Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Frederick Douglas

Prophet of Freedom

"Whoever levies a tax upon [tea], will find the whole land blazing with patriotism and bristling with bayonets". . . but "Millions of a foreign race may be stolen from their homes, and reduced to hopeless and inhuman bondage among us and we either approve the deed, or protest as gently as 'sucking doves.'"  That's Frederick Douglass commenting on the "paradox of passing history."  It is just like in Jill Lepore's THESE TRUTHS.  America suffers from a kind of split personality.  America is all about freedom and liberty, except when America is all about building its prosperity on slavery.  Which is really to say that America is all about protecting its vested interests while spouting humanistic platitudes.

"His 'wickedly selfish' Americans loved to celebrate their 'own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.'  They lived by the 'philosophy of Cain,' ready with their bluntly evil answer to the famous question 'Am I my brother's keeper?'"  From that shower of quotation marks, we can conclude that Douglass believed, and with good reason, that Americans consistently answer that question with "Why should I care?"

Emerson said that "all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons."  James Baldwin made the same point:  "The world is held together--it really is--by the love and determination of a very few people."  Frederick Douglass was one of those people.

I just finished David Blight's biography, FREDERICK DOUGLAS PROPHET OF FREEDOM, a few days ago.  I started it at the pool in Puerto Vallarta and finished it two weeks later at home.  We don't have a pool to read by at home.  Plus it was snowing.

The book was an apt follow up to THESE TRUTHS because both works talk a lot about racism as the raison d'ĂȘtre for most of what transpired in this country.  Jill Lepore's book was an easier read for me, not only because I was by the pool, but also because Lepore writes better sentences.  Another reason is that Blight's scrutiny of his subject ends up making Douglass not very likable.  Of course, he had good reasons for  taking himself a little too seriously and for being ruthlessly unforgiving of his enemies, for carrying grudges, for riding roughshod over his long suffering wife, for "courting" rich white women, and for any number of other little transgressions that we all commit, but not under the same microscope.

The horror of his life while enslaved and the events leading up to his escape comprised the first third of the book and were the most captivating.  His up and down relationship with Lincoln and politics in general is a familiar story, but still fascinating and disillusioning at the same time.  His struggles to get his message out via a series of barely viable newspapers combined with a disfunctional family always asking for money and employment, juxtaposed to the giant he became on a lecture tour or in the political arena made up most of the rest of the book.  Along with Lepore's book, I now have the last part of the nineteenth century in America down pat.  Ask me anything.

The book also sheds meaningful light on many works of black literature.  Booker T. Washington is a figure in the last part of Douglass' life and the connections to Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN are all over the place.  All of Toni Morrison's works could have easily gotten their start from Douglass and his three autobiographies.  James Baldwin is there.  Malcolm X.  Martin Luther King.  Blight's book illuminates all those others.

Douglass undergirds protest movements of all kinds:  "You don't find truth in the middle of the road; you find truth beneath the superficial, mediocre, mainstream dialogue . . .buried . . .hidden . . . and when you connect with that truth, you have to take a stand."

I enjoyed the book.  I learned a lot.  But on my next trip I'm gonna try to bring paperbacks.