Per Caritatem

Like a voice crying out in the wilderness, Frederick Douglass speaks both eloquently and powerfully to the brutality and injustice of chattel slavery. For example, in his 1852 oration, “The Internal Slave Trade,” Douglass offers his own analysis and stringent condemnation of America’s participation in the trafficking of human beings for economic gain. He begins by drawing our attention to “the practical operation” of America’s slave industry, an industry “sustained by American politics and American religion! Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.”[1] Driven around the country like mere animals, these men, women, and children are beaten, prod, and whipped, as they process in dirge-like fashion toward the New Orleans slave market. Douglass then zeros in on a few of these infelicitous, iron-clad souls—an elderly, gray headed man, a young mother with sun-scorched back and teary eyes carrying her infant child, a teen-aged girl mourning the violent separation from her mother. Tired and exhausted from hours of exposure to the blistering sun, the young mother begins to lag behind. Then you hear it—“a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul.”[2] What was this awful sound, followed by a high-pitched, piercing scream? The sound was a whip striking the young mother’s bare shoulder; the scream needs no explanation. As the slave traders drive this human herd to the auction block, where the males will be “examined like horses” and the women ”exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers,” Douglass implores us not to forget “the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.”^[3]

This is simply one among many scenes depicting the hardships African American slaves endured on a daily basis as a result of the institution of chattel slavery. Enslaved by the love of money, the master’s vision becomes distorted. Not only does he see human beings as things, but the sounds of suffering fail to reach his muted ears. Deafened to the wailing of mothers torn from their children and children torn from their mothers, he transposes the dissonance of clanking chains into golden keys, which like the dual cut of a double-edged sword open the door to his future and secure the bonds of his brother.

To add to their humiliation and degraded status as mere property of the white man, slaves were subjected to public auctions where they were ordered to stand, often naked or nearly so, allowing the potential buyers to examine their bodies to ensure their suitability for long-term servitude. If a slave’s body showed signs of illness, disease, or possible weaknesses, they were passed over as bad investments, unprofitable for the master’s business. Scar tissue on a slave’s back—the number of scars, whether a scar was old or relatively fresh—became the subject of a mythology employed to determine a slave’s character. Too many scars indicated a rebellious spirit, whereas having few scars meant the slave possessed a docile, obedient spirit. “As they worked their way from inflicted scars to essential character, buyers fixed slaves in a typology of character according to the frequency, intensity, and chronology of the whipping apparent on their backs.”^[4] While the slaves stood humiliated, exposed and wondering what kind of master might purchase them on that particular day, the slave buyers paraded themselves before the crowds as augurs who “could read slaves’ backs as encodings of their histories.”^[5] The slave’s face, however, with its expressive capacities spanning the spectrum of human emotions—from compassion to agony, ecstasy to alarm—the face as the display case crafted to exhibit the eyes is of no interest to the slave buyers. Provided that it is free of work-hindering defects, the slave’s face is utterly insignificant to the purchase. “It was the instrumental value of these bodies that mattered to the buyer, their size and shape, the color and the ages, the comparability of parts and durability of attributes—not the faces.”^[6]

[1] Douglass, “The Internal Slave Trade,” 436.

[2] Ibid., 437.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Johnson, Soul by Soul, 145.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 142–3.

In his essay, “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’,” Richard Yarborough highlights how 19^th century, white bourgeois constructions of masculinity and “manhood” influenced early African American writers. We see evidence of the influence of socially constructed notions of gender in Frederick Douglass’s writings and speeches. For example, commenting on his fight with the reputed slave-breaker, Mr. Covey, Douglass describes the victory as having reawakened in him a sense of his own manhood.[1] As is true today, notions of masculinity and femininity, like notions of “blackness,” are shaped socially and culturally, shifting over time as a result of various changes in legal, religious, political and other practices and discourses. Douglass—as is the case with every other human being—is not immune to social forces. In fact, in many ways he accepts the (white) hegemonic view of what it means to be a successful, autonomous, self-made male.[2]  However, Douglass is acutely aware of what his white audience can hear and what they refuse to hear. In other words, as I shall argue, while Douglass succumbs to dominant (white) constructions of masculinity he also employs gender essentialist and gender subversive narratives in a rhetorico-rebellious key. To be clear, none of what follows should be taken as making excuses for Douglass’s participation in promoting a patriarchal social order or for overt affirmations of gender essentialism; however, it is to claim that advances in social progress—especially in oppressive contexts such as 19^th century America—typically require for a temporary period a special deployment of the dominant cultural tropes for the purpose of reshaping cultural consciousness. The danger lies, of course, in allowing the strategic discourses—essentialist or otherwise—to sediment; instead, they too must be interrogated once the oppressed group’s political aims have been sufficiently achieved.

Yarborough enumerates several characteristic traits or features encountered in 19^th century white narratives of masculinity. Among these “masculine” traits mediated through the white hegemonic narrative of Douglass’s day, we find: courage, self-control, rational excellence, nobility, verbal mastery, and autonomy.[3] Aware of such dominant tropes and realizing that they had to work against entrenched negative notions of blackness, Douglass and other black writers such as William Wells Brown crafted their autobiographies and their fictionalized black protagonists with white discourses of masculinity in mind.[4] Thus, we find in Brown’s novel, Clotel, depictions of black male heroic slaves as “hardly distinguishable from bourgeois whites” in speech, behavior, and appearance.[5]

On the one hand, African American writers were constrained by white narratives, whose influence affected the creative freedom and extent to which black writers could develop their plots and construct their heroes and villains. On the other hand, Douglass and others used the pre-formed white-masculinst tropes in creative and subversive ways to challenge prevailing views of black inferiority. Given that the white conceptions of ideal masculinity in Douglass’s day portrayed males as independent, courageous, powerful, self-reliant, reason-bearing individuals, who through perseverance and strength forge their own destinies, it is not surprising that Douglass describes his physical struggle with Covey as having restored his sense of manhood. Would his narrative have had the impact that it did among white (male) readers if he would have employed culturally “feminine” tropes? The most likely answer is an emphatic “no.” In short, black male writers were faced with a difficult balancing act in their attempts to create “successful” black male characters. That is, given both white views of ideal manhood and the negative depictions of black males as unreasoning “savages,” black authors had to justify incessantly every move their black protagonists made.

In his 1853 novella, “The Heroic Slave,” a fictionalized retelling of Madison Washington’s lead role in a slave revolt aboard the American ship, Creole, we find Douglass’s attempts to strike this impossible balance. For example, similar to his description of his own restrained use of physical force qua self-defense against Covey, Douglass depicts Washington as having exercised reasoned restraint in his heroic lead role in the slave insurrection. No doubt Douglass chooses to work within these white-formed literary limitations; however, in so doing he plays an active role in re-forming the white imaginary with respect to their false construal of blackness. Continuing his subversive rhetorical strategies, Douglass draws a parallel between the slave revolt aboard the Creole and the American Revolution.  As his drama unfolds and the revolt gains steam, Washington proclaims to his white antagonists (and here white readers are implicated): “We have struck for our freedom, and if a true man’s heart be in you, you will honor us for the deed. We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they.”[6] In other words, Douglass appeals to socially approved (white) male acts of violence—the violence enacted by the white revolutionary “fathers” in their struggle for freedom—to justify the violence of Madison Washington and the other slaves in their quest for freedom.[7]

Again, none of the above is meant to promote a status quo position with respect to gender or race. Feminist and womanist theorists, as well as other critics concerned with gender equality are right to highlight the tensions in Douglass’s various freedom narratives—in particular, his failure to challenge the patriarchy of his day and his embrace of white masculinist ideals. Granting these tensions, Douglass’s imperfect attempts nonetheless challenged the white imaginary both to rethink their views of blackness and to confront the contradictions of their own violent, irrational practices. Douglass’s literary battles, both his victories and his defeats, mirror his struggles to break free from white constraint not only in the form of slavery but likewise in his relations with white abolitionists, in particular, his complex relationship with William Lloyd Garrison. As Eric J. Sundquist observes, Douglass’s ongoing identity formation was constituted in relation to a series of both white and black father figures. Douglass’s revisions to his autobiographies is in part motivated by his struggle to grapple with not only his present/absent white master/father (Aaron Anthony) but with the black rebel Nat Turner, the black hero Madison Washington, the white Founding Fathers, and white abolitionists such as Garrison. Through creating his own version of Madison Washington and his multiple versions of himself, Douglass engages in an act of self-fathering. In this stage of his life, Douglass refuses his role as Garrison’s “text” and creates a new, living, ever-revising “self-text,” or as Sundquist puts it, a “self-fathered figure combining black and white ideals.”[8]

Through his mastery of “the codes of Anglo-American bourgeois white masculinity,” Douglass sought to create a black male hero “who would both win white converts to the antislavery struggle and firmly establish the reality of black manhood.”[9] By choosing to birth his black male characters through white masculinist “codes,” Douglass’s successes on one front become failures on other. Nevertheless, given his context of oppressive structural racism and entrenched patriarchy, it is difficult to imagine how he could have navigated an error-free path. Perhaps an all-out frontal attack on both racism and patriarchy would have resulted in alienating those (males) possessing the political power and cultural capital necessary to bring about significant social change. Such is the complexity of our human condition and the difficulty of outmaneuvering both Scylla and Charybdis.

Undeniably, the United States has come a long way from the days of chattel slavery, and we can be encouraged by the positive strides made in racial relations and equality; yet, it is important to remember whence we came in order to avoid repeating past mistakes and so that we might become critically alert to new manifestations of racism and racial bias.^[1] Here we would do well to heed the words of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Having accepted an invitation to speak to a predominately white audience in celebration of Independence Day, Douglass, as master orator and rhetorician, turns to a Psalm of lamentation—a passage with which his audience was thoroughly familiar—and interprets it as analogous to the situation of American slaves.

Douglass begins with the following lines:  “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song.”[2] The captors, having accomplished their mission, now command their Jewish captives, whose eyes still tear up when they recall Zion, to sing one of their native songs. To this obtuse, insensitive demand, Douglass, speaking the “plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people,”[3] asks, “[h]ow can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem […] let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”[4] Always poised and ready, like Socrates of old, to turn his public speaking invitations into opportunities to provoke and to challenge the ethico-political status quo, Douglass condemns his fellow citizens’ superficial “national, tumultuous joy” in celebration of America’s so-called “freedom” and independence. In fact, earlier in his speech, Douglass emphasizes the great “disparity” and “distance” separating him and his fellow citizens. The good fortune and “blessings” celebrated on this day do not apply to those of a darker hue. “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.”[5] Beyond the surface civility, the fanfare, and the laudatory refrains, Douglass remembers, Douglass hears “the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them.”^[6]

With this example of what Foucault calls “reverse discourse,” Douglass uses the familiar words of Scripture and says in effect, just as the Jews were taken captive by their oppressors, forced to dwell in a land not their own, similarly African American slaves find themselves as strangers in a strange land where they have been constructed as the savage, as the intellectually-inferior other in need of the white man’s culture, “superior” reasoning abilities, and “moral” direction. Like the Jews exiled in Babylon, the most suitable song, the song corresponding to the violent, unjust, degraded existence of an African American slave is not a song of triumphalist jubilation, but a song of sorrowful lament. For Douglass to gloss over this all-too-recent contemptible American history because he is no longer in chains would be to turn a deaf ear to the “mournful wail of millions” and to once again allow the white, hegemonic culture to write the black story. Moreover, Douglass reminds his audience—who, after all, function as analogues to the captors of God’s people of old—that God’s heart bleeds for the weak, the humble, the downtrodden. Though a merciful and forgiving God, divine justice unlike human justice will not, in the end, be mocked.

To all in the D/FW area interested in the topic, I would like to extend an invitation to participate in my dissertation lecture. My dissertation is entitled, “Constructed Subjectivities and a ‘Thick’ Account of Agency: A Foucauldian Dialogue with Douglass, Fanon, and the Augustinian-Franciscan Tradition.” The lecture shall begin at 6:30pm at the University of Dallas, Gorman Faculty Lounge (#6 on the campus map) on Monday, August 29th. A brief question and answer period and a reception shall follow the lecture. If you are interested, promise that you won’t throw tomatoes or any other objects, and can make it, I would love to see you there! You may read the dissertation abstract here.

With Bakhtin’s categories in mind (see Part II), Sisco singles out the notion of literacy and its function within the hegemonic discourses of nineteenth-century proslavery America. When Mr. Auld terminated Douglass’s reading lessons and provided his commentary on why the slave must remain illiterate, Douglass became aware, in a way he had not been previously, of the conjoint character of power and knowledge. At that “pre-literate stage” (Sisco’s term), Douglass internalizes and begins to assimilate the authoritative discourse of his masters and commits himself to the task of becoming literate in order to attain his freedom and to subvert the master/slave relationship. “Aware that Auld uses literacy as a means to assert superiority over his slaves, Douglass plans himself to change his own position among these binary oppositions by using literacy to assert power over his master.”[1] As Douglass’s narrative unfolds, part of what we see is not only his growth in literacy and education but also his, using Bakhtin’s term, “ideological becoming,” in which he struggles with authoritative discourses, assimilating them as internally persuasive discourses that take into account his distinctive experiences as a slave and a black other forced to live in white America.

Because slaves were denied the opportunity of formal education and discussion about the topic was considered taboo, Douglass had to engage in creative resistance tactics in order to continue his studies. As we shall see, Douglass’s understanding of and relation to literacy becomes increasingly complex. His determination to learn to read and write in the face of systemic socio-political as well as local opposition required innovative improvisatory maneuverings on his part.  The drama he depicts of his struggle to accomplish his educational goals “reveals that literacy exists in many varying capacities in the rich interstices between and around freedom and enslavement, in marginal spaces free from such confining structures and ideologies.”[2] Douglass recounts, for example, how at age twelve when he was sent to do errands for his master, he always brought a book with him and a few extra pieces of bread.  He would complete the errand as quickly as possible so that he might interact with the white boys playing in the streets, some of whom were quite poor and hungry. Douglass befriended the boys by giving them bread to eat and over time “converted [them] into teachers.”[3] By engaging in these resistance tactics, he was able to secure a reading lesson with every errand.

For his writing lessons, Douglass was equally creative. While walking through the shipyards one day, he noticed that the ship carpenters used a letter abbreviation system to mark the various pieces of wood to be used for the different parts of a ship.  The letter “L” indicated a board for the larboard side, the letter “S” the starboard side, “S.F.” the starboard side forward, “S.A.” the starboard aft, and so forth. Douglass learned in a relatively short amount of time both the names of these four letters and how to write them.[4] As Sisco observes, “[o]n the body of ships which both represent freedom and facilitate slavery, literacy is used by the shipbuilders for a purely utilitarian purpose”; however, Douglass is able to recontextualize this “functional use of literacy” and “to transform the shipyard into a scene of self-education and an act of political resistance.”[5]

His next subversive move was to find a white boy and challenge him to a writing “duel.” That is, Douglass would inform the white boy that he could write as well as the latter. The white boy would then demand that Douglass prove it; Douglass would write a letter and the white boy would follow suit. In this way, Douglass received his “public” schooling, obtaining numerous writing lessons from the white boys by playing on their desires for one-upmanship, especially with respect to a challenge from a slave. Quite cognizant of how “literacy, as a form of knowledge, signals a kind of mental superiority for whites over illiterate blacks,”[6] Douglass takes advantage of this antagonism and creates educational sites wherever he goes. Describing his non-traditional classroom during that time, he writes, “my copy-book was the board fence, brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk.”[7] Finally, Douglass’s basic writing lessons were completed when he was able to copy “the Italics in Webster’s Spelling Book” by memory.  At this stage, he had been using little Master Thomas’s (Mr. Auld’s son) old copy-books, which had been more or less discarded. As Douglass explains, while Mrs. Auld was away at a meeting on Monday afternoons, he would “spend time in writing in the spaces left in [little] Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written.”[8] At last, over the course of seven years at the Auld’s, Douglass succeeded in reaching his goal of learning to read and write via his willful acts of “subterfuge, antagonism, direct imitation, and ultimately self-insertion in the margins of the ‘authoritative discourse’ of a southern ideology of literacy.”[9] Working within the racialized structures, authoritative discourses, and unjust practices of white southern society, “Douglass […] emerges as a literate individual in the marginal spaces between the world sanctioned by slavery and an alternating space of his own making free from its oppressive limitations.”[10]

In the previous post, I introduced Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse. In broad strokes, authoritative discourse, whether “religious, political, or moral,” comes from those holding positions of authority—“the word of a father, of adults and of teachers etc.”[1] In contrast, internally persuasive discourse in its most common variant “is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal code.”[2] The latter also cannot but arise out of the heteroglossia of authoritative discourses; yet, it can be reharmonized and reframed in a way that “pure” authoritative discourse cannot. The latter comes “with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers.”[3]

Because its history as already-accepted authority precedes us, authoritative discourse is not simply one discourse among others. Rather, it resists egalitarian status and imposes itself as sovereign. Manifesting in the form of religious, political, or scientific dogma, “[i]t is given (it sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact. Its language is a special (as it were, hieratic) language. […] It is akin to taboo, i.e., a name that must not be taken in vain.”[4] In other words, one ought not question authoritative discourse—to do so is itself a transgressive (in the negative sense) and a treasonous act, a sign of rebellion or perhaps backwardness. Not only does a certain rigidity and calcification characterize authoritative discourse, but likewise its “framing context” is immovable, frozen. “[I]t remains sharply demarcated, compact and inert: […] it is fully complete, it has but a single meaning, the letter is fully sufficient to the sense and calcifies it.”[5] One cannot improvise with authoritative discourse, nor can one reharmonize its melodies; it requires a unison voice; it demands complete replication with no key changes, modulations, or ornamentations. It calls for “unconditional allegiance” and “permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. […] one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it.”[6]As my brief description indicates, authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse are polysemous and have (ongoing) dynamic dialogical relations with one another, pressuring, convincing, infusing and at times coinciding and merging harmoniously with one another.[7]

Since we are born into and inherit authoritative discourses, at least some of these discourses are experienced as internally persuasive even if unacknowledged. Here, the qualifier “internally persuasive” signifies a kind of unreflective embrace of authoritative discourse. However, when an individual actively in process of “ideological becoming” experiences an event or encounters a counter-discourse compelling him or her to question the authoritative discourse, a gap between these two kinds of discourse occurs. As Bakhtin explains, “consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself; the process of distinguishing between one’s own and another’s discourse […] is activated rather late in development.”[8]

Prior to an individual moving toward this more reflective mode of discourse discrimination and active appropriation, he or she first experiences a “separation between internally persuasive discourse and authoritarian enforced discourse.”[9] Because internally persuasive discourse is constituted from a cacophony of alien discourses, even when we shape a discourse of our own, that new discourse is of course never simply ours. Nonetheless, there is a productiveness and flexibility about internally persuasive discourse creating space for personal assimilation. It allows “new” words and discourses to emerge out of the discourses with which we are already familiar and within which we live; it manifests an openness, a dynamism fostering development and application “to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses.”[10] In fact, according to Bakhtin, “[o]ur ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values.”[11]

Lastly, in contrast with the rigidity of authoritative discourse both in terms of content and surrounding or framing context, internally persuasive discourse promotes an improvisatory ethos. One can reharmonize its words by re-orchestrating the framing context, extending its former boundaries, opening up its semantic fields, and developing its themes in conversation with contemporary concerns. The internally persuasive word is perpetually pregnant with “further creative life”; it continues as an unfinished symphony in which multiple composers and performers improvise on its themes, stretch its form, and refuse to allow a final note to sound. The essence of internally persuasive discourse is dynamic and inexhaustible, always yielding new insights as we “put it in a new situation in order to wrest new answers from it, […] and even wrest from it new words of its own (since another’s discourse, if productive, gives birth to a new word from us in response).”[12]