The Heroic Slave

by Frederick Douglass

  Since the “chattel records” are necessarily commodified and hence perverse and incomplete, the narrator who would do this service to Virginia history must “command the pen of genius.” Instead of simply recording the known, he must penetrate the unknown, the “marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities” left by the fragmentary “chattel records.” The narrator of The Heroic Slave does not go so far as to say that the “genius” he will employ will be that of the novelist, but one cannot escape this implication, nor does the narrator want the reader to miss it. If, in writing the history of a slave the narrator is compelled to create what might be called a “fiction of factual representation” (White 121), he wants it clear that Virginia’s “chattel records” leave him no alternative. To historicize, to realize this son of Virginia in history, it is necessary to fictionalize him. The entire narrative enterprise of The Heroic Slave rests on the reader’s accepting the paradoxical necessity of the fictiveness of Washington’s history.

  As a storyteller, the narrator of The Heroic Slave plays a number of roles after justifying the fictiveness of his work. Because Robert B. Stepto has given close attention to the storytelling dimension of Douglass’s text, I do not devote more of my discussion to it here. Suffice it to say that after the introduction to the story, the narrator makes no effort to authenticate any specific contention made about Washington in the rest of the narrative. The narrator offers no means of distinguishing between facts, “possibles,” and “probabilities.” By structuring the story around speeches that he seems merely to report verbatim to the reader, the narrator gives the narration an appearance of objectivity. As his source for most of the speeches and much of the behavior of Washington, he names a Mr. Listwell, whom he also claims as a personal acquaintance. This disclosure lends to the narration of the first three parts of the text a consistent and plausible point of view. We seem to be reading one of those narratives “told by X [Listwell] to Y [the narrator] apropos of Z [Washington]” that make up “the very fabric of our ‘experience’” in the real world (Genette 239).2 In ways like these, the narrator of The Heroic Slave tries to make Washington’s story sound objectively told without holding himself accountable for the authenticity of anything in particular said by or about Washington.

  In taking these steps to objectify the narrating of The Heroic Slave, Douglass finesses the problem of authenticating what that narrating voice actually says. Unlike in the traditional slave narrative, which predicates the narrator’s authority on authentication provided by the facts in the text or the testimonials that preface and append the text, in The Heroic Slave the authority of the narrator is insisted on from the start by him alone. Indeed, his right to tell his story in his own way, free from the obligation to limit himself only to the few facts available to him, is insisted on before any narrating actually takes place. Herein lies the fundamental importance of The Heroic Slave to the evolution of African American narrative from “natural” to “fictive” discourse: priority in The Heroic Slave is given to the empowering of a mode of fictive discourse whose authority does not depend on the authentication of what is asserted in that discourse. The authority of fictive discourse in African American narrative depends on a sabotaging of the presumed authoritative plenitude of history as “natural” discourse so that the right of the fictive to supplement (that is, to subvert) “history” can be declared and then exploited.

  Works Cited

  Douglass, Frederick. “The Heroic Slave.” The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Ed. Philip S. Foner. Vol. 5. New York: International, 1975. 473–505.

  Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.

  “Madison Washington: Another Chapter in His History.” Liberator 10 June 1842: 89.

  Stepto, Robert B. “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave.” Georgia Review 36 (1982): 355–68.

  White, Hayden. “The Fictions of Factual Representation.” Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 121–34.

  1. From William L. Andrews, “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative,” PMLA 105, no. 1 (1990): 23–34; the selection is from 28–30. Reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, the Modern Language Association of America. The footnotes have been renumbered and are the author’s; the Works Cited list has been condensed so that it includes only the works referred to in this selection.

  2. In the fourth part of The Heroic Slave, where two sailors discuss the events aboard the Creole, Listwell does not figure as the source of the narrator’s privilege, nor is any other source of privilege offered.

  RICHARD YARBOROUGH

  from “Race, Violence, and Manhood”1

  Douglass’s fascination with self-reliance and heroic male individualism thoroughly shapes his conception of Madison as a leader.2 Thus, although there were reportedly several key instigators of the Creole revolt, Douglass omits mention of all but Washington, thereby highlighting the individual nature of his protagonist’s triumph as well as the man’s superiority in comparison to his fellow blacks.3 Furthermore, Douglass’s celebration of solitary male heroism leaves little room for women. In his 1845 narrative, critics have noted, he downplays the role played by female slaves in his life. As David Leverenz points out, Douglass’s wife, Anna, “seems an afterthought. He introduces her to his readers as a rather startling appendage to his escape and marries her almost in the same breath.”4 At first glance, Douglass’s treatment of black women in “The Heroic Slave” would appear to differ considerably from that in his narrative. Not only does Madison allude frequently to his wife, Susan, but it is her support that enables him to hide in the wilderness for five years. In addition, he is recaptured after his successful flight from slavery because he decides to return to Virginia to rescue her. However, not only do we receive no description of Susan whatsoever but, more significantly, she is rendered voiceless in a text marked, as Henry Louis Gates notes, by “a major emphasis on the powers of the human voice,” on the potency of speech acts.5 Finally, Douglass has Susan murdered during her attempt to escape with her husband. Her disappearance from the text at this point simply reinforces Washington’s heroic isolation.

  One way to appreciate fully the strategies underlying the characterization of Madison Washington in “The Heroic Slave” is to compare the novella not just with Douglass’s own comments in his 1849 speech6 but with three other literary dramatizations of the incident—by William Wells Brown in 1863, by Lydia Maria Child in 1866, and by Pauline E. Hopkins in 1901.7 The most significant ways in which Brown, Child, and Hopkins revise Douglass’s rendering of the Creole revolt involve the handling of violence in the story, the depiction of Susan, Madison’s wife, and the role of whites.8

  First, Brown, Child, and Hopkins all treat Madison Washington’s violence more directly than does Douglass in “The Heroic Slave.” In describing Washington’s recapture, for example, Brown does not qualify the slave’s fierce resistance:

  Observed by the overseer, … the fugitive [was] secured ere he could escape with his wife; but the heroic slave did not yield until he with a club had laid three of his assailants upon the ground with his manly blows; and not then until weakened by loss of blood.9

  In depicting the revolt itself, both Brown and Douglass stress Washington’s determination to shed no more blood than is absolutely necessary. However, Brown differs sharply from Douglass by locating his hero at the very center of the violence:

  Drawing his old horse pistol from under his coat, he [a white “negro-driver”] fired at one of the blacks and killed him. The next moment [he] lay dead upon the deck, for Madison had struck him with a capstan bar…. The battle was Madison’s element, and he plunged into it without any care for his own preservation or safety. He was an instrument of enthusiasm, whose value and whose place was in his inspiration. “If the fire of heaven was in my hands, I would throw it at these cowardly whites,” said he to his companions, before leaving their cabin. Bu
t in this he did not mean revenge, only the possession of his freedom and that of his fellow-slaves. Merritt and Gifford, the first and second mates of the vessel, both attacked the heroic slave at the same time. Both were stretched out upon the deck with a single blow each, but were merely wounded; they were disabled, and that was all that Madison cared for for the time being.10

  Like Douglass in “The Heroic Slave,” Brown, Child, and Hopkins all portray Madison Washington as a superman, but their hero is one whose strength, courage, and power find unmistakably violent outlet.

  In their treatment of Susan, Madison’s wife, Brown, Child, and Hopkins again revise Douglass quite extensively. In contrast to the faceless character we encounter in “The Heroic Slave,” William Wells Brown’s Susan receives an even more elaborate description than does Washington himself:

  In the other cabin, among the slave women, was one whose beauty at once attracted attention. Though not tall, she yet had a majestic figure. Her well-moulded shoulders, prominent bust, black hair which hung in ringlets, mild blue eyes, finely-chiselled mouth, with a splendid set of teeth, a turned and well-rounded chin, skin marbled with the animation of life, and veined by blood given to her by her master, she stood as the representative of two races. With only one eighth of African, she was what is called at the south an “octoroon.” It was said that her grandfather had served his country in the revolutionary war, as well as in both houses of Congress. This was Susan, the wife of Madison.11

  Furthermore, Brown arranges for Susan to be among the freed blacks when her husband takes over the Creole. Susan’s death before the revolt in “The Heroic Slave” reflects both Douglass’s lack of interest in incorporating a sentimental reunion into his happy ending and his conception of Washington as an isolated male protagonist. In Brown’s vision of Washington’s successful heroic action, liberation leads to a restoration of the integrity of the domestic circle, the black family unit; in Douglass’s, it does not.12

  Although similar in phrasing to Brown’s, Child’s depiction of Susan manifests an added concern with the beautiful slave as the embodiment of endangered womanhood. Child describes Susan’s peculiar plight this way: “[A] handsome woman, who is a slave, is constantly liable to insult and wrong, from which an enslaved husband has no power to protect her.”13 Hopkins, in turn, both corrects and elaborates on Child’s comment not only by showing that Madison Monroe (as she calls her hero) does, in fact, save his wife from sexual assault but also by making Susan almost as much the protagonist of the story as Madison. In Hopkins’s rendering, most of the drama on board the Creole centers not on the revolt but on the white captain’s attempted rape of Susan, which coincidentally occurs on the same night that Madison has planned his uprising.14 Even the syntax of the emotional reunion scene reinforces Hopkins’s focus on Susan: “She was locked to his breast; she clung to him convulsively. Unnerved at last by the revulsion to more than relief and ecstasy, she broke into wild sobs, while the astonished company closed around them with loud hurrahs.”15 On the one hand, Hopkins implicitly rejects Douglass’s obsession with masculine heroism as she gives Susan not only a voice in the text but also force—the first act of black violent resistance aboard the Creole is Susan’s striking the white captain when he kisses her in her sleep. On the other hand, by having Madison fortuitously appear and interrupt the assault on Susan like some white knight rushing to the aid of his damsel, Hopkins ultimately falls back on the conventions of the sentimental romance. Hopkins does succeed in reinserting the black female into a field of action dominated, in Douglass’s fiction, by the male. However, in claiming for Susan a conventional role generally denied black women, she necessarily endorses the accompanying male paradigm in her depiction of Madison, a paradigm drawn from the same set of gender constructions that provides Douglass with his heroic model.

  Finally, of the four versions of the Creole incident under consideration here, Douglass’s places the greatest emphasis upon the role played by whites in the protagonist’s life. Granted, for much of “The Heroic Slave,” Madison Washington is the epitome of manly self-reliance. At key points in the text, however, Douglass qualifies the isolated nature of the protagonist’s liberatory struggle not by creating ties between Madison and a black community but rather by developing a close relationship between Washington and a white northerner named Listwell. As Robert Stepto suggests, Douglass probably modeled Listwell on the abolitionist James Gurney.16 Yet, Douglass claims in his 1849 speech on the Creole incident, another abolitionist, Robert Purvis, also played an important role as Washington’s friend and advisor. Douglass’s decision to incorporate the white Gurney and not the black Purvis into his story reflects his desire to reach and move white readers. Like George Harris’s former employer, Mr. Wilson, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Listwell gives the white audience a figure with whom to identify; as Listwell comes to endorse Washington’s behavior—to evolve literally before our eyes into an abolitionist—Douglass hopes that the white reader will too.

  In none of the three later versions of the revolt do we encounter a white character who plays the central role that Listwell does in “The Heroic Slave.” Brown, Child, and Hopkins all depict a sympathetic white named Dickson, who employs Madison after he first escapes; but there is no great intimacy between the men. Furthermore, whereas Douglass has Listwell slip Washington the files and saws that he subsequently uses to free himself and his fellow slaves on board the Creole, Brown, Child, and Hopkins each tells us that Madison obtains these implements on his own, before he returns to Virginia in the ill-fated attempt to free his wife. By having Listwell provide Washington with the means of his escape, Douglass doubtless intends the white audience to see that they should not only sympathize with the slaves’ plight but work actively to help them gain their freedom. As a result, however, he implies that even the most self-reliant and gifted black male slave needs white assistance.

  In composing “The Heroic Slave,” Frederick Douglass could have easily taken a strictly documentary approach. The unadorned story of Madison Washington’s exploits certainly contained sufficient drama and courageous action to hold an audience. Moreover, Douglass’s writing to that point had been primarily journalistic; the novella would have hardly seemed the form with which he would have felt most comfortable. In depicting Washington in fiction, however, Douglass ambitiously set out to do more than demonstrate the slave’s determination to be free; he sought to transform his black male protagonist into a heroic exemplar who would both win white converts to the antislavery struggle and firmly establish the reality of black manhood. The route that Douglass chose in order to achieve these goals was to master the codes of Anglo-American bourgeois white masculinity, and his own internalization of the values informing mainstream masculine paradigms made this strategy relatively easy to adopt. In addition, as Robert Stepto observes, the act of fictionalizing this story of successful violent male resistance to slavery offered Douglass the opportunity not only to express his ideological independence from Garrison but also to present a potent alternative to the model of the black male hero as victim promoted so successfully in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.17 Ultimately, however, Douglass’s ambitious agenda was undermined by his intuitive sense that he could challenge white preconceptions regarding race only so far without alienating the audience that he sought to win and by problems inherent in the masculine ideal that he so eagerly endorsed.

  Douglass’s strategies for appealing to white readers in “The Heroic Slave” were flawed in at least three important ways. The first involves the extent to which his representation of Madison Washington as the embodiment of black manhood inevitably emphasizes the distance between his hero and the average slave. In celebrating this unusually self-aware, courageous, aggressive, conventionally educated, and charismatic figure, Douglass never explains his attractive capacities in terms that would encourage the reader to extrapolate a general sense of the black potential for heroic action from the extraordinarily endowed Washington. The gap between Douglass’s prota
gonist and less gifted blacks is widened even further by the presence of Listwell. That the one character both emotionally and intellectually closest to Washington is white indicates the extent to which Madison’s strengths and capabilities, training, and manner distinguish him from other slaves and thereby weaken his usefulness as a counterargument against claims that most blacks were inferior to whites.

  A second problem derives from Douglass’s attempt, in William Andrews’s words, “to domesticate a violence that easily could have been judged as alien and threatening to everything from Christian morality to the law of the high seas.”18 Employing a common abolitionist gambit, Douglass works to establish a link between Washington’s rebellion and the American War of Independence. However, doing so, Andrews contends, precipitates Douglass and other antislavery writers into a troublesome conceptual trap: “Even as they violate the ideals of Uncle Tom’s pacifism and declare blacks free from bloodguiltiness for killing their masters, they justify such actions by an appeal to the authorizing mythology of an oppressive culture.”19 That is, the very figures whose patriotic heritage Douglass claims for his hero won their fame by working to establish a social order in which the enslavement of blacks like Madison was a crucial component.

  In his careful packaging of Washington’s manly heroism, Douglass also chooses not to dramatize a single act of physical violence performed by his protagonist. One might argue that this approach reinforces the statesmanlike quality that Douglass may have been striving to imbue in his portrayal of Washington—after all, how often do depictions (literary and otherwise) of George Washington fully convey the violent nature of his heroism? Ultimately, however, Douglass’s caution here strips his fictional slave rebel of much of his radical, subversive force. As Douglass knew from personal experience, revolution usually entails violence, and black self-assertion in the face of racist attempts at dehumanization often necessitates a direct and forceful assault upon the very structures of social power that provide most whites (especially white males) with a sense of self-worth, security, and potency.