Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave | The New Thinkery Ep. 81

Welcome back to New Think Green. My name is David Barr with me as always my good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you doing? I'm doing very well.

Greetings from the World Headquarters of Nice People where it's a nice balmy 18 degrees today. Yeah, it's quite cold in Bethesda, Maryland. How's the weather in Denver, Boulder? It's cold not as cold as you guys as of the 20s here.

Oh, yeah. Good well. Thanks. My daughter was just sent home.

There was some child has COVID in her pre-k class. I think total school since they've arrived in the new years and spent something next seven or eight days. It's immensely frustrating. It's tough.

I spent time with your kids. Yeah, exactly. Well, when you're such a hard-working father, with them all day. Anyway, speaking of playing this, we should go into what we're talking about today.

I can't believe you would lament your life. We'll recover your text like this. I don't know. So what are we covering?

David, you're doing the introduction. Man, that's your job. I'm doing the introduction. Sorry.

I'm off for Asil. We're recording in the middle of the day. It's not our usual yeah. And so I'm usually Greg's three sheets to the wind.

Yeah, a little bit more away. I'm going to talk about the typology stuff. Yeah. So we're doing for a week.

I can do a very quick one in the next video. We're discussing today the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass and American slave. That's the full title of his by himself. Right.

Oh, thank you. That's the title. As he published in 1845, it says memoir. It's not his life is far from complete, but this is probably one of the greatest pieces of American literature.

I was a writ. It's already going to be digested in three hours, but you'll think about it for much longer. Yeah. I think Greg and I both jumped in with the written by himself because I think that's so important, right?

I mean, the title, it says narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave written by himself in the original edition. He didn't say that by Frederick Douglass. That was the whole thing. So he was trying, I think, to show you, I wasn't American slave yet.

I gained this literacy and I'm able to write about my own life, which is and I'm also willing to write about my own life, you know, which involves pointing fingers, you know, from pissing people off. And so it's very significant that he puts that in there, because it's just where it's going, right where the book is going. Yeah, this is one of my favorite books to read to teach. I just find it so inspiring.

The resilience of the human soul, you know, liberty is sort of being poof who these days it seems right and left, but sort of the that you can see powerfully portrayed before your eyes, the natural human longing for freedom to not be ruled by others without your consent, not to be degraded, not to be brutalized. I find it beautiful. I taught it a couple of summers ago and one of my favorite passages, I got it choked up reading it. And since then I can't read that passage without getting choked up.

It's about the mom, but we will talk about that later. It is like you said, when a great is works American, I think I think that's a fantastic yeah, that's what's about the grandmother who when the white family passes away, she's constructed a small shack in the woods and left there to die. Yeah, which I take to be a direct review go by I think I take that to be a direct review go by James Calhoun, and given a speech on saying, you know, we take great care of the elderly slaves when they when they're grandmothers and we take care of them. Oh, yeah.

So but actually about this memoir is just how powerfully Douglas writes about abuse, right? Slavery in and of itself is an abuse, but he goes into detail, right? And not with the beatings, but the in the ritual humiliations, the impact that it has on the soul of the slave and the soul of the master to it degrades everybody full circle, right? Yeah, with another passage, I had mine, but maybe I'll say that for probably the alphabet, which you probably provide a summary of the text, maybe the point of style, I'll get into that, but on the point of style, I think it's noteworthy.

He goes between these very powerful passages. So if you read that grandmother passage, it's chilling. And then he just goes right back into the factual narrative. So he turns it on and off and it's written.

So it's written by himself, but it's written with, you know, great care and great subtlety. And it's very, very deliberate. And when it decides to sort of draw on your emotions and when not so that it's not just exhausting, but he pulls you away at a certain moment when he thinks it's most appropriate. And he also has this nice, sorry, I was just to add to that, I apologize.

He's great at juxtaposing persons, especially a slave master's biography, so called pious biography with actions, and he does it back to Yale, do it one after the another. So he'll say something like, Alex, pre you, a Methodist preacher, and then he'll immediately talk about the outrages that you sort of run on your slaves. So I mean, we'll talk about his view of Christianity in the way that a Christian America comes off in the book. So the book consists of it has the beginning of preface by William Lloyd Garrison, and then a letter to Douglas from Wendell Phillips.

It then has 11 chapters. The 10th is by far the longest. I mean, it seems like it's about a third of the work. And then it has a short appendix with some poetry in it about Douglas's written after the facts about as he's read through his narratives, about his opinions on Christianity.

And so the main part of it are these, as these 11 chapters, and it really just proceeds chronologically from his earliest memories and his earliest state until 1841 when he spoke in Nantucket, which was apparently very significant point in his life, but also significant for those who attended, I think as Garrison of Phillips, Robert calls this moment vividly, I think Garrison. In 1845, he had an end in 1841, which is I think is significant. Yeah, sorry, Greg. Just to amplify something you said, I mean, Garrison is one of the most famous at this point in history, abolitionists.

So he's a leading public figure at this point. I mean, he's much more popular, much more famous than Frederick Douglas, although of course, Douglas will go on to surpass him. Do you know Douglas was the most photographed person in the 19th century by now? I know that.

Yeah. He also lifted weights. Didn't tell us about that. Yeah, you can see pictures of his weights.

Not that big. I think he was a... Anyways, he lifted weights right so he'd be more imposing on stage. I think that's really important from his biography because it shows that him being impressive is not just a good speaker, but it's what he says, I thought, cover yourself.

You look at me like, yeah, I don't want to fight this guy either. No, no, for sure. You're only 16 at that point, right? We talked about it.

Yeah. So yeah, so there's these 11 chapters it proceeds chronologically. It's so episodic and it has sort of machinations. I'll just touch on a few things.

It talks about his early childhood and his relationship to his mother and his father, who he can only assume is actually his owner. It talks about how he by chance, someone by chance ended up going to Baltimore, where he again by chance, being stuck with a master who had not owned slave before. And she taught him the beginning of how to read and he learned how to read and he had conditions of, you know, enough food and stuff like that and enough time to be able to learn. And then going back and forth between Baltimore and working in the fields, when he comes back and he's working in the fields, it turns out that he's not since he's not used to it.

He's not used to being whipped. His master sends him to Edward Covey, who is a notorious slave breaker for a year that year. And then some time after that is related in the very long chapter 10. The question, I mean, the two, a couple major themes, the relationship between freedom and literacy on the one hand and freedom and courage on the other.

That's a really important theme. Another theme is relationship between chance and divine providence, friendship, community representation comes up in some interesting ways. And the sort of deep American contradiction between a slave owning society that's nevertheless devoted to the principles of freedom, which I think is important and why you might want to emphasize that the title that phrase, an American slave, is something very peculiar about the situation of American slaves. I'm not sure how good that is as an overview of me.

I think it was a great overview. I would only quibble with one of the themes that you mentioned, courage and freedom. I agree. My quibble is Douglas uses the term manliness consistently to describe it.

So he's connecting. And one of the things I think is a puzzle, I think we should be actually spoken to be called about this as well. For readers, as Douglas does actually seem to be connecting it to a distinctly male trait possible, we'd have to think through what that means. And of course, in his later writings, he actually corresponds, and we know that he was present with some of the women's liberation movement stuff.

So I think you're what that means. But I mean, fighting, for example, is deeply connected to his own freedom, like an actual fist fight. And to be clear, Alex, can you say where about when it ends in his lifetime? So he has 40 more years to live, I think.

Yeah. And so he wrote other autobiographies, but none, two others. Yeah. And the, but this one, I think is by far the shortest.

I mean, I use the Norton edition, but just some interesting stuff in the supplements. But it starts on page 13 after the front matter. And then before the appendix, it ends at 79. So it's 66 pages, right?

And it's incredibly quick reading and it's condensed. It really needs to be unpacked. I read excerpts. I know Greg, you've read the other ones, but I read excerpts with the other ones.

And my impression is that it's not as compact as this. And this, I find moments in here, it's written with an incredible density that makes it, I think, remarkable. One with thing I'll say just about the arc of it, it starts from sort of the darkest depths of slavery and ignorance, ignorance of anything that's going on in the world, ignorance of his own parentage or at least any relationship to his own. And then he finally ends up establishing a whole for himself in bed for Massachusetts in full freedom.

Freedom, not just that he's able to go and do as he please, but freedom in that sense that he feels that he's able to speak freely and speak what the truth of his experience is and what he went through and talk about the injustice he's gone through. And in that respect, going from the most abject servitude to the sort of full sense of freedom as a free citizen, moral and political freedom, it does show us, again, with remarkable density, I think the whole range of human nature as coming to be a moral and politically free being. It also is a nice, it's a really the book's all about ascending. So it's ascending from darkness to light, but also a geographic ascent from the south to the north.

And then there's a nice contrast to what we could discuss. The conditions in the city for slaves, for the conditions in the country. The role versus the slavery. Yeah.

But that, of course. So for me, when I teach this, one of the things that I stress to students is Douglas makes clear all of the mental gymnastics that slave owners have to go through to justify this to themselves and the recognition that they're lying to themselves. So for example, why is life better for the slave and urban areas than in rural areas? It's because they have neighbors and they don't want to be seen as being nasty towards their slaves, which is a kind of tacit recognition that slavery is wrong.

They've been from reading at the moment, we're going to talk about it later, right? But you don't have to be quiet because why are they slaves? Because they're some human. Well, you shouldn't teach the dream, but you don't have to teach your you don't have to have a similar prohibition for your cow for reading.

So all of these like, all of these weird rules simultaneously, they're trying to deny the humanity of the slave, but also recognize the humanity at the same time. So there's this enormous contradiction, which takes an enormous amount of violence to try to keep in place. So if you if you if you're reading this work, and we all know that Douglas was a big fan of the Declaration of Independence, that which holds that all men are trade equal, you know, one could look at slavery and say, well, here before our eyes is evidence that humans aren't trade equal, slavery exists. And I would say, well, I mean, one way to think about the laws of nature is that like so gravity, for example, can be contravened to some extent with force, you can prevent something from falling with force.

So you can prevent natural equality, you can prevent freedom from bubbling up with this enormously evil system slavery. And that's like all the machinations I had to go through to try and keep these people down. And the word that keeps coming back to me in this context is brutalized. What what the slaves are trying to do is to dehumanize slaves and turn them into brutes, animals, but it's not possible in the last analysis.

No, it's not possible. In fact, in certain ways, so maybe we can tie this to the beginning of the book, when he talks about removing his mother, you know, that how he was moved from his mother and how he never knew his father, and therefore, his siblings were sort of just whoever, you know, they didn't have a sort of a clear relationship with them. When he details that, you wonder, okay, why is that important? Why do you need them to be sort of ruptured from them?

You're trying to break that familial bonds because you're trying to dehumanize them. Exactly. Yeah. But it turns out he also does, they also do something, this is all when he's talking about the Great House Farm.

Sure. He says a few privileges were seen tired by the slaves of the out farms, then that of being selected to do errands at the Great House Farm. It was associated in their minds with greatness. A representative could not be prouder of his election to a seat in the American Congress than a slave on one of the out farms would be of his election to do errands at the Great House Farm.

They regarded it as evidence of great confidence reposed in them a little further. He was called the smartest and most trusty fellow who had this honor conferred upon him the most frequently. And he said it even fills them with the kind of enthusiasm. And what I think to be happening there is, okay, we have this natural sort of allegiance to what's ours to be part of it to be how trustworthy to have confidence played in us.

Well, get rid of those associations and remap them on to the plantation, make it the Great House Farm. And so the natural sort of desire to be a representative, to be deemed smart and trusty and worthy of confidence to give them those honors, that's perverted into this sort of hierarchy with the plantation. And so what you see is on the one hand a brutalization and a dehumanization, but on the other hand, you have to appeal to those human emotions to keep them somewhat satisfied. So this is more your point, Greg, right?

On the one hand, subhuman, on the other hand, the tactics implicitly acknowledged that they are human and have a these important actions that find their fullest expression in representative democracy. That was said that the greatest tactic, of course, was the holiday season, the Christmas party. Yeah, where he says explicitly, if that would be taken away, he believes there would be mass operations. Can you explain what it is first?

Sure. So it's a few days, four or five days where slaves are at liberty to travel sometimes during the holiday season. So it's between Christmas and New Year's, but they're also enjoying to drink. And fight to the Rouse to fight.

It's just to enjoy themselves, but it's a perverse kind of intubulation that Douglas contends the masters, voiced on them as a kind of forgetting. And so by the time the holiday concludes, they wish they were back in fields because they're so disjointed. And they become and it teaches them to confuse liberty with license. They don't they don't it's the worst, the reasoning thinks it's so bad is because it persuades so many slaves.

Oh my god, they're right, we are not fit to rule ourselves. And so at flying the liquor and curation in the fight, they go, they go sort of humbly back to their slave bonds. Yeah. The first example to me of the dehumanizing thing, I think that Chris was part of my favorite because it illustrates it so well, the degrading effects and the extent to which it was such an evil system.

But the first one is simultaneously, I think horrific and it's the one that brings me to tears, but then also I think is uplifting because it shows the that these kind of things can't succeed. So one of the things and how it's mentioned this is that they break up families. And so Douglas's mom is sold or sold or moved, I remember just 12 miles away. And so Douglas says, you know, I didn't know my mom, whatever.

So in a way it was kind of successful, this separation because Douglas never really grew affectionate toward his mother. On the other hand, the one thing that this institution could not destroy was his mother's love for him. So, you know, you separate animals to do this sort of thing. And then, you know, after a little bit, that goes away.

But for a human mother, it can't go away. And one of the things, I mean, this goes back into aerosol, right? And the power of friendship or power of different kinds of love and the love for mother of a child is one of the strongest kinds of love. And that you can't, it's strongest in humans and you can't get rid of it.

I mean, what's amazing to me is that this woman, who's a slave when Frederick Douglass is a little boy. And by the way, keep in mind that this son of hers is probably the product of her having been raped because Douglas mentions that his father was very likely his master. And even she still deeply devoted to young Frederick Douglass such that she would walk 12 miles just to lie within a couple of hours and turn around and walk back. And when I point out to my students that's 24 miles round trip after a full day's work, that's a marathon on foot, probably poorly clad, right?

I mean, to me, that's the human spirit shining through and saying it can't be irrevocably suppressed. So I find that passage where people, I think that's one of the reasons because I just think of my mom and I'm sure you guys would think of the same. Like your mom would do it. Of course, you're not to that.

I'll try to. Let me let me I want to add to that. So yeah, that's the mother towards the child. I want to in chapter five, after his mother has died and he you know, is told he's going to Baltimore, he says the following says the ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes were also suspended in my case.

I found this of your trial in my departure. My home was timeless. It was not home to me. I'm partying from it.

I could not feel that I was leaving anything which I could have enjoyed by staying. My mother was dead. My grandmother lived far off. So I told him, sorry, I had two sisters and one brother that lived in the same house with me.

But the early separation of us from our mother had well-mived a lot of the fact of our relationship from our memories. And so the absence of home is striking, right? The absence of real family bonds. The very next sentence though, he says, I looked for home elsewhere.

So the lack of a home does not so yeah, the mother has the child and the child has kind of kept an ignorance away from that. But and he might not have that connection to his mother and grandmother so on. But he still walks it. Right.

And if you go forward a couple paragraphs, he draws attention to the present, he says, it is possible and even quite probable that that but for the mere circumstance of being removed from that plantation of Baltimore, I should have today instead of being here seated by my own table in the joyment of freedom and the happiness of home writing this narrative. So he uses that word a lot. And he says, yeah, he's looking for home and then draws attention to the fact that he finally found it. Right.

And so that longing he connects for the home that he was denied by virtue of the circumstances becomes the part of this yearning for freedom, independence, and for his own home that he finally achieves in in Massachusetts. So maybe this is just to go back to your point, Greg, that the human spirit or the human soul is in many ways abdominal. It giants through this most fluidization and it becomes this power at least to Douglas to your in first freedom. Yeah, even the mother example, you can sense that he was he didn't have that feeling for his mother but he sensed that he should have that feeling for his mother.

So there was it's still there and just in a different mode or a different way, right? Like, oh, wow, what's wrong? Like there's he becomes aware of a sort of deficiency or something like that. Yeah, I think that's right.

Very good. I also think that without that deficiency, reminds me a little bit of Rousseau's early story too. He's essentially abandoned where he leaves Geneva when he can't get back in because of the Gator clothes. He's also an auto-dietak, just like Douglas.

I mean, Douglas is a genius. He teaches himself how to read, but it's not just it's also how he does how he teaches himself how to read. He tricks a little white voice into spelling contests. Sure, he can learn all of it.

All right, it's incredible. I mean, it's incredible. I mean, think of yourself at that age. Would you be doing that?

No, no. But it was actually a Muslim wisdom at age. And so if he had had some of those familial bonds and life had been even the slightest bit more comfortable, one wonders if that fire would have been awakened in him to flee his circumstances. Because even the slightest bit of comfort can render you, well, it's better to devil you know, right?

So it's the master you know. Well, I don't know what things to be better in the North, can I even survive a trip to where he contemplates an extremely perilous trip up the Chesapeake, which it didn't result in anything because of a turncoat within his ranks. But I mean, he to even consider something like that, and not everybody was on board because they said, look, it's risky, man. It's not so bad here.

I will say, I mean, I do want to teach this on that as I think about this book. It really does show how the human spirit can sort of rise like the Phoenix. But I mean, he does mention that there's a certain point where he's almost broken, where he was broken, in fact, where he'd sort of resigned himself. And he ultimately changes that.

And that low seems to have sort of sparked the resurgence in a way. But that's not to deny also that other people weren't broken. Like there were slaves who just completely were broken. And their examples in the book, as the most extreme case, I'm thinking of slaves who would have been killed or say there's one young man, Demby, who's early in the book Douglas describes this guy who's being whipped and so he runs in the water of a river to sort of try to alleviate some of the pain, right?

I guess. And the master, it's not the master, but if you're the word is for the guy that's sort of doing the master's nasty business of the overseer. That's the overseer's command name come out, and he just blows his head off shoots him. And he said, I'm gonna count to three in it.

And by the way, Douglas, it's weird to think of horrific things being described beautifully, but I believe that Douglas simply says, Demby was no more, which is a sort of strangely beautiful way of saying it. It's vivid. He says he had it to his water. And then when the smoke clears, all that's left is his brains, where it was.

So you just imagine the head disappearing into some matter of everything sunk below. And it's a really, it's a purely like almost clinical description, but the power of it just hits you immediately. Yeah, so the point I it does hit you. But the one thing that's really interesting to connect this to is Douglas is so steeped in the natural rights and the decoration of independence.

And there's this natural human longing for self-reservation. You have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And what's interesting is this man seemingly forfeits his rights a lot. He doesn't try to at all cost to preserve himself.

And I'm reminded actually of the passage in Locke's second treatise where Locke forbids suicide. But Locke basically says that you could actually be in a similar station to this Demby where your situation can be so even Locke, the self-preservation guy says you can be in a situation of sensibly that's so bad that you can invite someone else. So Demby didn't commit suicide, but he in effect did. He knew that this was going to because life wasn't worth living anymore.

So that was that's another example of someone who is I would say slavery did break him. You know, I think the one of the Douglas's earliest awakenings was you said that he admired the Declaration of Things, but I thought he cites a particular book by a Catholic scholar on slavery. He reads two books on slavery. He gets the Columbia and Worder.

That's the big one. The Columbia and Worder. And then there's another book. Yeah.

You talk about the mighty Sheridan, right? Right. Yeah. But Sheridan, he it's a speech in that book.

Let me I want to talk about that passage in conjunction with something earlier when he's talking about the slaves who were brought up to the Great House Farm, who were very enthusiastic as their walking says they made the deaths old woods, a river braid with their wild songs revealing at once the highest joy in the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up came out if not in the word in the sound. And then he goes on to say that these songs to many would seem unmuted jargon, but which nevertheless were full of meaning to themselves.

So there is this like feeling of sadness slash joy that comes to expression in these songs. When he reads the Columbia and Order, he echoes this this few relationship between thought and song where word he says, the features gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind and died away for want of utterance. The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts. And again, to draw it into the passage Greg mentioned when he reaches this low, and he looks out on the bay and sees ships sailing away and sees them going to the north and he wishes he could be with them.

He says, my thoughts will compel utterance. And there with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul's complaint. So I think he has this conception of literacy and freedom that you have these sentiments and these feelings and these thoughts, but they're completely incoherent or just sort of indeterminate and language and ideas give them determination. And the slaves who lack literacy, lack of the very language, the very vocabulary to articulate their thoughts, their experiences, he stumbles across this book, which would not have existed but in a country like America, right, which does have principles of freedom and speeches about this sort of thing.

And that literacy ends up, as Greg noted, kind of pulling him out of this, this lowest point that he gets in at Covey's plantation. And I think this is why I always emphasize this to students when reading this, that, you know, look, it might be kind of dull to read hooks and it seems sort of language can seem old when you're reading Shakespeare or something. But if you don't have literacy and you're not adept with language, you're not free. You're going to feel all sorts of things that you don't have the words for it.

And you need to dig deep and you need to read to be able to sort of get that out of you. Otherwise, it's all going to be sort of incoherent and your own sentiments will not be known to you. I think Douglas really understands how important literacy is to freedom in that regard. And it seems like it saves him.

I think it's Greg noted, right? It saves this ability to sort of dig into himself and say to himself what he's feeling gives him the resolve to at one some point, some point down the road to get out of the situation. Can I talk about since you raised the music that I've always been fascinated by this? So I like the idea that you're right, it's sort of this incoherent longing.

But one of the things that he says that I find particularly striking is when he says, you know, most people look at the slaves singing as a sign of their contentment and happiness. And he corrects this, Douglas says, quote, it is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy and quote. So I think you're right, it's this incoherent longing probably for some freedom or something.

But it's also an outward manifestation of their inner turmoil or inner sadness. And Tom Cleveland actually helped me think about this passage just a little bit. I happen to be reading it when we were talking about music and other context. And the idea and just think to yourself, why does music, and I talked about this with my students when I taught this passage, the music is effective in soothing their soul, right?

It does help them sort of make them somehow come some piece with their situation and the question would be how. And so why is it that this outward manifestation that seems so beautiful is a sign of inner struggle, inner unpleasantness. And I think that what's going on here is that there's this really, you have emotions going on inside of you that are very bad and they're sort of chaotic and they're all over the place and everything is sort of disordered. And what are you trying to do by by bringing music in?

You're trying to restore a kind of, you're trying to restore a kind of word to the soul. If you guys both have small children, when they cry, what's your first instinct to rock them to sing to them? Because we know that there's the soothing power of music is a kind of forgetting. And so in a way, I think you're right, you see these alternative, there's this rationale, I'm exaggerating stress this because you brought it up.

There's this Douglas, Douglas's way is reason, rationality, reading, I'm gonna think my way out of this. And then there's, there's this, I'm just gonna try to soothe the passions, some in some cohort, some in our way. Let me let me let me let me I think Douglas, it thinks his way out of it. But I think when it comes to writing, he makes it up.

So when you go to that passage about his grandmother, I'll just read a bit of it because it is powerful. The heart is desolate. The children, the unconscious children who once sang and danced in her presence are gone. She groves her way in the darkness of age for a drink of water.

Instead of the voices of her children, she hears by day the moans of the dove. And by night the screams, the hideous owl, all is glued. The grave is at the door. And now when weighed down by the pains and aches of old age with the heading clients to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence meet and helpless infancy and painful old age combined together, at this time, this most needful time, the time for the exercise of that tenderness and affection which children only can exercise toward a declining parent.

My poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of 12 children is left all alone in yonder little hut before a few dim embers. She stands, she sits, she staggers, she falls, she groans, she dies. And there are none of her children or grandchildren present to wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death would a place beneath the sod. Her fallen remains.

Well, not a righteous God visit for these things. I read that and it gives me children ever I read it because he actually says, I don't know, she might still be alive. So this is a poetic construction, right? Which is, yeah, I should walk back to the reason business is rhetorical.

You're right. He's definitely trying to work on our path off here. There's no question. Yeah.

So there's, I think he sees rhetoric as a combination of argument and observation, which allows you to see things with a kind of musicality. And I think he's no action that right before this passage, right before I start a reading, he quotes a poet, right? He's writing in verse, he writes in prose, right? But you can see the musicality there, right?

When he turns, he has the synthesis of song and argument. There's an implicit argument here, but you have to work it out of the text. Right. I think we already talked about literacy to some degree, but there are a few things I wanted to maybe amplify.

I mean, we didn't mention how he starts to learn how to read. We didn't mention that, right? We didn't mention that, right? We mentioned how he very briefly that he goes on to trick the young boys in his Baltimore neighborhood.

But he's first taught by his new master's wife, Sophia All right. Sophia All, what's interesting about that relationship, the way that Douglas describes it, or the way it unfolds rather, is the tenderness of her heart and her caring for Douglas, seemingly irrespective of his skin color, right? In the way that relationship transforms after she grows used to owning a slave. So when he first tries to correct her, right?

On how to rule a slave. And her heart grows increasingly toward Douglas. And then because she just becomes a monster. So when he first arrives, she teaches him how to read, right?

That's where he gets his first taste. Yeah. And then she cuts that off after a very brief period of time. And his new kind of tutors are his equals, his running mates, the little white kids in the neighborhood.

Yeah. So there are two points here that I want to stress. One is that before we get into the substance, I always ask students with any text I read, who do you think this book is written for? This book is written in the 1840s.

I don't think it's written for people who are already opposed to slavery. I don't think it's written for black people. I think the audience is written for everybody. And I think that Douglas is aware that this book might have some staying power.

But the initial, it's, I think obvious audience, is white moderates, supposed white moderates, people who are sort of maybe, maybe sort of unoffensive, slavery's kind of bad. I don't know. But is it that bad? Right?

That's the person I think that he's talking to because he emphasizes in this book consistently that slavery is not just bad for the blacks, it's bad for the slave owners, that for whites. And you mentioned Alice at the beginning, the two preferatory letters, one by Phillips mentions that this this takes place in Maryland. This is Maryland slavery. And the common narrative of the slave people was like, well, you know, Northern slavery, as long as it's not like Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, like, it's not that bad.

Georgia, I'm going to done an accident completely that accident. And so I think one of the things Douglas is showing you is like, look white people. This is how bad it is in Maryland. Okay, so it's not some lofty people just singing and happy with their lot in life.

And so I think that's one of the reasons you get this portrayal of Sophia, all this angel, he turns into a devil. So that I think the rhetorical, I think the rhetorical strategy of this book is to appeal to people who were mildly opposed to slavery on the fence about slavery. But I don't think the, I don't think the audience is slave owners or people who believe that slavery is good. Right?

And so it's probably not people who already have been sweet. He's trying to persuade people. So who's he trying to persuade? Yeah.

Now with respect, with respect, sorry, I was just gonna turn back to literacy at this point. You just on that point, I'll see all her transformation is other piece with his general descriptions of all the slave owners. One of the things I think is really as a work of literature is really striking is that you get for all the overseers and masters that he has, you do get a real sense of their personality as individuals. Right?

They have different tactics, different passions, different behaviors that, so he doesn't just render them sort of monsters that are completely understandable. You can experience or feel the experience better because you hear of how what Covey would do. That would be different. So one master is kind of inconsistent.

Right? Another Covey is much more sneaky. Right? And so you start to understand the situation better precisely because of that characterization.

Likewise, as Sophia all you see your turn from an angel or a lamb into a lion as he says, and you get that kind of loss of humanity, yet you can still see part of it. So I do want to pivot to the literacy. Well, what I want to pivot to and since David mentioned it's Sophia is the first one who teaches them how to read her husband comes home and says, what are you doing? He gives her this dressing down.

If you give one of these kids an inch, they'll take a mile. It would spoil a slave to teach them to ruin them. You'd render them unhappy. And I just disagree with it.

Exactly. By the way, yeah, a couple of things. One is Douglas agrees that I think later it bears out that in fact it does make him unhappy. But the other thing I'll say is that, you know, Alex touched on this at the beginning, there are two themes that are deeply connected to freedom that I think are essential for understanding and one has to be intellectually free in order to be free.

And here Douglas connects very clearly literacy to freedom. You cannot be free. And I think I think I was just outlined some of the reasons why you have to articulate these things to yourself. But that's not all.

I mean, right here, he says, this is the beginning of chapter six, the third fourth paragraph. When he says that this is bad for him, Douglas says from that moment on, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. And it was through literacy, like through reading. I mean, this sounds trite and people say this sillyness all the time.

I don't think they realize the seriousness of the claim that they're making when they say, you know, learning how to read was that you free, education is freedom. And here's Douglas showing you the actual way in which this is serious. This is not just on trite saying, the truth will set you free, you know, some crap like that. Let me now connect this to the cover.

So in chapters seven, he says, knowing how to read opened his eyes to the horrible pit, but no ladder on pitch to get out. He then wishes, I wish I was a beast, get rid of thinking everlasting, thinking eternal, wakefulness, I want to get rid of it. And so where is the ladder? And I think the ladder comes in his encounter with company, right?

So with Covey, he's getting, he's working one day, he's not feeling well and he collapses. It's not actually, and can you explain who Covey is and why Douglas is with him? Sorry. So Covey is this, this guy is notorious for breaking slaves, right?

He's so persistent and sort of, you know, ways that he will break even the most opposite of slave. I infer from that that Douglas has been misbehaving in some way that he's been sent to this guy. Yeah. Yeah.

And really well, from the end of the chapter prior, we find out that he would purposefully let the horses run away so he could go get some extra food from his master's father-in-law. So while he's with Covey, Covey is in large part successful. He gets rid of what Douglas calls his natural elasticity. And then you get this passage where he speaks to the boats on the Chesapeake Bay that are going up to the North saying, why can't I go with you?

And he resolves at the end of this to get free. On the heels of that, he says, you'll see how a man was made a slave. You shall see how a slave was made a man. And then he goes into the description of his fight with Covey.

He's sick one day while working. He collapses. It stops all work because there's a sort of process or chain of labor and Covey starts beating him. He eventually escapes and goes to his master who has lent him out to Covey for a year to break him.

He comes back on a Saturday. This is the next day. So he leaves on Friday, comes back on Saturday, Covey chases him into a field, loses him. He goes to stay with Sandy Jenkins.

He comes back on a Sunday holding a root, a superstitious root. I think this is a really funny point because he's like, maybe it's the root. That's why he's not beating me. Maybe it's the root.

And it's like, well, it's also Sunday. So he doesn't attribute to God. He attributes to a root. He is 16, by the way, at this point.

We were all probably a little more superstitious back then. But still, I mean, he mentions root. Wait, are you implying that he's likening religion to superstition? Is that what you're daring to allege here?

Dr. Riesz? Yeah, I mean, I would be reluctant to believe if I were in his condition as well. Anyway, so then Covey...

That's a really important point. So you think that's really interesting and contrary to what I would say, actually. So you think being in a really awful position would incline you not to believe in the field religion. I mean, in this page, he mentions Sunday and the root alongside each other a number of times.

And he never once entertains that the reason Covey is obedient is because it's Sunday where maybe the Lord is restraining him or something. He just keeps playing. Maybe it's the root, not even in retrospect, because he's supposed it's Sunday. So anyways, and then he gets into the fight with Covey.

I think you wanted to talk about this, Greg. I think you really have some interesting stuff on this. Do you want to jump into this? Annliness?

Well, I mean, I just, for sure. I've always been struck by this chapter. And I try to get students to take seriously some of the questions it raises because I think it raises this question of some conception of like in order to be free, you have to be able to stand up for yourself. I mean, think about even the deck already has been appented in order to be free.

You want to have to stand up and start their rights against, and experience has told us that people will long endure and suffer under an unjust regime and these kinds of things. So for me, what I find impressive, you read this as a story. And so like watching a movie all of a sudden, you start, I start to get excited for Douglas to go with Covey's butt, because it's so deeply connected. And I don't know if he's going quite this far, but in his later writings, he does seem to imply, right?

If you're not willing to fight for yourself, you almost are undeserving of freedom. And so there's this deep connection of, look, on the one hand, he obviously has to be an intellectual human being to recognize that he's free. There's all these other factors. But I think you're right that the path to that freedom is a physical fight.

And when he's done with it, as you mentioned at the beginning, he said, you've seen how a man was made slave. You'll see how a slave is made a man. At the very end of it, he says, when he finally, when he finally beat Covey, there's a lot going on here. He says, the fight rekindled in him, few expiring members of freedom and revived within him a sense of his own manhood.

Man, man, man, I'd resolve to fight him and be a man. And when he was done, he said, so I think there's teaching here between slave and man. And he says, when I was done with this fight, I realized that although I might continue to remain a slave in, was it in fact, in form, I no longer was a slave in fact. Yes.

I'll see if I can find that passage. It's however long I might remain a slave in form. The day had passed forever when I could be a slave. In fact, I did not hesitate to let it be known for me that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping must also succeed in killing me.

At this time, I was never again what might be called fairly whipped. I remained a slave four years afterwards. I had several fights, it was never whipped. Okay.

So that life business, by the way, willing, like a willingness to be like freedom, give me liberty or give me death, right? A willingness to accept death as the alternative. One point that always really strikes me here is there's a lot of brutal scenes in this. We just talked about Juan Dendy with his talk about blood running down.

It always strikes me. He says when he's fighting, he says, he's got his hand on his story. He says, I held him uneasy causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers. Very, very clear description.

You can all see the hand on Covey's neck. And you can see the drops of blood coming. And though it's not as brutal of a violent moment as what we saw the overseers and masters doing to the slaves, it is the first time you're seeing a slave inflict in real violence on a master. And the first time you're seeing a white man bleed, right?

And that always jumps out to me that it's just a touch, right? It's just a touch, but it's so significant that on this point, especially there's a reversal. Right. That's very good.

I think in the fact that he could have used this opportunity in the text to say, and how I would wish using this, what I had done to Covey, how I would wish my brethren still in chains would do to their masters. He could have right here said, follow my example, see where it will take you. You guys have a sense of why he stopped. I'm not liking the audience or anything, but he just doesn't say anything.

I think I go back to the audience, right? Like who's, look, I think there are, I see audiences, white people, right? And so why, like anybody, like me, I get riled up and put myself in Douglas's place and I'm on his side and I want to beat up Covey, right? If you start talking about all the blacks that unite and finally fight and kill their white, white, overlord masters, I think you run, which I'm not saying they didn't deserve, but then you run the risk of offending some of these white moderates who maybe I don't really like slavery, but I sure don't like all these newly, like revolutionary slaves going around killing people.

I mean, the memory of what's happened in other parts of the world, slave revolts, they weren't discriminating a lot of those places between the slave owners and non-slave owners. And so you may not favor slavery, but I don't want to be killed alongside all the other white people, even though I have nothing to do with it. So I just take it to be part of the rhetorical strategy. But later on, he does talk, I mean, once he's free, he does have this thing called as it wise and right to kill kidnapper.

So he does support, and he's not simply a piece that got by any stretch of imagination. I mean, here's an early example of it, but later he's more violent than I would say, or he's definitely a violence in the name of pursuit of freedom. I mean, didn't he after the South started killing black Northern troops, Tel Lincoln, you should kill some troops? He was not a peaceful dude.

No, no, no. So one thing, so maybe we should jump to the last chapter when he attains full freedom. There's some other points. I mean, we can't cover everything.

This is where I spent a few weeks on this when I do this in class. But the one moment that's worth talking about is this little Sunday school. He calls it a Sunday school, but it doesn't look like the worshiping. They're learning to read, right?

It's the pretense as well, but it's actually literacy. But he calls it the most blissful moment of his life. And this was the real sort of community he had. And one of them has gotten free, you know, but through his aid.

But he finally comes to full freedom when he gets to New Bedford. He has this really funny, ironic line. He says, I was quite disappointed at the general appearance of things in New Bedford. And he's disappointed because it's far better than he had been led to believe.

Conditions would have been in the North. He had been told that economics in the economic conditions in the North were far worse than in the South because they didn't have slavery, right? But he gets there. He says, there's no loud songs, right?

Because people work quietly. And he says, every man appeared to understand his work and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which be tokened to deep interest, which he felt in what he was doing, as well as a sense of his own dignity as a man, right? So there's sort of individual dignity as a man. When I amplified that for a moment, how he was in copper, hence, how there could be well for where there wasn't slavery.

He's like, how can there be rich people? There's no leisurely rich masterclass. And he points to the fact that most of these workers in the North actually seem to live cleaner, more decent lives than even the masters done south, right? He lived amongst so much built.

And he's talking about slaves who have been free, not very long, live better than the average sort of slavery. So then he finally, I find this line really, I mean, Tocqueville amplifies this right when he's talking about how he's going down the Ohio river. And he's like, you look right, and you see industry and cleanliness and people are working. And he looks out and swallowed and built the end disgusting.

Sorry. Yeah. So finally, he makes a little money. He can finally afford to read the Liberator, which is a paper.

And he says that the paper became my meat and drink. My soul was set all on fire through his soul. That idea of his soul now being on fire, who calls me all this talk about the spark in his soul, the spark of thought, the beam of thought. Now it's a warring fire, right?

Glowing, because he has all these words. And he attends these meetings, right? And he listens because there are others speaking better than him until finally in August of 1841. And this is where the books or ends, he says he felt strongly moved to speak and was at the same time much urged to do so by Mr.

Williams, the coffin, a gentleman who had heard me speak in the color people's meeting at New Bedford. And it's the first time he's going to speak publicly, but specifically to whites, he says, it was a severe cross. And I took it up reluctantly. The truth was I felt myself a slave.

So he has his factual freedom as a man in fighting Covey, yet the form of freedom in which he no longer has any of the outward trappings or the outward circumstances of a slave, they're still part of that. And he says, the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke with a few moments where I felt a degree of freedom and said what I desired with considerable ease. And at that point, I think he has reached what he considers to be a kind of full freedom in a moral or political sense, which is being able to speak what you desire with considerable ease to those who might take offense.

That's what is required of a citizen and a good order who's going to try to affect the good. He then concludes with this line before the appendix. He says, from that time until now, I've been engaged including the cause of my brethren with what success and what devotion I think those are going to with my labors. Interesting use of the word my labors to decide.

So he thumbs up in one sentence the next four years, because it is, it seems like it's continuous with this moment of full freedom he attained in in Tucka. I love the way this adds, I think it's really elegant and powerful and speaks much to the nature of freedom. Well, to return to this name of our religion, or was that and that was a really beautiful notion to send there? I think I've already spilled the beans on where I think about this religion.

I guess I'll just say in response then that he Douglas writes this appendix, which is a lot of readers shared Alex's suspicion that Douglas was an impious little devil who didn't really believe in Christianity because he had so many nasty things to say about religion. You didn't even mention the fact that he said the worst slave owners were the religious ones because that somehow sanctified the evil deeds. And his appendix is at least ostensibly a defense of his own Christianity where he says, I mean, read carefully, it's not that strong of a vehicle. Yeah.

I mean, he says, I love the pure, peaceful and impartial Christianity of Christ. Yeah. Does he does he, I mean, he says at some point, at one point early on, he says, I believe I've been held helped by a kind of Providence people will think he superstitious. But when it comes down to the province, he attributes it to the root more than to God.

I wonder how much of his endorsement of Christianity is lip service, knowing that if he is too direct on this point, he will completely yell at me. Or we can say that there's the Christianity is practiced by certain people in the United States, he's against it. I don't know that the status of his belief in the divine in more general, or nature is God or something like this. I mean, to a certain extent, I think, I mean, he has, there's a lot of stuff about religion in this we skipped over a lot of it, but when he ends that powerful statement about his grandmother will not have righteous God, yeah, you know, revengeance for this.

I mean, it's a hard situation. You have to answer that question. It's rhetorical. You wonder what's the answer.

He is fairly clear that he thinks most Americans are hypocrites and not true believers, right? And as of any penises, he says, dark and terrible is this picture. I hold it to be strictly truly overwhelming massive for best Christians America, namely that they're hypocrites. They're putting on the power of Christianity.

They're not true believers. Whatever his feelings of Christian, the tense of Christianity of the book, it's pretty clear that his view of Christians is pretty low. Absolutely. I mean, he also, he talks about political partisans, even his idea of people who are actually work as representatives is really low.

He's quite pessimistic about actual human conduct over and against what is actual noble conduct. I'm actually, there's something great said earlier that I want to return to, which is David, you asked the question, why doesn't he tell other people to follow in his footsteps? I think it's important to look at this book as providing an example of what a man in full really looks like, right? And it's hard not to read this book and come away with admiration, a desire to emulate as best you can, the sort of directness and honesty and sort of forth whiteness about injustice that he has.

And he's just, you can't look at him and see anything about a powerful example before, which you might feel a kind of shame for not doing what little you can do for the sake of justice. So in a way, I think it's almost more powerful not for him to chastise you, but to evoke that sense of shame in his white readers, especially for not doing what little they can when he has accomplished so much. Yeah, no, you're right. I think that's good.

Well, I enjoyed this book. I mean, I kind of hope this isn't the last time we turn to it, because I find it so interesting. And maybe we could focus on some of the other so much we missed. You can't catch everything an hour like you said.

So maybe we come back and do some other stuff or some other readings by Douglas at some point. Maybe we can have some guests on. So July's just a few months away. Maybe we do what's this labes the fourth of July?

Yeah, that might be a nice, great speech. Yeah, very good. All right. Well, thanks listeners.

Hey, don't forget to like, subscribe, great, donate review. All right, folks, we'll see you next week on the June think read.