Blood on the Joist: Masculine Desire & (Re) imagining the Boundaries of
Identity in Frederick Douglass’s Autobiographies
by
Clarence W. Tweedy, III
African American slave narratives were crucial in
historicizing the slave experience and challenging the moral as well as
political legitimacy of slavery in the
I argue that Douglass’s witnessing of his Aunt Hester’s unjust punishment serves as more than a moment of his initiation into slavery; rather, it becomes a (re)narrated scene in which the body of Aunt Hester is objectified, establishing the difference between Douglass’s agency juxtaposed against her passivity. His narrative is more about the formation of his self-identity by establishing bodily and psychological difference between him and the victims of traumatic violence. Critics such as John Ernest argue that Douglass’s narrative is a “double voiced” historical commentary of his individual struggle to escape from slavery into the freedom of self-agency (203). However, Douglass’s text is more than just a historical commentary; it provides insight as to how former slaves dealt with traumatic violence. It is through the objectification of Hester that Douglass projects his unwanted affects of shame and humiliation into the scene, while introjecting into his self the positive affects of white manhood—agency and self-reliance on his journey toward freedom. In this sense, the violent and traumatic scenes of his narrative (re)inscribe bodily meanings of victims in order to subvert the power of white patriarchy, leading to his (re)creation of his self-identity.
First, Douglass reproduces the scene of Aunt Hester’s beating in order to announce the end of his innocence and the emergence of his masculine voice. Moreover, he co-opts the master’s torture of Aunt Hester’s body, stripping away her language in order to (re)imagine his self-identity. Second, he continues to display Hester’s body in his second and third revisions of his life story in order to create his discursive and heroic identity in relation to her bodily passivity. Finally, it is his fight with Covey that brings to the forefront his masculine identity and agency. Hester’s and Covey’s scenes of violence both demonstrate Douglass’s psychical splitting that simultaneously addresses the horrible reality of slavery, while disavowaling the psychological consequences of his traumatic experiences in favor of a mimicked identity of white manhood and a discursive embodiment of white agency.
In order to explore Douglass’s scenes of sadomasochistic violence, I use Anna Freud’s definitions of projection and introjection where an individual, such as Douglass, projects attributes, tendencies, desires, etc., to others that he refuses to recognize in himself, while introjecting, taking into himself, what he perceives to be positive and wanted affects—in Douglass’s case powerlessness vs. power. The bodily pain of victims becomes the symbolic language of Douglass’s heroic rise from slavery into a de-racialized reproduction of white American manhood. And what is hidden in his (re)modification of traumatic events is his objectified body. Beneath Douglass’s narrative discourse is a disavowal of the reality of traumatic events which are re-written into a symbolic language of bodily violence that introjects the socio-cultural values of republicanism, bodily self possession, the narrative negation of Douglass’s past objectification, and the insertion of masculine agency into his textual identity. In this sense, we are not dealing with the pain of the body in the traumatic experience of oppression and abuse; rather, we are confronted with the socio-cultural symbolism of sadomasochism as masculine power projected through the manipulation of violence.
The psychical split that we see in Douglass’s narrative is a disavowal of the reality of his objectified body under the dominance of his master. Each time that Douglass witnesses violence, or engages in acts of physical violence, it functions as a means of symbolically negating his past objectification by (re)inscribing these scenes with his desires for agency as well as manhood. In this regard, the pain and trauma of Aunt Hester is severed from the real event witnessed by Douglass. Her body operates as a symbolic and sympathetic catalyst, drawing the attention of the audience to the horrors of Douglass’s enslavement. Thus, the objectified body of Aunt Hester underpins Douglass’s rise into self-agency. His self-agency, both narratively and publicly, are dependent upon his ability to disavow his experiences of objectification within the confines of his autobiography.
Thus, we never witness Douglass as a docile slave or even as passive victim; rather, over and over again he narrates a story of his resistance as well as subversion of the desires and control of white manhood over both his bodily objectification and psychological agency. And, although he does temporarily disrupt the white supremacist system of control, his agency is conjoined, as well as his newfound self-identity with the violent acts used to maintain white masculinity. In the end, Douglass’s desire for self authored identity and manhood reproduces the same system of sadistic masculinity that has enslaved and exploited him.
In Douglass’s writings, agency over African American bodies is a zone of confrontation between competing definitions of black and white manhood. In this sense, the public and private transcripts reflect the internal and external dynamic of the narrative.[1] The public transcript of the narrative is an attempt to define Douglass’s body and identity as non-objects in the face of continual white American racism vs. the hidden transcript of the story that re-asserts Americanized connections of sadomasochistic power dynamics with the passivity and docility of the black body. Douglass never engages in a direct confrontation with Captain Auld. Instead, he consistently engages in textual moments of subversions by inserting his desires into (re)narrated scenes of trauma and psychological conflict. For Douglass, his narrative is an attempt to demonstrate his agency and self reliance, even under the oppressive conditions of slavery, while disrupting socio-political beliefs that consistently challenge his self-identity. Douglass’s public transcript exposes and challenges the exploitative nature of American slavery, while the hidden transcript re-negotiates the racial boundaries of manhood. His narrative represents his transition into self-made manhood, detailing his subversion of white hegemony as well as escape in his attempt to assert his equality. Douglass’s narrative journey imbues him with the attributes of white manhood through acts of linguistic subversion and in the manipulation of violent symbolism.
Violence and the Passive Body
In his narrative, Douglass uses Hester’s image of suffering to challenge white authority over his body and self-autonomy. But in as much as the masochistic image of the narrative disrupts white patriarchy it is also acts as a re-affirmation of its power. Douglass employs the same socio-cultural material that connects passivity and subordination to the female body. Lynn Chancer’s Sadomasochism in Everyday Life asserts: “Patriarchy creates a tendency for sadomasochism to become gendered, as women are socialized into a relatively more masochistic position, men into roles that are relatively more sadistic” (27). His depiction of Aunt Hester is a re-investment of the patriarchal tendency to engender the masochistic position: women become victims and men become sadists. However, Hester is a projection of Douglass’s own passivity and subjugation which allows for him to articulate his claims for manhood. And, as Mason Stokes’ The Color of Sex asserts: the “subversive power of black writing” is its adherence to an “oppressive bodily economy” that becomes “subsumed under the sign of black flesh” (2). In the case of Douglass’s narrative, the sign of black flesh is the racialized and gendered objectification of Aunt Hester’s body that serves to conceal his status as an object. Thus, the depiction of Aunt Hester’s brutal beating demonstrates Douglass’s positing of unwanted affects of shame, passivity, and humiliation into Hester, while associating himself with the power, as well as agency, of Captain Auld. It is a highly sexually charged scene in which Douglass manipulates socio-cultural stereotypes of gender.[2]
It is important to note that Douglass’s story of Hester’s beating is based on a childhood memory. Although Douglass is narrating his story as a free man he is still psychologically bound to his slave experiences. He re-narrates the story over more than twenty years after witnessing the event. One can imagine how the brutal scene traumatized young Douglass. Jacob Arlow’s “Trauma, Play, and Perversion” argues that children cope with and attempt to overcome traumatic events by displacing reality into a world of play (35). Often victims of childhood trauma, or child witnesses of trauma, blame themselves for their powerlessness to prevent victimization. When discussing the traumatic event, individuals often project their adult maturity and emotional understanding into the narration of the past traumatic event. Their projection of affect serves as a means to control the reproduction of the traumatic event and its subsequent psychological consequences. Thus, the scene of Hester’s torture is not the voice of a child speaking but the voice of the narrator, attempting to deal with the trauma of his childhood through the (re)inscription of past abuse. In Douglass’s autobiographies, the reoccurring image of the brutality suffered by Hester demonstrates his continual attempt to cope with the traumatic effects of slavery, creating a constant textual anxiety between past enslavement and the freedom afforded by his escape.
In
her chapter, “Myths of Masculinity: Frederick Douglass and the Oedipus
Complex,” Gwen Bergner argues that “scenes of racial discovery” complicate
Douglass’s narrative (19). She suggests that Douglass’s scene of “racial
discovery” occurs when he witnesses Captain Auld’s vicious beating of Hester.
It is here that Douglass associates the notions of dominance with masculinity
and passivity with the female body. And, for Douglass, these notions of
passivity and dominance begin to form the shifting pattern of his narrative
struggle between slavery and masculine identity.
His text radiates with masculine desires that attempt to both authenticate, as well as to negate his former slave status, while establishing his masculine identity and subverting the power of white manhood over his body. His autonomy is plotted through his racially (re)imagined, as well as (re)aligned, myth of the self-made man. Douglass’s endorsement of the myth of the self-made man consumes the body of Aunt Hester within the narrative in order to build a site through which he can create his self-autonomy. The depiction of her body is an iconic representation of his desire for self-hood and the need to end his condition of servitude. Sander L. Gilman’s “Black Bodies, White Bodies” argues that iconic representations reveal the relationship between individuals and their social status (223). Thus, Douglass’s depiction of Hester is less about providing an exact representation of the event and her bodily trauma; rather, it is ideologically charged with his desire for manhood. After her torture, her body remains narratively bound to the joist as Douglass’s masculine and authorial voice begins to take shape, laying claims to the conventions of white masculinity. Thus, Douglass moves at the beginning of the narrative from a position of passivity, unable to contemplate direct confrontation with white authority, to a sadistic identification with white manhood through his reproduction of Hester’s torture. It is his narrative move from masochist to sadist that empowers Douglass in his future confrontations with white patriarchal power. What is noticeably absent from the first autobiography is any hint of his own physical subjugation while enslaved. Instead, we (re)live and (re)witness Hester’s violation, leading to the creation of Douglass’s authorial voice.
Douglass’s failure to discuss the physical violations of his body causes the narrative to use the suffering of Hester as an act of narrative self-creation. By (re)creating the violence inflicted upon Hester, Douglass’s autobiography demonstrates his masculine agency over his body and, symbolically, the black woman’s body throughout the entire text by not displaying the pain inflicted upon him. Bergner’s Taboo Subjects argues that the subtext of Douglass’s slave narrative is his desire for masculinity and agency defined through his psychological association with his master during the whipping of Aunt Hester (38). Douglass creates a textual path through which he can assert desires for freedom, manhood, and humanity (Stokes 1). Although he does sympathize with Aunt Hester, his sympathy serves to establish the difference between her passivity and his self-agency. In this regard, readers’ sympathy for Aunt Hester is secondary to the sympathy that Douglass garners as a young child witnessing the brutality of Captain Auld. Moreover, his narrative exploits Hester’s bodily anguish in order to transcend the condition of his physical and psychological servitude. Douglass becomes the embodiment of the self-made man through Hester’s objectification. Thus, she is the sacrificial victim that leads to his identity transformation into manhood. It is her expressions and pleas of anguish that act as a linguistic bridge between the narrator and the emergence of his masculine identity.
However, Douglass fails to reinvest Aunt Hester with a voice that would allow her the power to subvert Captain Auld and to establish her own self-identity. Instead, it is in her moments of agony that he announces his birth into the world of slavery, giving to him the power to re-make his public identity. Douglass’s masculine, rhetorical strategy assumes the master’s position in extending his agency and power through the subjugation, and confession, of the body of Aunt Hester. Moreover, we witness how Douglass becomes complicit in acts of violence perpetuated against the bodies of African American women through his depiction of her. He manipulates the scene of Hester’s beating in order to (re)inscribe her with his masculine desire. Thus, her body functions as a projection of his own passivity through which he emerges to (re)imagine his masculine identity and confront the white hegemonic control over his bodily status as property. Bergner argues:
Douglass’s Narrative uses the image of a castrated woman to foster masculine fantasies of control over meaning. The link between a woman’s damaged body and a man’s ability to make meaning . . . is really a symbolic condition for signification. . . . Douglass’s narrative manipulates contradictory identifications of gender and race according to political and historical determinants. (41)
Hester’s depiction functions as the means through which Douglass’s “masculine fantasies” emerge. For, if Douglass equates himself with the body of Hester, then he would be accepting passivity. Thus, her body serves to conceal Douglass’s passivity and objectification, while maintaining the patriarchal subordination of women through his mimicry of socio-culturally, gender inscribed violence. It is through this juxtaposition of gender difference that Douglass begins to (re)define his identity as the self-made man within both the black and white community. The alignment of gender and race represent his psychological association with the desires of the master. Douglass writes:
I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it. (Narrative 5)
His witnessing of Aunt Hester’s beating becomes the “bloodstained gate” through which he enters into the “hell of slavery.” However, Douglass’s re-enactment of this event does not serve as a testimony to the master’s power, but rather it becomes an act of subversion. Similar to the master, Douglass robs Aunt Hester of her voice in order to narrate his own feelings outrage and horror.[4] And in doing so, he opens the gate to his demands for freedom and manhood.
In the case of Aunt Hester, Captain Anthony punishes her because she failed to obey his restriction that she not visit Lloyd’s Ned. However, Douglass displaces the master’s display of power and authority with the desires of his voice. Aunt Hester’s is a projection of Douglass’s feelings of humiliation and powerlessness associated with his enslavement. In effect, Aunt Hester’s body serves as conduit through which Douglass asserts his desires for self-identity, manhood, and self-determination. Douglass writes:
Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, naked. Then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d—d b—h. After crossing her hands he tied them with a strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, for his infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, ‘Now, you d—d b—h, I’ll learn you how to obey my orders!’ and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. (Narrative 6)
He subverts the hegemonic power of Captain Anthony, by silencing the pleas of Aunt Hester in his re-telling of her story. Thus, Douglass aligns himself with Captain Anthony’s act of violence. Bergner argues: “He authenticates his voice as Representative American Negro Man by temporarily aligning himself with his aunt. Yet his mimetic mastery of writing also allows him partly to suspend his enslavement: inscribing the Name-of-the-Father displaces his humiliation as a slave onto an African American woman” (30). However, Douglass’s reproduction of Aunt Hester’s beating not only displaces his shame and humiliation into her it also conceals his objectified body with the scene.
Thus, immediately after the scene Douglass’s narrative voice and declaration of his desire to be free are manifested. The whip of Auld is no longer the weapon of domination; rather, it is the body of Aunt Hester that operates to reveal the injustice and cruelty of slave master’s towards their slaves. Furthermore, Douglass preserves his masculine image for his audience by not allowing his body and discursive identity to be associated with Hester’s victimized body. In his later revisions, My Bondage and My Freedom and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his narrative voice is even more prevalent. In “Letter to his Old Master,” Douglass asserts:
When yet but a child about six years old, I imbibed the determination to run away. The very first mental effort that I now remember on my part, was an attempt to solve the mystery—why am I a slave? And with this question my youthful mind was troubled for many days, pressing upon me more heavily at times than others. When I saw the slave-driver whip a slave-woman, cut the blood out of her neck, and heard her piteous cries, I went away into the corner fence, wept and pondered over the mystery. (My Bondage 319)
What is most noticeable about this scene is that the voice that is speaking is
not that of six year old child, but, rather, that of Douglass the adult narrator of the
story. The child is erased and we do not witness a young boy struggling with
emotional trauma. Instead, we see the introjection of affects of determination and
resolve embodied in the young Douglass as he grapples with the violence he has
witnessed while in servitude. And as he goes away to the fence, he disavows the reality of the slave woman’s “piteous screams” in pondering the mystery of his enslavement. Like Hester, her voice falls silent as well.
By robbing black women of their voiced expression of pain, Douglass narrates his ascension into agency and masculinity through a declaration of the loss of his childhood innocence. Hester’s loss of language becomes the extension of his masculine world reproduced through her commodified personhood. Priscilla Wald asserts: “The eroticized scene is fueled by and in turn reproduces the enslaved woman’s commodified personhood. As an author, Douglass participates in the representation, perpetuation, and reproduction of these dynamics” (Wald 81-2). Douglass usurps the language of torture in order to manifest his voice, leading to his recognition of the oppressive conditions of slavery. It is not only the loss of Hester’s voice that we witness, but the loss of Douglass’s voice as a child replaced by his adult and authorial voice through the commodification and objectification of Aunt Hester.
Furthermore, Douglass maintains the use of Hester’s body in My Bondage and My Freedom and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Both revisions display similar depictions of Capitan Auld’s assault that is in the 1845 narrative. His consistent use of Hester’s image and his continued re-assertions of manhood are direct results of the historical treatment of African Americans over the course of his life. After the Civil War and the end of slavery, African Americans were still viewed as second class American citizens, leading to the codification of Jim Crow laws that once again restricted their rights as well as their political and socio-economic opportunities.
Although Douglass asserts more authorial control over his revisions, he still consistently deals with issues of his public objectification and exploitation. Specifically in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass points out how William Lloyd Garrison and others treat him as an object, more so than as a person. Brent Edwards asserts: “Over and over again, he points out the ways that Garrison and others treat him as an example, as a living document of slavery, but never as an emerging intellectual in his own right with his own shifting opinions and his own hunger for knowledge” (xxvii). However, psychologically, Douglass’s revisions are less about him as an emerging intellectual and more about re-occurring experiences of objectification by white men that serve as a constant remainder of his traumatic past. Douglass writes:
generally introduced as a “chattel”—a “thing”—a piece of southern “property”—the chairman assuring the audience that it could speak. Fugitive slaves, at that time, were not so plentiful as now; and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being a “brand new fact”—the first one out … “Give us the facts,” said Collins, “we will take care of the philosophy.” … It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them (My Bondage 268-269)
Contrary to Edwards’s interpretation that Douglass’s story establishes him as an
intellectual, my interest is in how Douglass’s autobiographies produce a hidden
transcript that denounces, for him, the primary wrong of his continual
objectification. His description of being chattel, a thing, and property of the
abolitionists draws a clear comparison to his subjugation and exploitation under
slavery. Thus, in his revisions, he maintains a narrative strategy of negating
his objectification by juxtaposing his active agency vs. the passivity of the
victims.
Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake The Nations argues that Douglass’s revisions assert republican principles and an inherent demand for equal rights, making his rise from slave to public orator “the model of African American life” (85). Moreover, his revisions solidify his public position as a continual race leader in the black community. Sunquist asserts:
Douglass’s very revision of his own
life is the central element of his entry into
However, Douglass’s rejection of slave culture and his paternity does not preclude him from using the sadomasochistic imagery that associates passivity with the powerlessness of the female body. Thus, at the same time he denounces the patriarchal system of slavery and white manhood, his autobiographies maintain the sadomasochistic power dynamics of gender. Moreover, discursive and textual identity must be continually portrayed as a site of subversion and resistance to the power of white patriarchy over him. In effect, Douglass’s advocacy of political liberalism is maintained through his scenes of violence. Violence symbolically establishes him as his own man, beholden to no one.
Moreover, Douglass
demonstrates his complicated relationship with Garrisonian abolitionism when he
grants the privilege of choosing a new name for him to Nathan Johnson—an
abolitionist who provided him with hospitality and lodging after his arrival in
I gave Mr. Johnson the privilege of
choosing me a name, but told him he must not take from me the name of “
By delegating Johnson to choose a
name for him, Douglass shows the double bind in which he exists as runaway slave
and public orator for the abolitionist movement. His insistence that he keeps
the name of “
Although Douglass is doubly bound in his revolt against slavery and his demeaning exhibition as “platform slave specimen,” he continually uses the scene of Hester’s bodily torture as a means of asserting his self proclaimed agency and escaping his own exploitation. Hester’s bodily sacrifice remains a constant site of transition into masculine identity, serving to make him into the ideal model of black manhood created through self-determination. Furthermore, Douglass would change the scene in his later revisions in order to bring Hester’s body under the protection and concealment of black manhood.
The notion of
concealment operates as a textual strategy, showing black womanhood’s need for
protection by black men. In Douglass’s original narrative, Anna Murray, his wife,
suddenly appears in and then disappears from the text. However, how and where
he meets Anna Murray, a free black woman, as well as develops a relationship
with her, exists outside of the text. Suddenly, he announces her saying, “At
this time, Anna, my intended wife came on; for I wrote to her immediately after
my arrival at
Finally, Douglass modifies the description of Hester’s beating, in his two revised autobiographies, by giving her back the power of language. It is through the use of Hester’s image that he demonstrates white manhood as a violent threat to the black woman’s body, while investing the desire to protect black womanhood within the domain of black masculinity. In the revised scene, Douglass graphically details how Hester is bound and hung from the joist. Moreover, Capitan Auld is the one is robbed of language and no longer does he scream at her “d—d b—h,” while Hester is re-invested with the language of her suffering. The removal of Auld’s voice and the return of Hester’s power to speak is an act of symbolic disempowerment of white authority over the black body. Douglass writes:
Here she stood, on a bench, her arms tightly drawn over her breast. Her back and shoulders were bare to the waist. Behind her stood old master, with cowskin in hand, preparing his barbarous work with all manner of harsh, coarse, and tantalizing epithets. The screams of his victim were most piercing. He was cruelly deliberate, and protracted the torture, as one who was delighted with the scene. Again and again he drew the hateful whip through his hand, adjusting it with a view of dealing the most pain-giving blow. . . . Each blow, vigorously laid on, brought screams as well as blood. “Have mercy; Oh! have mercy” she cried; “I won’t do so no more,”. . . language has no power to convey a just sense of its awful criminality. After laying on some thirty or forty stripes, old master untied his suffering victim, and let her get down. She could scarcely stand, when untied. From my heart I pitied her, and—child though I was—the outrage kindled in me a feeling far from peaceful. (My Bondage 77)
At first, Hester’s body tied and fastened to the joist is seemingly symbolic of Captain Auld’s power over her. The whip becomes an extension of him, engaging in the semiotics of power upon Hester’s flesh (Sundquist 109). However, it is Douglass, the author who is in control of this scene of violence. Counter to his first narrative, Hester possesses a voice to scream her pleas and pain, making her an even greater object of sympathy in order to demonstrate the brutality of the slave experience. Yet, even with the return of her voice, she is still a passive object that is juxtaposed to the young Douglass’s “outrage,” signifying the beginning of his resistance. His resistance marks him not as object but as a person that is willing to exercise self-agency in attaining his liberty.
Finally, Douglass’s fight with Edward Covey provides a scene of direct confrontation with white manhood in regard to the status of his bodily objectification under slavery. In this scene, once again, there is an inside/outside trajectory of the narrative that seeks to establish Douglass’s agency over his body and identity. Douglass narrates his story in order to show to his audience that he is no longer the master’s property, no longer objectified, he stands as a man. At first, he opts out of direct confrontations with white manhood represented through Captain Anthony and Hugh Auld, in favor of covert subversion. Douglass has narratively and psychologically negotiated his way through gender and racial identifications that have continually frustrated his desires for manhood and agency. His re-alignment and revision of masculine mythologies distinctly move his desires for self-identity and manhood into a direct conflict with whiteness over his body as well as identity. For Douglass, control over one’s body is apparent and essential to concepts of self-hood and freedom. Thus, direct confrontation with Covey signifies assertion over ownership of his body—an act of self-possession that seeks to reclaim the body that has been lost and socio-economically exploited.
Douglass is sent by master Auld to the slave breaker Covey in order to be disciplined and re-trained to be a more obedient slave. Even before his arrival on Covey’s plantation, Douglass’s begins to suggest his masculine agency by implying that “he made the change gladly” as though he has the power to consent to his master’s wishes. His implied consent disrupts Auld’s authority over his body and person with the suggestion that he chose to go to Covey’s. Thus, he displaces the master’s power over his body in terms of desiring to end his hunger rather than stay hungry, while in service to Hugh Auld. He writes:
He resolved to put me out, as he said, to be broken; and for this purpose, he let me for one year to a man named Edward Covey. . . . Added to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and class-leader in the Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a “nigger-breaker.” I was aware of all the facts, having been made acquainted with them by a young man who had lived there. I nevertheless made the change gladly; for I was sure of getting enough to eat, which is not the smallest consideration to a hungry man. (Douglass Narrative 58-9)
Douglass’s claim that he “nevertheless made the change gladly,” although he knew of Covey’s “nigger breaking” reputation, demonstrates the degree to which he has effectively (re)invented himself from docile slave to rebellious slave. His authorial voice constructs a narrative moment of acquiescence where the master’s desire to break him is supplanted by Douglass’s insertion of his free will. His willingness to go to Covey for the purpose of being fed displaces the master’s intended meaning of breaking him with his need to get enough to eat. Through this linguistic act of subversion the master is stripped of power and authority over Douglass’s body.
Douglass’s fight with Covey demonstrates his psychological transition of identity from perceiving himself as a slave to the recognition of his agency over his own body. Bergner suggests that “the scene in which he fights with the slavebreaker, Covey, allows Douglass to shed that slave identity in his own mind, if not in the eyes of the law” (23). Yet Douglass’s fight with Covey fails to bring about his physical freedom or shed his slave identity in the “eyes of the law.” However, the battle does imbue him with a sense of masculine identity that leads him to vow never to be beaten again—a shedding of his mental servitude. Douglass writes:
Covey said, “Take hold of him, take hold of him!” Bill said his master hired him out to work, and not to help to whip me; so he left Covey and myself to fight our own battle out. We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate, saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him. The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger. He would occasionally say, he didn’t want to get hold of me again. “No,” thought I, “you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.” This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself. . . . 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. (Douglass Narrative 73-4).
First, Covey’s authority is subverted by Bill’s refusal to help him beat Douglass. He undermines Covey’s power over his body by deferring to the will of his master, by saying his master had “hired him out to work, and not to help to whip me.” So, Covey is under the indirect rebellion of Bill, while facing a looming physical altercation with Douglass. Covey is unable to challenge the authority of Bill’s master over him without bringing into question his authority to punish Douglass. However, Bill’s role in the conflict is revised in Douglass’s subsequent revisions. In My Bondage and My Freedom as well as The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Bill’s refusal to help Covey takes on a more significant meaning. Douglass writes, in Life and Times:
The scene here had something comic about it. Bill, who knew precisely what
Covey wished him to do, affected ignorance, and pretended he did not know what
to do. “What shall I do, Master Covey?” said Bill. “Take hold of him! Take hold
of him!” cried Covey. With a toss of his head peculiar to Bill, he said:
“Indeed, Master Covey, I want to go to work.” “This is your work,” said Covey,
“take hold of him.” Bill replied, with spirit, “My master hired me here to
work, and not to help you whip
The key revision of this scene is that it is no longer the subversive choice of Bill
that leads him to thwart the authority of Covey, but rather it is Douglass’s warning Bill not to touch him. In this sense, Bill remains the possession of his master’s desire, while still rejecting Covey’s authority over him. But at the same time, his placement, in comparison to Douglass, serves to maintain him as an object of possession of white masculine authority. Moreover, Douglass is in direct revolt against the power of white manhood over his body, while Bill becomes the lingering embodiment of his master’s authority over his personhood. His warning for Bill not to “put” his hands upon him only solidifies the narrative boundary between him as object and Douglass’s rebellion—that seeks to (re)define his master’s ownership over his body. Furthermore, different from his first narrative, the female voice of Caroline is added in—she becomes a projection of his former passivity. She does not escape the effects of physical violence upon her body. Instead, in “the dire effects of her refusal: he gave her several sharp blows” (Douglass Life and Times 96). It is here that Douglass projects into Caroline the physical damage of his fight with Covey. It is absurd to think that a fight that lasted for over two hours would leave Douglass physically unharmed and un-bloodied. But the image of him standing without blood marking his body serves to state to his audience the control over his physical as well as psychological self.
After the fight, Covey attempts to save face by suggesting that if Douglass had not resisted he would not have beat him as severely. Jason Matzke’s “The John Brown Way” asserts: “It is important to note that Douglass thinks his newfound dignity came in part from a change in Covey and not just from the awareness of his newfound willingness to stand up for himself. Covey could no longer stand in a perfect master-slave relation with Douglass—the power Covey held over him was no longer absolute” (69). Narratively speaking, Douglass has negotiated the trauma of this scene in order to demonstrate that he is the master over his body and desires. There is a switch of power dynamics—no longer is Douglass in the masochistic slave position; rather, he becomes the master that through the projection of affect re-assigns republican values of American manhood into his textual identity. Thus, Bill remains the property of his master and Caroline is reduced to an object of physical abuse, while Covey represents the embodiment of disempowered masculinity once occupied by Douglass. And what is left is Douglass espousing the rhetoric of self-made manhood—the master over his own body and identity.
Thus, Covey’s attempt to maintain the racial power dynamics is undermined by Douglass’s pronouncement of: “No! … you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before,” which clearly demarcates him as the winner of the fight between him and Covey. And, in doing so, Covey’s reputation as a “nigger breaker” is thwarted, while his manhood is symbolically stripped away from him and awarded to the triumphant Douglass. Covey has “drawn no blood from him,” but he has drawn blood from the slave breaker, producing his first moment of psychological freedom. Douglass asserts:
He only can understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, or hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant and a cowardly one withal. After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of independence. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. (Life and Times 97)
In this revised scene, Covey becomes a projection of Douglass’s fear and cowardice. It is through the displacement of his cowardice, in regard to confronting his own master directly, that Douglass is able to invest his narrative with the utterances of republican manhood—a willingness to die for his freedom that has been established through the repression of the bodily agencies of Bill and Caroline. For Douglass, breaking Covey, the “nigger breaker,” serves to displace the authority of white manhood over his body and self-identity. Covey and Douglass swap positions to where Douglass becomes the narrative sadist over the bodies of Covey and his fellow slaves. Moreover, Douglass recognizes that this moment of masculine sadism where Covey “had drawn no blood from [him]” but he had drawn Covey’s blood as a “turning point” in his masculine identity. It is at this point that every act of subversion evolves into the triumph of his newfound agency and the assertion of self-reliance. Through violent resistance to Covey’s power over his body, he emerges from non-personhood to manhood. And as Douglass pronounces, “even death itself” no longer represents a threat to the emergence of his newfound identity.
Beneath the moral condemnations of Douglass’s writing there remains a blood stained joist, marking the primary bodily sacrifice of his escape—Aunt Hester. The religious condemnation of slavery’s immorality is the public discourse that Douglass engages in with American society. This public discourse debates the recognition of injustices of slavery, demanding that American society recognize the humanity of its African American citizens. He adeptly manipulates masculine myths of the self made-man throughout his autobiographies, showing his rise from slavehood into manhood. But as he demonstrates his ascension into manhood, he reveals his complicity in the exploitation of African American women’s bodies. Douglass’s exploitation of Hester remains the consistent subtext of his masculine agency. He uses Aunt Hester’s torture in order to carve a thin line between gender and race in the economy of the slave plantation: a line that would lead to his ability to (re)imagine his subject position, but fail to liberate Hester from the bonds of both psychological and physical oppression.
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[1] James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance argues that conflict between public and hidden transcripts demonstrates a “zone of constant struggle between dominant and subordinate (14).
[2] John K. Noyes’s The
Mastery of Submission argues that masochism “blurs the boundary
between real pain and the
representation of pain” (41).
[3] In The Colonization of Psychic Space, Kelly Oliver argues that the individuality and subjectivity cannot be understood apart from its social context. She defines subject position as being “constituted in our social interactions and our positions within our culture and context; history and circumstance govern them. Subject positions are our relations to the finite world of human history and relations—the realm of politics” (Oliver xv).
[4] Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain argues that the intent of torture lies within the question and answer of the interrogation which is meant to reduce the victim’s identity and agency through the loss of language. The language of the victim is displaced by the sign and desires of the torturer; thus, extending the torturer power of the victims body and ultimately over its meaning. She asserts: “The torture experiences the absence of this annihilating negation. These physical realties, an annihilating negation and an absence are therefore translated into verbal realities in order to make the invisible distance visible, in order to make what is taking place in terms of pain take place in terms of power, in order shift what is occurring exclusively in the mode of sentience into the mode of self extension and world … It is only the prisoner’s steadily shrinking ground that wins for the torturer his swelling sense of territory. The question and the answer are a prolonged comparative display, an unfurling of world maps” (Scarry 36)