stage, Douglass laments his misery, questions whether there is a God, and concludes that since Covey is probably going to kill him anyway, he might as well try to escape. According to Garrison, Douglass’s oratorical tableau is the visual and literary epitome of the basic human desire for freedom—a “whole Alexandrine library of thought, feeling, and sentiment” (7). Like Garrison’s investment in The Liberator’s 1850 masthead, adapting Josiah Wedgwood’s image of a shackled and kneeling slave asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?,” Garrison points Douglass’s readers to this moving portrait of suffering with the hope that they, too, will vicariously experience the slave’s resolution for freedom.1 Although Garrison seems to have hoped that the scene would principally inspire sympathy for Douglass among his white readers, in Douglass’s hands it also turns into a representation of literary agency with lasting significance for African American literature. Douglass’s figure of himself—embodied in words—as communicating with the nation is echoed in similar moments of coming-to-voice in African American literary figures to the present day, and has become one of the most enduring elements of his rhetorical legacy.
Douglass’s waterside speech is a curiously artistic milestone in antislavery testimony even beyond its anguished desperation. Garrison might have pointed to many other dramatic passages—such as the whipping of Aunt Hester, the slave auction, the abandonment of Douglass’s grandmother, or even the fight with Covey—but he chose instead to highlight this highly literary, if not overwrought, transformational moment in Douglass’s consciousness. In his essay on the aesthetic elements of Douglass’s Narrative, written over forty years ago, Albert Stone argued this speech was an expression of Douglass’s artistic impulses to imaginatively synthesize his thought processes concerning freedom (72).2 But put more bluntly, he might have admitted that Douglass probably never gave this speech at all. Part of what makes Douglass’s first autobiography so effective is his ability to blend his largely factual account of slavery so seamlessly with the inventions of art. Like his deliberately falsified account of his grandmother’s abandonment and death, whose purple passages remained in his autobiographies even after he admitted that they were not true, Douglass’s speech is one of the more glaring examples of his departure from conventional fact in telling his story
