The Heroic Slave
Page 25
In his public statements regarding the Creole revolt both before and after he wrote “The Heroic Slave,” Douglass apparently felt little need to undermine the implications of the black militancy that Madison Washington embodied. We have already examined his celebration of Washington’s heroism in his 1849 speech.20 In commenting on West Indian emancipation eight years later, Douglass goes even further:
Joseph Cinque on the deck of the Amistad, did that which should make his name dear to us. He bore nature’s burning protest against slavery. Madison Washington who struck down his oppressor on the deck of the Creole, is more worthy to be remembered than the colored man who shot Pitcairn at Bunker Hill.21
Granted, the exhaustion of Douglass’s patience with the limited efficacy of moral suasion as an antislavery tactic surely informs this quite remarkable repudiation of the popular appeal to an American patriotic past as a way to validate black slave violence. I would argue, however, that there was something about the mode of fiction itself (and possibly about autobiography as well) that stifled the radical nature of Douglass’s anger. The “controlled aggression” that Donald Gibson sees as informing every aspect of Douglass’s Narrative underlies the depiction of Madison Washington in “The Heroic Slave” as well.22 The key may lie in what Houston Baker describes as the “task of transmuting an authentic, unwritten self—a self that exists outside the conventional literary discourse structure of a white reading public—into a literary representation.” Baker continues: “The simplest, and perhaps the most effective, way of proceeding is for the narrator to represent his ‘authentic’ self as a figure embodying the public virtues and values esteemed by his intended audience.”23 Baker’s argument applies with particular force to “The Heroic Slave,” for it appears that the freer rein the form offered Douglass in his depiction of the exemplary black male hero paradoxically also confronted him more directly than possibly ever before with the restrictions imposed by the expectations of the whites to whom he was appealing.
The third weakness in his attempt to use fiction to shape his white reader’s attitudes toward slavery is structural in nature. That is, by rendering the Creole revolt through the recollections of a white sailor, Douglass cuts us off not just from Washington’s heroic violence but from his emotional responses to the dramatic events in which he plays such a crucial part. William Wells Brown’s straightforward depiction of Washington’s rebellious behavior in his sketch dramatizes by contrast the extent to which Madison’s role in “The Heroic Slave” is primarily catalytic, as Douglass emphasizes through shifts in point of view his impact upon the whites around him. Such elaborate formal manipulations result in what Raymond Hedin terms “an emphatically structured fiction,” which serves to convey a sense of the writer’s control and thus to permit a release of anger in a rational and somewhat unthreatening manner.24 As one result of this strategy, at the end of the novella Washington stands not as the embodiment of expressive, forceful self-determination, but as an object of white discourse, a figure whose self-assertive drive to tell his own story—to reclaim, in a sense, his own subjectivity—is ultimately subordinated by Douglass to a secondhand rendition by a white sailor who did not even witness the full range of Washington’s heroic action. This decentering of the black voice in “The Heroic Slave” may be the greatest casualty of Douglass’s polemical appeal to white sympathies.
Finally, like the majority of nineteenth-century black spokespersons, Douglass was unable or unwilling to call into question the white bourgeois paradigm of manhood itself. Consequently, his celebration of black heroism was subverted from the outset by the racist, sexist, and elitist assumptions upon which the Angle-American male ideal was constructed and that so thoroughly permeated the patriarchal structure of slavery. As Valerie Smith points out, “Within his critique of American cultural practices, then, is an affirmation of its definitions of manhood and power.” That is, “Douglass … attempts to articulate a radical position using the discourse he shares with those against whom he speaks. What begins as an indictment of mainstream practice actually authenticates one of its fundamental assumptions.”25 It should go without saying that one can scarcely imagine how Douglass might have extricated himself from the conceptual briar patch into which he had fallen, given both the political purposes to which he directed his fiction and the extent to which he sought validation in the most conventional, gender-specific terms for himself in particular and for black men in general from a white society unwilling to acknowledge the complex humanity of blacks in any unqualified way. The dilemma so powerfully rendered in Douglass’s attempt to dramatize the Madison Washington story in fiction is one that has plagued most Afro-American fiction writers—and, indeed, most Afro-American thinkers—over the past century and a half.26 His failures do not qualify the boldness of his attempt, and one can argue that the short-term benefits of his approach must be taken into account in assessing the overall success of his enterprise. Ultimately, however, Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave” may be most valuable insofar as it enables us to understand better the complex internal and external obstacles to a balanced, complex depiction of black men and women in Afro-American fiction. If nothing else, it leaves us wondering whether the tools of the master can ever be used to achieve the complete liberation of the slave.
1. From Richard Yarborough, “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave,’” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 166–88; the excerpt is from 176–88. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. The footnotes have been renumbered and, unless otherwise indicated, are the author’s.
2. Douglass’s speech on “Self-Made Men” was one of his most often-delivered presentations. See Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 253–78.
3. See Howard Jones, “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt,” Civil War History 21 (March 1975): 30 n7.
4. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 128. Frances Smith Foster suggests that Douglass’s withholding information regarding Anna enables him to suppress certain positive aspects of his slave experience (Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives [Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979], 113). Also see Donald B. Gibson, “Reconciling Public and Private in Frederick Douglass’ Narrative,” American Literature 57 (December 1985): 551.
5. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 107. The closest we get to hearing Susan speak is Madison’s explanation that in his extreme concern for her safety after his flight to Canada, he “could almost hear her voice, saying ‘O Madison! Madison! will you then leave me here? can you leave me here to die? No! no! you will come! you will come!’” (Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths [Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853], 219).
6. [As Yarborough reports earlier in his essay, in 1849, Douglass declared: “Sir, I want to alarm the slaveholders, and not to alarm them by mere declamation or by mere bold assertions, but to show them that there is really danger in persisting in the crime of continuing Slavery in this land. I want them to know that there are some Madison Washingtons in this land” (“Great Anti-Colonization Meeting in New York,” North Star, 11 May 1849, 2). A section of the speech is reprinted in this volume. Eds.]
7. William Wells Brown, “Madison Washington,” in The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863; reprint, New York: Arno, 1969), 75–83; Lydia Maria Child, “Madison Washington,” in The Freedmen’s Book (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 147–54; and Pauline E. Hopkins, “A Dash for Liberty,” Colored American Magazine 3 (August 1901): 243–7.
8. Some of the minor distinctions among these four versions are re
vealing as well. For example, Brown’s description of Washington is far more ethnically specific than Douglass’s: “Born of African parentage, with no mixture in his blood, he was one of the handsomest of his race” (Brown, “Washington,” 75). This emphasis on Washington’s African background recalls Brown’s treatment of Jerome in the 1864 Clotelle, A Tale of the Southern States, published one year after The Black Man appeared. It must be noted that there are several instances where Brown, Child, and Hopkins employ remarkably similar phrasing. Brown had appropriated material from Child before, in the first edition of Clotel (1853). There is evidence of extensive borrowing here as well—either by Brown from an earlier version of Child’s sketch or by Child from Brown’s in The Black Man, or by both Brown and Child from an earlier text by another writer…. Pauline Hopkins was familiar with the work of both Brown (whom she had met personally) and Child, and thus would likely have encountered their versions of the Creole revolt. To complicate matters, Hopkins cites neither Brown nor Child as her primary source, but rather an article by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
9. Brown, “Washington,” 80.
10. Ibid., 83.
11. Ibid., 81. Brown’s portrayal of Susan closely resembles the sentimental depiction of his light-skinned heroines in Clotel.
12. We find what is perhaps the first suggestion that Madison Washington’s wife may have been aboard the Creole in “Madison Washington: Another Chapter in His History,” Liberator, June 10, 1842. In his recent article on “The Heroic Slave,” William Andrews quite rightly suggests: “This effort by the Liberator to infer a romantic plot underlying the Creole incidents testifies to the strong desire of American abolitionism for a story, if not the story, about Washington that would realize him as a powerful symbol of black antislavery heroism” (“The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative,” PMLA 105 [January 1990], 28).
13. Child, “Washington,” 147.
14. Characteristically, Hopkins provides an extensive discussion of Susan’s mixed racial pedigree. For a look at the role of ancestry in her most important fictional work, see Yarborough, Introduction to Contending Forces, by Pauline E. Hopkins (1900; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxvii–xlviii.
15. Hopkins, “Liberty,” 247; emphasis added.
16. Robert B. Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave,’” Georgia Review 36 (Summer 1982): 363 n8.
17. For a further discussion of what Robert B. Stepto calls the “antislavery textual conversation” between Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” see Stepto’s “Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 135–53. Stepto contends that Washington’s revolt also appealed to Douglass because it “in some measure revises his own story” (Stepto, “Thunder,” 359).
18. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 186.
19. Ibid., 187.
20. [See note 6 above. Eds.]
21. Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Vol. 2, Pre-Civil War Decade, 1850–1860 (New York: International, 1950), 438. [Yarborough refers to Douglass’s 3 August 1857 speech on West Indian emancipation, an excerpt from which is included in this volume. Eds.]
22. Gibson, “Public and Private,” 563. See also David Leverenz’s discussion of the tension between Douglass’s “genteel self-control and his aggressiveness” in the 1855 edition of his narrative (Leverenz, Manhood, 114).
23. Houston A. Baker, Jr., The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 39.
24. Raymond Hedin, “The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction,” Novel 16 (Fall 1982): 37.
25. Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 32–46; Leverenz, Manhood, 108–34; and Annette Niemtzow, “The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative,” in The Art of Slave Narrative, ed. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982), 96–109.
26. In a forthcoming essay entitled “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition,” Deborah McDowell examines how the tendency to give Douglass’s Narrative, with its uncritical inscription of sexist Anglo-American concepts of gender, a central position in constructing the Afro-American literary tradition marginalizes black women’s texts. [The essay can be found in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: Hall, 1991), 192–214. Eds.]
MAGGIE MONTESINOS SALE
from “The Heroic Slave”1
[Madison] Washington not only leads an entire ship of people to freedom, but justifies without qualification their actions by claiming the “American” notion that the cause of liberty justifies rebellion. This transformation worked to convince Douglass’s resisting readers that whatever negative connotations they may have associated with Washington’s “blackness” insignificantly compare with his bravery, eloquence, willingness to die for liberty, moral restraint, and rationality. I suggest that the principal factor determining whether or not they heard his implicit call for abolition, and accepted his assertion that “we have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing,” depended upon whether or not they found his display of masculinity compelling.2
In order to grasp why masculinity was so important, we need to recall that the most obvious, yet the most fundamental feature of the revolutionary republican subject was masculine gender. At the time of the Revolution, this subject did not have an explicit class or racial marking, although material conditions and social, political, and economic practices determined that typically elite men of European descent were authorized by what Locke called “Political Power.” Class and slavery were masked by the apparently universal address to “all men,” and race had not yet come to play the central ideological role that it would in the nineteenth century. Douglass appropriated a late-eighteenth-century notion of manhood, or republican male virtue, characterized by bravery, eloquence, moral restraint, concern for the common good, and a willingness to die for liberty, and transported it into a different historical context, a different social and political field in which racial difference had become one of the most salient ways of signifying relations of power. Like other political orators and writers of his own time, Douglass chose for his heroic model not nineteenth-century nation-builders like Andrew Jackson or Zachary Taylor, or unionists like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, but republican revolutionaries. Antebellum political rhetoric instead favored Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. But by connecting their known history with the activities of an enslaved man, the opening paragraph of The Heroic Slave challenges the legal, social, and economic strategies of dominant groups that defined the national political community—the inheritors and rightful claimants of the rhetoric of the Revolution—as free, white, and male. This definition denied authorization to slave rebellion, as Douglass points out:
The state of Virginia is famous in American annals for the multitudinous array of her statesmen and heroes…. History has not been sparing in recording their names, or in blazoning their deeds…. By some strange neglect, one of the truest, manliest, and bravest of her children … a man who loved liberty as well as did Patrick Henry,—who deserved it as much as Thomas Jefferson,—and who fought for it with a valor as high, an arm as strong, and against odds as great, as he who led all the armies of the American colonies through the great war for freedom and independence, lives now only in the chattel records of his native State. (25)
In creating this connection, this passage asserts that the revolutionary alliance was inherently contradictory because it did not include enslaved people from the Southern colonies, and it suggests a newly configured alliance.
This challenge presents the possibility of a new national alliance, based on a common masculinity, one that includes the founders and those slave rebels who have broken their fetters and claimed their freedom.4 This alliance does not “accurately” portray the founders, in that although many of them were aware of a theoretical contradiction between their fight for their own liberty and their status as slaveholders, most did little during their lifetimes actually either to bring about abolition or to emancipate their own slaves. Rather Douglass’s (re)vision centralizes what enslaved people and abolitionists considered most valuable and laudable in the Revolution, and marginalizes those acts of the founders that they considered worthless. This rhetorical strategy reimagines the history of the Revolution in the service of a radical agenda, one that projects not just freedom for British colonists, but equality for enslaved men as the goal of the original fight for liberty.