My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography.

Sekora, John

Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master Temp. Maintenance for the building--it lacks sufficient stature to be a Hall--is contracted to Master Craftsmen, repairs to Master Builders and Master Plumbers. With a Master-Card, of course, one has available equally lofty services: Master Assist, Master Purchase, Master Travel, Master Rental, Master Legal, and Master Medical. This is the shortest of short lists, yet it makes the point. As word and concept, master has a long and complex history, much of it interwoven with the history of slavery. The least one can say about it at the moment is that Americans are ambivalent about power relations under slavery. They might cheer the underdog in a sports event, but slavery is a different matter altogether.

Such an attitude is the more understandable when one realizes that the black figure most closely associated with slavery and writing about slavery is Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery has never been out of print, nor has Washington's imprint upon American life. In the late 1970s I did an unsystematic search for towns, schools, and the like named for Washington. I stopped when the list went over 700; meanwhile, I found about fifty namings for Frederick Douglass, thirty for W. E. B. Du Bois, and ten for Malcolm X. Washington's eclipse of Douglass is a prominent feature of the politics of literary history in the 1890s. The expanded edition of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1st ed., 1881) appeared in 1892 and did not do well, selling only 399 copies in two years. Douglass's health was failing, and his death came in February 1895. Washington's Cotton Exposition address followed in seven months and gave him a national platform. Up from Slavery completed the apotheosis in 1901. The final stage came with Washington's recreation of Douglass in his own image in a biography of 1907--a book Washington cajoled and coerced publishers for the exclusive right to do, against Du Bois's superior, competitive claim. For three generations thereafter he would hold the mantle of destiny. Douglass's works all remained out of print until the watershed of 1960, when Benjamin Quarles published his edition of the Narrative for the Harvard University Press.

Americans want to mythologize those of their leaders like Washington and Lincoln who endured extraordinary struggles for as long as a decade, some historians have said. Indeed, Arthur Schlessinger calls FDR the greatest of Americans because he bore the weight of struggle and decision for more than a decade. The books under review here acknowledge that Douglass endured incessant struggle for five continuous decades, and intermittent strife for three more thereafter. He was without doubt the major black figure during the last generation of slavery, during the Civil War, and during the whole of Reconstruction. Many, including several essayists here, have tried to capture his representative quality as the foremost black figure of the nineteenth century.

The six books are nicely complementary. Appearing in the same season that a biographical opera on Douglass would open in New York City and a biographical documentary would be announced by PBS, they signal in effect a return to the regard Frederick Douglass possessed in the 1880s. William S. McFeely has written the first full biography in more than a generation; some have called it the first ever. Douglass has always attracted significant biographers--Chesnutt, Washington, Shirley Graham, Quarles, Philip Foner, Arna Bontemps, and Nathan I. Huggins--and excellent though more limited studies of the life have come in the last decade from Dickson J. Preston (whom McFeely praises highly) and Waldo E. Martin. The William L. Andrews collection amounts to a small library of the most important critical essays, with special emphasis upon the historicist. Eric Sundquist, in contrast, gathers essays from as many historians as critics, all from the very recent past. David Dudley tells a particular and impressive story of Douglass's influence, from the Narrative of 1845 through the Autobiography of Malcolm X. And two volumes of the opening series of The Frederick Douglass Papers provide meticulously annotated speeches and interviews from 1864 until the end of Douglass's life.

In an age of elephantine biographies, one is surprised to wish one longer. Yet this is emphatically the case with McFeely, who does so much so well that one can only wish he would do more. His earlier biographical subjects were two generals of the Civil War: O. O. Howard (for whom Howard University is named) and Ulysses S. Grant. He is good with precisely those aspects of Douglass's life that others skirt or squelch: the significance of Betsy Bailey, the two Auld couples, and Douglass's black friends in Maryland; the attractions of Wye House; his convoluted relations with Garrison, Lincoln, and especially Anna Murray Douglass; the disappointment presented by some of his five children; and the chagrin of his last years. McFeely is unusually successful as a stylist, weaving analytic issues seamlessly into his narrative flow. Although he does not attempt a literary biography, he does the spadework for such critical work by producing the full complexity of those periods during which Douglass wrote his great books as well as his journalism.

There is, moreover, a psychological acuteness to McFeely's interpretation of important issues that amounts to a new reading of several major, troubled texts. Already Douglass's dealing with Garrison and other abolitionists makes one of the most compelling of American literary tales. A brilliant, self-educated young former slave goes to school with the most eloquent abolitionist of the age. Douglass takes Garrison's writings as his lesson; Garrison takes Douglass's life, his being, as his text. Douglass's vivid version of the initial event:

Mr. Garrison followed me, taking me as his text.... It was an effort of unequaled power.... For a moment, he possessed that almost fabulous inspiration...in which a public meeting is transformed, as it were, into a single individuality--the orator wielding a thousand heads and hearts at once, and by the simple majesty of his all controlling thought, converting his hearers into the express image of his own soul.

They continue to inspire one another. A close, familial bond, born in political battle, grows between them. The student becomes a central participant in a mass social movement, quickly outstripping in stature the teacher himself. Quarrels follow--and spread along predictable lines--over will, money, status, activity, control. The break and ensuing bitterness shadow their remaining years and touch later political figures. This can be taken as one of the central plots of our social history, anticipating tales by Hawthorne, James, Fitzgerald, Malamud, John A. Williams, and others, as well as some of the current woes of the Democratic Party.

To this story of men of different ages, colors, temperaments, and expectations, McFeely adds the enveloping tension of the age. For the Garrisonians often felt a class, if not a racial, irritation against many of the former slaves with whom they worked in the abolitionist cause. They preferred well-tuned, well-tailored gentlemen. Their rhetoric, however, required something else. Douglass could not simply talk from his direct experience of slavery. The Massachusetts Society excoriated slaveholders for having turned their slaves into brutes and, as if converted by their own metaphor, demanded that Douglass stand as a redeemed animal. "It is recorded in holy writ that a beast once spoke," Garrison said often, in what would prove his mission statement for black antislavery agents. Daily growing more confident, more accomplished, more sensitive, Douglass would for the sake of the movement over and over again portray that beast, that creature made human, the chattel turned person. Such was the christological weight he bore that he would ever after be "of the cabins" but clear and moving, unlearned but eloquent, a beast but noble, an animal but a gentleman. "For the whole of his life, Douglass would have to appear as a man more admirable than other men," McFeely notes.

Like black soldiers during the war, black anti-slavery agents did not receive as much pay as white, and Douglass was rebuffed when he asked Maria Weston Chapman, who as secretary handled finances, for equality of salary or conditions. White speakers generally rode to the lectures; Douglass walked. White speakers carried the money from sales and contributions; Douglass could not. White speakers would introduce themselves; Douglass could not. (This is understandable the first or first few times. But the sixth? the tenth? the twentieth?) White speakers would themselves determine the content of their addresses; Douglass could not. White speakers had arrangements made for their lodging; Douglass made his own. Indeed Chapman sometimes failed to pay him at all, because he would then be forced into a position she approved of, namely pleading with her for charity. On this and other issues concerning black lecturers, she believed she was applying the lessons of the British anti-slavery societies, with whom she was in close contact. They kept black spokesmen on very short leashes; they were successful in the abolitionist cause; they should set the example for Americans. As policy, Chapman ordained that black agents not have money to carry, preferring to send salaries home to their wives and to arrange always for a white agent to hold the funds for a journey.

The effect of being lionized, Chapman said, was to turn Douglass into an untamed lion. More overtly than Garrison, she sought to break him. She admonished him to give up his "indecorous" attitudes, his quest for equality within the society, and his application to be made general agent, the primus inter pares of all positions. During his celebrated first visit to England, she had him watched in every town by British correspondents and by a white traveling companion sent specifically to control him. One of the correspondents wrote to her, agreeing, "He is a child--a savage." Another said, "...he is a wild animal."

When provoked, Douglass could be quite difficult, but this was too much. His resolve to determine his own course was strengthened when he met the Jennings, a family in Cork who accorded him the genuine equality he had hungered for in the States, and provided that special brand of social comfort he would champion the rest of his life. He would hereafter refuse to play man Friday, if the only reason for deference were the assumed superiority of white people. He came to believe that slavery had corrupted abolitionists and slaveholders alike. "All great reforms go together," was his response to a galling exchange during one meeting. His opponents were willing to work for an end to slavery but not a beginning to equality. He would no longer be a black dummy manipulated by white ventriloquists.

From the mid-1840s on, bad treatment and bad faith haunted Douglass. Abolitionists in general, even those who supported John Brown, did not wish a "servile rebellion." The Garrisonians worked for a pacific end to slavery, one that would be negotiated between themselves and the federal government. It would be, that is, one in which slaves, former slaves, and free blacks would play no part whatsoever. John Brown's plan for a free black state in the Appalachians presented a painful instance of this attitude. The conception, financing, and strategy were entirely in the hands of white New Englanders. Not a single black person was taken into trust or even consideration--not Douglass, not H. H. Garnet, J. W. Loguen, Charles L. Remond, or Harriet Tubman. In something so serious as an insurrection, something that would touch so many black lives, black people were to them of no consequence. This situation could be interpreted positively, as an attempt, should the plan fail, to shield Douglass and the others from painful repercussion. But no such protection followed Brown's capture. When the authorities hunted Douglass, no one prevented or disabused them. When Douglass sought refuge--first in Canada, then in Britain--Samuel May, Jr., wrote to an Irish abolitionist, asking that he not assist Douglass: "He is wholly selfish and unworthy of our trust for a moment." This is the same Samuel May who said the black abolitionists had no life apart from the movement, that it was their entire reason for being, and that they should be humbly grateful for all it had given them. Like an old toad that goes on living although buried under a rock, racial blindness persisted, even among the most inveterate of the white anti-slavery workers.

Graceless when Douglass was in adversity, the abolitionists could be obtuse when he prospered. All who worked with him testified to the propitious effect of Julia Griffiths, a white woman who traveled to America from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. To him she seemed an indispensable collaborator--confidante, writer, editor, business manager; he said she made his literary efforts far better, even possible. Yet by 1855, after six years of incessant abuse, Griffiths packed her bags and returned to England. The American Anti-Slavery Society did not normally permit women to share the lecture platform--or seats in the audience--with men. This is one of several reasons we have so few separately published narratives by women. For most of the antislavery societies a fugitive needed to become a well-known lecturer before being encouraged to write. If women could not easily mount the lecture platform, they could not easily wrest the pen. Like other papers, The Liberator had a separate "Ladies' Department." To such "friends," propriety overbalanced any benefit Griffiths brought to the cause. She had to go.

Not yet 30, Douglass hoped to put aside such affronts and begin an independent literary career when he started the North Star in December of 1847. Editing his own newspaper satisfied him more than anything of recent years. It fulfilled the dreams he had formed in Britain. It made him his own publisher--thus able to skirt truculent abolitionists--and gave him the prestigious calling of journalist. It permitted him to follow in the footsteps of his mentor, Garrison, and raised him from the rank of employee, much beholden to others, to that of a gentleman with a profession. It relieved him of the exhausting chore of almost daily lecturing, away from his family for weeks at a time. And it removed him from those who wished to dictate or otherwise control his words. To be an editor meant for him not only the ability to select his own words, but also to determine their final form and disposition. For his black colleagues, Douglass's decision amounted to a new stage in the struggle for civil rights. James Mc-Cune Smith wrote of the North Star: "Only since his Editorial career has [Douglass] seen to become a colored man! I have read his paper very carefully and find phase after phase develop itself as in one newly born among us." For many years hereafter, when asked how he wished to be addressed, he replied proudly, "Mr. Editor, if you please."

In Douglass's altercation with white male abolitionists McFeely sees a coldness, a want of affection. "Somewhere in the ruined house of his relationship with Thomas Auld, in an obscure corner of the destroyed friendship with Henry Harris, Douglass had discarded his trust in himself wholly to be a man's friend" (122). This involuted but persuasive judgment is followed by a discussion of the long line of female confidantes with whom Douglass worked and corresponded, from his first Irish visit to the end of his life. McFeely names his chapters after places; each is the site of some intense struggle, many of agony. His profound admiration for his subject does not obscure the losses and misdirections of a life of interminable battle.

The Andrews and Sundquist collections convey a similar openeyed reverence. Present-day criticism is of course critical of Douglass's "construction of the feminine." Henry Louis Gates (in Sundquist) traces the politics of literary displacement whereby the putative demands of masculine struggle disqualify feminine figures and values. In a genuinely complementary essay, Deborah McDowell (in Andrews) argues that Douglass often silenced the women about him and that later, mostly male scholars have followed suit. Richard Yarborough and Jenny Franchot (both in Sundquist) offer detailed indictments of his conception of manhood, in The Heroic Slave and the two earlier autobiographies. And the essay by Thad Ziolkowski (in Andrews) can be read as a response to Yarborough. Andrews and Sundquist have attempted to cover essential areas in a cooperative way. The former's graceful introduction traces criticism from the earliest notices to present-day scholarship, noting how late was recognition of Douglass's literary power. Included are several landmarks pieces: reviews by Margaret Fuller and Ephrain Peabody; essays by Kelly Miller, Vernon Loggins, and J. Saunders Redding; scholarship by Albert E. Stone, Gates, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Robert Stepto, Sundquist, and Andrews. The essays by Ziolkowski and McDowell appear for the first time. In a related original essay, "The Antilanguage of Slavery," Ann Kibbey and Michele Stepto reveal how referentiality is lost in a masterslave economy and must be reconstructed by a process that begins in subjectivity, passes through intersubjectivity, and moves into community. The volume as a whole amounts to a precis of literary history.

In his introduction and selections, Sundquist emphasizes the contemporary, with an admirable mix of critics and historians. John R. McKivigan's "The Frederick Douglass-Gerrit Smith Friendship and Political Abolition in the 1850s," for example, is important in treating a pivotal theme and period for which McFeely has little space. Other historians represented are Waldo E. Martin, Jr., on Douglass's significance for the Civil Rights era, Wayne Mixon on the confinement of "race" writing, Sterling Stuckey on African influences, and Rafia Zafar on Douglass's use of the Franklin myth. Among the critics, Donald Gibson and David Van Leer study the Narrative, Shelly Fishkin and Carla Peterson the journalism, and Kenneth Warren the Life and Times. Sundquist's opening essay addresses issues of context--family, politics, war, intellectual tradition--and is especially insightful on Douglass's attachment to the ideals of the generation of the Revolution. David Dudley's Douglass is not so fully-fleshed, many-dimensioned as that of the others. He is the "head of the line" of African American autobiographers that includes Washington, Du Bois, Wright, Baldwin, Cleaver, and Malcolm. He is first in time, first in struggle with a powerful (if absent) father figure, first in luminous prose, and first in completion of a heroic journey. Dudley has a good deal to say that is new, yet not so much on Douglass himself as on the "line" that followed.

The Blassingame and McKivigan volumes, fourth and fifth in the opening series of the Douglass Papers, include major speeches and interviews from 1864 to the end of Douglass's life on February 20, 1895. Dominated by the issues of war, assassination, and reconstruction, the former includes 62 of the approximately 550 speeches he delivered, two newspaper interviews, and testimony before Congress. The latter presents 47 of the approximately 250 speeches he gave between 1881 and 1895 in the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Egypt, and Haiti--a period when, as "Sage of Anacostia," he delivered many lyceum set-pieces, frequently summed up his long career, and offered eulogies for old comrades in the anti-slavery struggles. Vigorous to the end, he spoke of his work as U.S. marshal and recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, later minister and consul general to the Republic of Haiti, a post that brought back the old fire and old talent for controversy. As in the earlier volumes, the editors here seek a balance of materials over the years, revealing thereby the evolution of Douglass's style, actions, and thought over time. The specific selections can be questioned; some would wish more on education and less on party politics, or more of the private man and less of the lyceum favorite. Yet few can doubt the skill with which the series has been assembled. The apparatus is of the first order, allowing for repeated use by all levels of students. A partial speaking itinerary is included, allowing us to trace his schedule, route, and audience. Each entry provides title, occasion, date, known sources, and variants; a dense paragraph of introduction; and full but not intrusive annotation--all on the same page. Each of the critics and historians in Andrews and Sundquist who distinguishes between the author and the orator or between the man of the '40s and the stateman of the '70s has depended upon these volumes. They have rightly become the model for other such textual projects and leave us with the certainty that Douglass was more than representative of his time. He was the time's very ticking.