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No part of the past is dead or indifferent.
—FREDERICK D OUGL ASS
History is not the past. It is the present.
We carry our history with us.
We are our history.—JAMES BALDWIN
PROLOGUE: 1844 Frederick
“BOY, YOU’RE NO SLAVE,” shouted the old white man who stood in the fifth row, interrupting Frederick with a voice so deep it should not have come from a slanted, withered body. “You’re just another lying, big-headed nigger.”A few in the audience gasped, but no heads turned to investigate or condemn, as if the old man had been appointed to say what the others were thinking.
A young, wiry man with a bulbous nose stood. “Yes, prove it! You sure don’t talk like one.”
Frederick’s neck veins throbbed against his crisp shirt collar and cravat; he didn’t know what to say. He was usually quick to respond to verbal affronts with sarcastic remarks or pointed questions, but now he took a deep breath, lifted his wide chest, and glared at the hundreds who packed the town hall that Sunday afternoon in Massachusetts.
He waited.
Still wearing the dark coats and frocks required for the morning’s church service, the people before him sat on benches with backs in rigid formation, a field of jutting rocks. Beyond the closed windows, the red, yellow, and gold leaves shimmered in the sunlight.
Rage reddened the face of the young man, and he looked around, agitated by the silence. “Prove it,” he yelled. “Prove it!”
Now ignited, the audience began to chant, “Prove it.” And as the chant swelled to a chorus of shouting and stomping feet, the customary reserve of New Englanders was unmasked to reveal the brutality of mobs, the faces of witch-burners, the crowd that chased William Lloyd Garrison in Boston.
Frederick smirked.
After three years as a lecturer, discovered by Garrison and other white abolitionists during an antislavery convention on Nantucket Island, Frederick had told his story countless times throughout New England, noticing surprise and suspicion in whites, overhearing the whispered comments about his yellow skin, his articulate speech. But before today he had never been confronted about his past with such raw effrontery.
He wanted to shout them all down with his bass–baritone voice. Frederick had learned to use this powerful instrument and could chastise like the best preachers or curse like a dockworker.
Frederick knew what he had to do. A shouted denunciation like the jeremiads of the Old Testament he quoted often, another story with more graphic details of his past, more revelations of the emotional pain he felt as a child— none of these would not satisfy the demands for proof. He needed to shock the audience, force their silence, destroy the last vestiges of doubt.
Frederick started to unbutton his overcoat. With every button, he recalled the snide remarks, the contemptuous questions, the mocking surprises: Where did the abolitionists find him? His white father explains his intelligence. Who does he think he is, talking like a white man? Even some of his white antislavery col- leagues had suggested that he speak less formally and add plantation talk to his narratives for greater authenticity.
He unbuttoned his waistcoat and thought, How dare you presume to judge me. I am your equal. No, I am better.
Frederick deliberately folded his coats before he placed them on the chair behind him. He took the suspenders off his thick shoulders, leaving them as dangled hoops on his hips, and pulled at the tail of his shirt after releasing the lower buttons. Wanting no interference, he avoided the widening eyes and gripped hands of the meeting chairman, James Buffum, whose Quaker reserve was as tight as the cravat around his neck.
“Friend Douglass, what are you doing?” asked Buffum, motionless as he stared, at the nearby table.
“I’ll show them.” He said to Buffum. Frederick’s face was hot. He was sure that the ridge across the top of his nose, scars from injuries long ago, bulged.
“No,” said Buffum, “The ladies . . .” “Let them see,” said Frederick. A few men pulled their female companions’ arms, ushering them out. Most people remained transfixed as Frederick, gathering and lifting the folds of his shirt, turned around to show the work of the slave breaker Edward Covey, who was hired to crush his spirit and almost drove him to suicide. Frederick was fifteen, his lacerations the stories of an unforgettable year at a remote farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.Exposing the gashes healed by thick lard, Frederick pulled his shirt as high as he could and held it there for what seemed an eternity. He counted the thirty seconds as he stared ahead, hearing the pounding of his heart, feeling the sweat of his brow, holding his breath as he clenched his teeth and felt the shocked silence. The doubting old man then started to applaud. The singular clapping of his hands crackled like snapping wood in the silent hall. Another man clapped, and then another. Soon there was a standing ovation and shouted cheers. “Hear, hear!”
“Yes, sir!”
Frederick turned his head to the right and grinned, enjoying Buffum’s open- mouthed surprise as much as the deafening noise. He quickly tucked in his shirt and put on his coats before turning.
He waited for absolute silence, staring at three stone-faced men with folded, defiant arms at the back of the room. One of them lowered his arms, but still Frederick waited, demanding the capitulation of the other two.
The second man lowered his arms. Then the third. Only then did Frederick return to the exact place where he had stopped and continue his well-rehearsed speech. He concluded with his now famous parody of southern preachers defending slavery. “Oh, if you wish to be happy in time, happy in eternity, you must be obedient to your masters, their interest is yours,” he intoned, enjoying his mastery of mimicry developed in childhood. “God made one portion of men to do the working, and another to do the thinking. Now you have no trouble or anxiety. But ah, you can’t imagine how perplexing it is to your masters and mistresses to have so much thinking, to do on your behalf. Oh, how grateful you and obedient to your masters! How beautiful are the arrangements of Providence! Look at your hard, horny hands—see how nicely they are adapted to the labor you have to perform. Look at our delicate fingers, so exactly fitted for our station, and see how manifest it is that God designed us to be this His thinkers, and you the workers—Oh, the wisdom of God.”
Frederick knew his audiences. With laughter and applause, white Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists relished their superiorities. Southerners were the true Christian hypocrites.
Nevertheless, Frederick believed he had debased himself. The lifting of his shirt was vulgar and melodramatic, unworthy of a gentleman; it reminded him of the slave block where slaves were examined for physical assets and liabilities. He had successfully rebuked these New Englanders, but he knew he would never reveal his scars again. With no bill of sale, he had to find another way to prove himself. Legally, he was still a fugitive.
Frederick’s credibility was now a matter of open discussion in The Liberator. One correspondent wrote, “Many persons in the audience seemed unable to credit the statements which he gave of himself and could not believe that he was actually a slave. How a man, only six years out of bondage, and who had never gone to school a day in his life, could speak with such eloquence, with such precision of language, and power of thought, they were utterly at a loss to devise.”
After three years standing before the white public, Frederick could tolerate the whispered suspicions, the innuendo, the gossip shared by colleagues. But printed suspicion made his situation intolerable. He needed to respond in kind because he understood the power of the printed word, the fear it inspired, the hope it nurtured. As a youth, Frederick had dared to teach adult slaves how to read, creating a school in the forest of the Eastern Shore, and was almost lynched for it. Print mattered. A book could change the world.
Frederick knew what to do: write an autobiography and name family members, masters, and plantations. He would tell everything except the details of his escape and put the entire matter to rest. There was no other choice. All he had was his word. His career as a legitimate antislavery agent was at stake.
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey Douglass had a book to write.
