Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
Submitted by Taylor Stoehr (profile)

Title and Author: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass
Genre: Autobiography written in 1845
Theme: In this famous book, Douglass combines the story of his own life, up to age 20, with his indictment of slavery and slaveholders.
Class type: Although this classic text will shock and inspire any reader, just as it did when it first appeared in 1845, we've chosen it for our Dorchester program because it still speaks to the problem of racism in contemporary America, a concern that confronts our students every day in their ordinary lives. To read about Douglass's bondage to the slave system of his day can be especially stirring for men bound over to probationary status in a criminal justice system that weighs so heavily on people of color in our own times. Douglass's discovery of the meaning of freedom can help probationers find new hope for their own lives.

Frederick Douglass is an excellent model for historical awareness of how one's personal plight has roots in larger public issues, opening up the possibility of new roles to play in society and a new sense of responsible citizenship. For example, when Douglass taught himself to read and write, starting as a boy of nine, it was because he realized even then that literacy was the key to personhood and to his vision of freedom. "If you teach that nigger how to read," young Frederick overheard his master warning his wife, "it would forever unfit him to be a slave." He did learn to read, and it did inoculate him against the slave mentality. This was his first step in understanding his condition, and thereby taking a hand in his own fate.

Later, when a white farmer, Edward Covey, determined to break his spirit, to fit him for field labor, Douglass fought back because at age sixteen he had begun to understand what was at stake, not simply another beating, but a defining moment aimed at making him "a slave for life," as he had now learned to phrase it. "This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. . . . My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact."

Finally, after his escape four years later, Douglass devoted himself to the abolitionist movement, telling these stories over and over because he understood that his own destiny had depended on seeing beyond personal suffering to its significance as part of the slave system.

Douglass's gradual discovery of the power of historical consciousness is one of the fundamental themes in the CLTL program and can lead to similar insights in our probationers. Consider, for instance, what one of them wrote about Douglass and Malcolm X a few years ago:

"I feel that these black men show the meaning of courage because of the way they lived their everyday lives. Knowing that what they say and do can change their lives in a split second. Not only their lives. But the people in their own time. It was a movement for years and generations to come."

The probationer who came to these conclusions was a stolid man of thirty, built like a tank, a family man whose arrests on drug charges had thrown his life into confusion, but who was beginning to pull himself together by the time he came to us. He was not a "black" man, but Hispanic, with Mayan cheekbones and build. He worked as an auto mechanic, went to the movies, read the sports page, smoked weed. From outward signs, he was not someone you would expect to possess much historical imagination. In fact, he was not much given to reflection of any kind. He was just an average guy, responding to Douglass's story with surprise and admiration.

We use Douglass's Narrative as the central text in our Dorchester program. Although written a century and a half ago by a runaway slave who had never been to school and who taught himself to read and write, the book is as clear and readable as today's newspaper and serves us well with a student body that often ranges from the barely literate to the college-educated. It is not too difficult for the former, or too simple for the latter. We read just a few chapters a week, combined with short excerpts from other works that help us highlight the key issues. In this way, we get to know Douglass very well, talking about him over the entire semester and comparing his virtues and strengths, as well as his hardships, with those of other heroic figures like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr., and with struggling protagonists in fiction by Tolstoy and other classic Russian authors.

We ask questions like the following:

--How do people learn to face the things that life will demand?
--Where do people get their courage, self-esteem, and righteousness?

Notes: We find it useful with readers who are nervous about their ability to read "literature" to tell them at the outset to glance at the prefaces by white abolitionists Garrison and Phillips, before starting to read Douglass. The contrast is reassuring, and students are much more willing to read so colloquial a stylist after a taste of the preachers who introduced and authenticated him.

Some facilitators may want to consult the second version of Douglass's autobiography, My Life in Bondage (1855), in which he elaborates the material of the Narrative. Also helpful is Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (1980), who examines all the evidence in depth.