SOURCE: Yarborough, Richard. “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass's ‘The Heroic Slave.’” In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, pp. 159-84. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

[In the following essay, Yarborough contends that Frederick Douglass's reinterpretation and exaltation of a slave rebellion in his novella The Heroic Slave is subverted by the underlying prejudices of the white, masculine worldview.]

Sir, I want to alarm the slaveholders, and not to alarm them by mere declamation or by mere bold assertions, but to show them that there is really danger in persisting in the crime of continuing Slavery in this land. I want them to know that there are some Madison Washingtons in this land.

—Frederick Douglass

In 1877 the African-American author Albery A. Whitman published an epic poem called “Not a Man, and Yet a Man.” At one level, his apparently contradictory title refers to the fact that although relegated to the category of chattel, of brute property, slaves possessed the ability to maintain their own humanity. At another level, Whitman's articulation of black heroism in male terms typifies a great deal of the discourse in nineteenth-century African America surrounding the slave experience. We encounter a more telling example of this tendency in Whitman's preface to a later work, The Rape of Florida:

Amid the rugged hills, along the banks of Green River in Kentucky, I enjoyed the inestimable blessings of cabin life and hard work during the whole of my early days. I was in bondage,—I was never a slave,—the infamous laws of a savage despotism took my substance—what of that? Many a man has lost all he had, except his manhood.¹

With its focus on “manhood,” Whitman's proud self-representation recalls one of the most eloquent testaments to the slave's capacity to transcend attempts at dehumanization—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). In this text, Douglass first describes how he fell into the depths of slavery, becoming, in his words, “transformed into a brute”; then he makes one of the most often-quoted statements in African-American literature: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”² The key step in this latter transformation involves Douglass's physical confrontation with a white slavebreaker:

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. … It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. 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. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.³

These lines are replete with fascinating rhetorical turns, but I want to focus particularly on, first, the extent to which the term manhood comes to stand for the crucial spiritual commodity that one must maintain in the face of oppression in order to avoid losing a sense of self-worth and, second, the connection established between manhood and violent resistance.

One might argue that when writers like Douglass say “man” they mean “human,” that when they say “manhood” they mean “humanity.” It would follow then that David Walker, for instance, is addressing all blacks, regardless of gender, when he asks in 1829, “Are we Men!!—I ask you, O my brethren! are we Men? Did our creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves?”⁴ Quite often, however, the broader rhetorical contexts of such statements reveal the gender-specific nature of the discourse. Thus Henry Highland Garnet's paraphrase of Walker's angry question in 1843 is prefaced by statements directed exclusively to his male listeners:

You act as though you were made for the special use of these devils. You act as though your daughters were born to pamper the lusts of your masters and overseers. And worse than all, you tamely submit, while your lords tear your wives from your embraces, and defile them before your eyes. In the name of God we ask, are you men?⁵

Even a superficial survey of nineteenth-century writing and oratory reveals the extent to which African-American spokespersons like Whitman, Douglass, Walker, and Garnet saw the crucial test of black fitness to be whether or not black men were, in fact, what was conventionally considered “manly.” As Calvin Hernton puts it,

Historically, the battle line of the racial struggle in the United States has been drawn exclusively as a struggle between the men of the races. Everything having to do with the race has been defined and counter-defined by the men as a question of whether black people were or were not a race of Men. The central concept and the universal metaphor around which all aspects of the racial situation revolve is “Manhood.”⁶

In this essay, I want to examine some of the complex ramifications of this obsession with manhood as manifested in early African-American fiction—in particular, in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave.

Contemporary scholars have focused on the obstacles that nineteenth-century black women encountered in convincing white society that they were little different from their middle-class white counterparts, that they embodied the attributes of True Womanhood with only slight adjustments.⁷ Social scientists have noted for some time that black men have confronted related problems in meeting white society's criteria for male status. Indeed, one can identify a mythology of masculinity analogous to the Cult of True Womanhood and partially grounded, like the feminine ideal, in the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition. The Anglo-American bourgeois paradigms of both masculinity and femininity were equally imaginary in nature, essentially ideologically charged constructions serving, first, to bolster the self-image of privileged whites who endorsed and propagated them through their control of major acculturating institutions and, second, to keep marginalized those “others” who—on account of their appearance, speech, family background, class, religion, behavior, or values—did not measure up.

In striving to counter racist charges of inferiority, early African-American authors understandably sought to shape their portrayal of black male heroes in accord with middle-class definitions of masculinity. Such definitions contained the following crucial ingredients: nobility, intelligence, strength, articulateness, loyalty, virtue, rationality, courage, self-control, courtliness, honesty, and physical attractiveness as defined in white Western European terms. Furthermore, as Robert Staples puts it, “Masculinity … has always implied a certain autonomy over and mastery of one's environment.”⁸ As if the need to have their black male protagonists embody these characteristics were not a daunting enough task, early African-American writers were also aware of the extent to which many of the white readers whom they wished to reach would have agreed with proslavery commentator John Campbell's characterization of blacks:

The psychical attributes that peculiarly belong to man are adoration, benevolence, conscientiousness, intellectual appetite, fame, speech, prudence, admiration, and reason, or causality. In the Caucasian, these attributes are developed harmoniously, and he is warlike, but not cruel nor destructive. In the negro, on the contrary, these attributes are equally undeveloped: he is neither originative, inventive nor speculative; he is roving, revengeful and destructive, and he is warlike, predatory and sensual.⁹

Campbell's telling use of the term warlike here captures perfectly the dilemma confronting black authors. That is, whites were quite capable of viewing the same trait that signified heroism in whites as signifying degradation and inferiority in blacks.

African-American writers were fully aware of both the arbitrary way in which white middle-class standards of behavior were applied to blacks and also of how the environment in which most blacks lived prevented the full development of those very capacities that white readers appeared to value so highly. Accordingly, in 1860 the black abolitionist H. Ford Douglass qualified his claim for black manhood this way: “Now, I want to put this question to those who deny the equal manhood of the negro: What peculiar trait of character do the white men of this country possess, as a mark of superiority, either morally or mentally, that is not also manifested by the black man, under similar circumstances?”¹⁰ His phrase “under similar circumstances” would appear to allow him to attribute any alleged lack of manhood among slaves to the oppressive conditions of servitude. At the same time, however, such a stance acceded to racist contentions that the masses of blacks were, in fact, inferior; as far as many whites were concerned, whether this inferiority resulted from heredity or environment constituted a rarely meaningful distinction. In an attempt to shore up this weakness in his racial defense, H. Ford Douglass takes his argument in a somewhat different direction: “After all, I say that the negro is a man, and has all the elements of manhood, like other men; and, by the way, I think that, in this country, he has the highest element of manhood.”¹¹ By claiming the “highest element of manhood” for blacks, he turns his back on his environmentalist position and seems to welcome the application of the most exacting white bourgeois criteria in the evaluation of black abilities.

By hook or by crook (and occasionally through a disorienting wrenching of our credulity), mid-nineteenth-century African-American writers found ways to discover black male figures who could stand up to the most rigorous scrutiny and thereby substantiate H. Ford Douglass's lofty pronouncement. For example, in the 1853 edition of William Wells Brown's Clotel, currently recognized as the first novel published by an African-American, we have two heroic male slave characters, William and George Green. Brown describes the former as “a tall, full-bodied Negro, whose very countenance beamed with intelligence.”¹² In speech and manner, he is hardly distinguishable from bourgeois whites, expressing himself in proper English for most of the novel. Brown's portrayal of George Green is even more striking. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe's George Harris in Uncle Tom's Cabin, he is virtually white in appearance: “His hair was straight, soft, fine, and light; his eyes blue, nose prominent, lips thin, his head well formed, forehead high and prominent.”¹³ Green resembles the typical middle-class Anglo-American male hero in terms of achievement as well, for Brown locates his ultimate fate firmly in what later became known as the Horatio Alger myth of success: having emigrated to England after escaping slavery, George works his way up to a clerkship and is eventually reunited with his ex-slave sweetheart.

Although Brown would seem to be giving ground to stereotypes and stock images here without much of a struggle, he and other black authors were often too committed to capturing in their writing the reality of the slave experience as they knew it to concede completely to convention. (Brown himself was an ex-slave.) That is, incongruities in their characterizations frequently reflect some degree of ambivalence on their part toward the social values and literary images they felt constrained to endorse in their fiction. Thus, although Brown's George Green is nearly white in appearance, William is clearly black. Even more revealing developments occur in the 1864 edition of Clotel—entitled Clotelle; A Tale of the Southern States—where we see significant differences in the appearances of both leading men. In the initial version of the novel, Brown describes William as “a tall, full-bodied Negro”; in Clotelle, however, he is “a tall, full-blooded African.”¹⁴ This change, although apparently minor, in fact manifests Brown's rejection of some of the racist ideological assumptions that supported popular white conceptions of blacks.

A more dramatic shift occurs in his recasting of George Green, now named Jerome Fletcher. In Clotel this character is “as white as most white persons”; in the 1864 edition, he is “of pure African origin, … perfectly black, very fine-looking, tall, slim, and erect as any one could possibly be.”¹⁵ Unfortunately, this flattering portrait is marred by Brown's inability to transcend all racist physical standards: “His features were not bad, lips thin, nose prominent, hands and feet small. … His hair which was nearly straight, hung in curls upon his lofty brow.”¹⁶ The significance of Brown's hasty qualification of this black image is brought home when we consider his depiction of another dark-skinned figure, Pompey, whose job is to disguise the ages of his master's slaves before they are put on the market. In sharp contrast to Jerome, Pompey is, in his own words, “de ginuine artikle.”¹⁷ Not only does he speak dialect, but his features are stereotypically “black.” The differences between the two characters are directly related to their roles in the novel. The primary male lead in Brown's sentimental melodrama, Jerome must look the part; a partially comic embodiment of the degradation of slavery, Pompey is not intended to arouse our admiration or identification. Although Brown's emphasis upon Jerome's undiluted African heritage represents a small but significant move away from the nearly white male hero and thus an important step toward artistic self-determination, the problematic assumptions underlying Brown's strategy here are evident. Furthermore, he feels no need whatsoever to call into question the paradigms of male heroism that so inform his characterizations.

Perhaps the most pressing task confronting early African-American writers who sought to establish the manhood of their black slave heroes lay in determining how to depict their male protagonists' responses to slavery, especially given what Marian Musgrave calls the “interdiction, perhaps unconscious, perhaps deliberate, upon even mentioning the fearful possibility of black violence visited upon whites.”¹⁸ In the initial edition of Clotel, William Wells Brown attempts to solve this problem by locating George Green's bravery and militant resistance to slavery in both a black and a white context. Thus, immediately after Green is introduced, we learn that he is the sole surviving member of Nat Turner's group of rebels. Then, in a dramatic trial scene, this articulate and well-educated slave endorses armed resistance to injustice by invoking the ideals of the American War of Independence; at one point he declares, “Did not American revolutionists violate the laws when they struck for liberty? They were revolters, but their success made them patriots—we were revolters, and our failure makes us rebels.”¹⁹ In a quite calculated move, Brown links two violent acts of liberation—one that many of his white readers would instinctively reject and one that many of them would readily endorse. Brown cannot go much further than this lest the crucial link he is forging between the American Revolution on the one side and the Nat Turner rebellion on the other be broken.²⁰ Consequently, for all of his militant background and patriotic talk, George does not come close to committing a violent act in the novel. Even his freedom is won not through any assertion of force but rather through the intervention of his slave lover, Mary, who exchanges clothing and places with the imprisoned George in one of the novel's less credible plot twists.

In the final edition of the novel—entitled Clotelle: or, the Colored Heroine (1867)—history provides Brown with something of a way out of this conceptual cul-de-sac—the Civil War, an event that most black leaders saw as the opportunity to fulfill what David Blight terms the “quest for the irrevocable recognition of manhood and citizenship.”²¹ For possibly the only moment in United States history, black men were provided with a socially sanctioned opportunity to bear arms against their white American oppressors. It is hardly surprising, then, that Brown has his fictional hero, Jerome, return to the United States toward the end of the novel and eventually lose his life in the bloody engagement at Port Hudson. What is unexpected, however, is the fact that Jerome does not die in an attack upon Confederate forces; rather, he is decapitated by a shell while attempting to retrieve the corpse of a fallen (presumably white) officer. In one fell swoop, Brown skillfully identifies the male slave's militant struggle for freedom with the Union's struggle for survival and simultaneously strengthens his hero's claim upon the respect due one embodying the best of American manhood without forcing his readers to confront a dramatization of black violence against whites.

In November 1841, a slave named Madison Washington played a key role in a revolt aboard the American ship Creole while it was en route from Virginia to New Orleans. After commandeering the vessel, he had his fellow blacks sailed to Nassau, where they gained their freedom. Although Washington's story is relatively little known today, in antebellum circles his name was often mentioned in the same breath with those of other black heroes. Henry Highland Garnet, for example, extols Washington as “that bright star of freedom” and ranks him with the likes of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and Cinque.²² Thus, in 1853, when Douglass published a fictionalized version of the Creole revolt entitled The Heroic Slave, his audience was probably already familiar with his protagonist and his remarkable story.²³ No nineteenth-century African-American thinker was more concerned with the issue of manhood than Frederick Douglass, and the manner in which he transforms Madison Washington from a historical personage into a fictional epitome of militant slave resistance vividly reveals the representational strategies he adopted in attempting to dramatize black male heroism.

Just as William Wells Brown does in depicting his protagonists, Douglass initially focuses upon Washington's attractive physical appearance:

Madison was of manly form. Tall, symmetrical, round, and strong. In his movements he seemed to combine, with the strength of the lion, a lion's elasticity. His torn sleeves disclosed arms like polished iron. His face was “black, but comedy.” His eye, lit with emotion, kept guard under a brow as dark and as glossy as the raven's wing. His whole appearance betokened Herculean strength.²⁴

In sharp contrast to Brown's relatively unadorned treatment of George and Jerome, however, Douglass conveys the superhuman stature of his hero through explicit allusions to both Greek legend (“Herculean strength”) and the Old Testament (“black, but comely” from the Song of Solomon). Douglass is also quick to qualify Washington's seeming ferocity: “Yet there was nothing savage or forbidding in his aspect. A child might play in his arms, or dance on his shoulders.”²⁵

This elaborate description differs radically from Douglass's celebration of Madison Washington in a speech that he delivered in April 1849—four years before the publication of The Heroic Slave:

About twilight on the ninth day, Madison, it seems, reached his head above the hatchway, looked out on the swelling billows of the Atlantic, and feeling the breeze that coursed over its surface, was inspired with the spirit of freedom. He leapt from beneath the hatchway, gave a cry like an eagle to his comrades beneath, saying, we must go through. … Suiting the action to the word, in an instant his guilty master was prostrate on the deck, and in a very few minutes Madison Washington, a black man, with woolly head, high cheek bones, protruding lip, distended nostril, and retreating forehead, had the mastery of that ship.²⁶

In a characteristic use of irony here, Douglass contrasts the racist connotation of certain black physical attributes with the fact that Washington has just taken control of both the Creole and his fate. In The Heroic Slave, however, Douglass forgoes the sarcastic thrust at racist conceptions of black physiognomy so that his protagonist's appearance will fall more in line with conventional Anglo-American conceptions of ideal masculinity. Unfortunately, in so doing, Douglass retreats from his attack upon the racist stereotypes that he had earlier successfully undercut.

One year after the publication of The Heroic Slave, Douglass indirectly reveals his tendency to link physical appearance with mental capacity as he describes Irish peasants whom he encountered on a trip to Europe:

I say, with no wish to wound the feelings of any Irishman, that these people lacked only a black skin and woolly hair, to complete their likeness to the plantation negro. The open, uneducated mouth—the long, gaunt arm—the badly formed foot and ankle—the shuffling gait—the retreating forehead and vacant expression—and, their petty quarrels and fights—all reminded me of the plantation, and my own cruelly abused people. … The Irishman educated, is a model gentleman; the Irishman ignorant and degraded, compares in form and feature, with the negro!²⁷

Douglass then asks, “But what does it all prove? … It raises the inquiry—May not the condition of men explain their various appearances? Need we go behind the vicissitudes of barbarism for an explanation of the gaunt, wiry, ape like appearance of some of the genuine negroes?”²⁸ Douglass's argument here—what Waldo Martin terms “an ambiguous environmentalism”—is flawed in a number of ways, not the least of which is his tacit endorsement of the assumption that “form and feature” are accurate indications of psychological development.²⁹ As a result, he lets stand one of the fundamental assertions of the racist, proslavery position: that the appearance of most blacks signified inferiority. Thus, for Douglass, the heroic stature of his fictional Madison Washington is directly related to the fact that his protagonist is not a “genuine negro,” despite his apparently undiluted black pedigree and harsh experiences as a slave. Madison's manner reinforces his uniqueness even further, for as soon as he opens his mouth, he reveals himself to be extremely articulate and formally educated—hardly the typical slave. A white sailor in the story later notes, “His words were well chosen, and his pronunciation equal to that of any schoolmaster. It was a mystery to us where he got his knowledge of the language.” It is likewise a mystery to the reader, but one upon which Douglass offers no comment.³⁰

Like William Wells Brown in Clotel, Douglass confronted an especially troublesome dilemma in depicting black violence. He had encountered a similar challenge several years earlier when he sought to trace his own evolving rebelliousness in his 1845 narrative. There, in describing his battle with Covey, he goes to extraordinary lengths to portray himself as having exhausted every reasonable alternative before resorting to force. And he makes it quite clear that when he at last turns to violence, he is not the aggressor; rather, he presents his goal as solely to keep Covey from beating him.³¹ The emotionally controlled, rational, and physically restrained persona Douglass meticulously constructs serves both to establish his narrator's genteel, bourgeois credentials and to render his violence palatable to his white audience. Douglass's job would have been far simpler had the speaker in his Narrative been a white man, for most readers would have been quite prepared to endorse his use of force. In fact, they would likely have criticized the narrator for not vigorously resisting Covey from the outset. Simply put, blacks were not granted the same freedom of action as whites, and yet they were condemned for not meeting popularly held norms of behavior. Black men were viewed as unmanly and otherwise inferior because they were enslaved; at the same time, they were often viewed as beasts and otherwise inferior if they rebelled violently. Moreover, black writers like Douglass must have realized at some level that to make their heroic figures too independent, too aggressive, might permit white readers to evade acknowledging that they themselves must intervene in order to end the horrors of slavery. Many African-American authors saw no easy way to make their black male characters deserving of sympathy and at the same time to celebrate their manhood.

Given Douglass's complex sculpting of his own violence in his autobiography, it is hardly surprising that in his fiction he emphasizes not Madison Washington's use of physical force but rather his restraint after taking command of the vessel. In his 1849 comments on the Creole incident, Douglass makes it clear that Washington encouraged if not actively participated in the attack that resulted in the death of several whites. In contrast, because the white sailor through whose eyes we witness the revolt is conveniently knocked unconscious at the outset of the uprising, in The Heroic Slave we see Washington neither commit nor directly urge any acts of physical violence whatsoever. When the white man awakens, the fighting has ended, and Washington is doing his utmost to prevent further bloodshed.³²

Despite Madison Washington's exemplary behavior during the insurrection, however, Douglass takes no chances and has his protagonist justify what violence has been used:

You call me a black murderer. I am not a murderer. God is my witness that Liberty, not malice, is the motive for this night's work. I have done no more to those dead men yonder, than they would have done to me in like circumstances. 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.³³

Washington's phrasing reflects Douglass's deliberate attempt to exploit the parallels between the rebellion on board the Creole and the American Revolution and thereby to gain reader approval of his protagonist's implied violence. Like William Wells Brown in Clotel, Douglass turns a backward glance to the early days of the American republic to find socially approved examples of violent male action, and the name of his chosen hero doubtless makes this tactic seem especially appropriate. As the white sailor who narrates the final chapter of the story puts it, the name “Madison Washington” was one “ominous of greatness.”³⁴ Accordingly, Douglass from the outset emphasizes the links between Washington and two especially well-known white American political leaders—James Madison and George Washington.

If Douglass sensed that his white audience might experience some discomfort with the means adopted by his slave hero to win his freedom, his concern was well grounded. As Ronald Walters points out, a resolution put forward by one antislavery group in support of the Creole revolt manifests the ambivalence felt by many abolitionists:

The society decided that while we would deprecate a resort to arms for the emancipation of the enslaved population of the south, yet we rejoice in the fact proved, by the recent strike for freedom of the slaves of the Creole, that slaves are not indifferent, as our opponents have often declared, to the inestimable blessings of civil liberty.³⁵

That Douglass was struggling with his own mixed feelings regarding the appropriateness of violent resistance to slavery and his solidifying opposition to Garrisonian pacifism at the time he wrote The Heroic Slave also contributes to the tensions we find in the text surrounding this issue.³⁶

Douglass's sensitivity to and absorption of the values and expectations of his target audience inform his depiction of Madison Washington in other important ways as well. For example, Douglass's fascination with self-reliance and heroic male individualism thoroughly shapes his conception of Madison as a leader.³⁷ Thus, although there were reportedly several key instigators of the Creole revolt, Douglass omits mention of all but Washington, thereby highlighting the individual nature of his protagonist's triumph as well as the man's superiority in comparison to his fellow blacks.³⁸ Furthermore, Douglass's celebration of solitary male heroism leaves little room for women. In his 1845 narrative, critics have noted, he downplays the role played by female slaves in his life. As David Leverenz points out, Douglass's wife, Anna, “seems an afterthought. He introduces her to his readers as a rather startling appendage to his escape and marries her almost in the same breath.”³⁹ At first glance, Douglass's treatment of black women in The Heroic Slave appears to differ considerably from that in his narrative. Not only does Madison allude frequently to his wife, Susan, but it is her support that enables him to hide in the wilderness for five years. In addition, he is recaptured after his successful flight from slavery because he decides to return to Virginia to rescue her. However, not only do we receive no description of Susan whatsoever but, more significantly, she is rendered voiceless in a text marked, as Henry Louis Gates notes, by “a major emphasis on the powers of the human voice,” on the potency of speech acts.⁴⁰ Finally, Douglass has Susan murdered during her attempt to escape with her husband. Her disappearance from the text at this point simply reinforces Washington's heroic isolation.

One way to appreciate fully the strategies underlying the characterization of Madison Washington in The Heroic Slave is to compare the novella not just with Douglass's own comments in his 1849 speech but with three other literary dramatizations of the incident—by William Wells Brown in 1863, by Lydia Maria Child in 1866, and by Pauline E. Hopkins in 1901.⁴¹ The most significant ways in which Brown, Child, and Hopkins revise Douglass's rendering of the Creole revolt involve the handling of violence in the story, the depiction of Susan, Madison's wife, and the role of whites.⁴²

First, Brown, Child, and Hopkins all treat Madison Washington's violence more directly than does Douglass in The Heroic Slave. In describing Washington's recapture, for example, Brown does not qualify the slave's fierce resistance:

Observed by the overseer, … the fugitive [was] secured ere he could escape with his wife; but the heroic slave did not yield until he with a club had laid three of his assailants upon the ground with his manly blows; and not then until weakened by loss of blood.⁴³

In depicting the revolt itself, both Brown and Douglass stress Washington's determination to shed no more blood than is absolutely necessary. However, Brown differs sharply from Douglass by locating his hero at the very center of the violence:

Drawing his old horse pistol from under his coat, he [a white “negro-driver”] fired at one of the blacks and killed him. The next moment [he] lay dead upon the deck, for Madison had struck him with a capstan bar. … The battle was Madison's element, and he plunged into it without any care for his own preservation or safety. He was an instrument of enthusiasm, whose value and whose place was in his inspiration. “If the fire of heaven was in my hands, I would throw it at these cowardly whites,” said he to his companions, before leaving their cabin. But in this he did not mean revenge, only the possession of his freedom and that of his fellow-slaves. Merritt and Gifford, the first and second mates of the vessel, both attacked the heroic slave at the same time. Both were stretched out upon the deck with a single blow each, but were merely wounded; they were disabled, and that was all that Madison cared for for the time being.⁴⁴

Like Douglass in The Heroic Slave, Brown, Child, and Hopkins all portray Madison Washington as a superman, but their hero is one whose strength, courage, and power find unmistakably violent outlet.

In their treatment of Susan, Madison's wife, Brown, Child, and Hopkins again revise Douglass quite extensively. In contrast to the faceless character we encounter in The Heroic Slave, William Wells Brown's Susan receives an even more elaborate description than does Washington himself:

In the other cabin, among the slave women, was one whose beauty at once attracted attention. Though not tall, she yet had a majestic figure. Her well-moulded shoulders, prominent bust, black hair which hung in ringlets, mild blue eyes, finely-chiselled mouth, with a splendid set of teeth, a turned and well-rounded chin, skin marbled with the animation of life, and veined by blood given to her by her master, she stood as the representative of two races. With only one eighth of African, she was what is called at the south an “octoroon.” It was said that her grandfather had served his country in the revolutionary war, as well as in both houses of Congress. This was Susan, the wife of Madison.⁴⁵

Furthermore, Brown arranges for Susan to be among the freed blacks when her husband takes over the Creole. Susan's death before the revolt in The Heroic Slave reflects both Douglass's lack of interest in incorporating a sentimental reunion into his happy ending and his conception of Washington as an isolated male protagonist. In Brown's vision of Washington's successful heroic action, liberation leads to a restoration of the integrity of the domestic circle, the black family unit; in Douglass's, it does not.⁴⁶

Although similar in phrasing to Brown's, Child's depiction of Susan manifests an added concern with the beautiful slave as the embodiment of endangered womanhood. Child describes Susan's peculiar plight this way: “[A] handsome woman, who is a slave, is constantly liable to insult and wrong, from which an enslaved husband has no power to protect her.”⁴⁷ Hopkins, in turn, both corrects and elaborates on Child's comment not only by showing that Madison Monroe (as she calls her hero) does, in fact, save his wife from sexual assault but also by making Susan almost as much the protagonist of the story as Madison. In Hopkins's rendering, most of the drama on board the Creole centers not on the revolt but on the white captain's attempted rape of Susan, which coincidentally occurs on the same night that Madison has planned his uprising.⁴⁸ Even the syntax of the emotional reunion scene reinforces Hopkins's focus on Susan: “She was locked to his breast; she clung to him convulsively. Unnerved at last by the revulsion to more than relief and ecstasy, she broke into wild sobs, while the astonished company closed around them with loud hurrahs.”⁴⁹ On the one hand, Hopkins implicitly rejects Douglass's obsession with masculine heroism as she gives Susan not only a voice in the text but also force—the first act of black violent resistance aboard the Creole is Susan's striking the white captain when he kisses her in her sleep. On the other hand, by having Madison fortuitously appear and interrupt the assault on Susan like some white knight rushing to the aid of his damsel, Hopkins ultimately falls back on the conventions of the sentimental romance. Hopkins succeed in reinserting the black female into a field of action dominated, in Douglass's fiction, by the male. However, in claiming for Susan a conventional role generally denied black women, she necessarily endorses the accompanying male paradigm in her depiction of Madison, a paradigm drawn from the same set of gender constructions that provides Douglass with his heroic model.

Finally, of the four versions of the Creole incident under consideration here, Douglass places the greatest emphasis upon the role played by whites in the protagonist's life. Granted, for much of The Heroic Slave, Madison Washington is the epitome of manly self-reliance. At key points in the text, however, Douglass qualifies the isolated nature of the protagonist's liberatory struggle not by creating ties between Madison and a black community but rather by developing a close relationship between Washington and a white northerner named Listwell. As Robert Stepto suggests, Douglass probably modeled Listwell on the abolitionist James Gurney.⁵⁰ Yet Douglass claims in his 1849 speech on the Creole incident that another abolitionist, Robert Purvis, also played an important role as Washington's friend and advisor. Douglass's decision to incorporate the white Gurney and not the black Purvis into his story reflects his desire to reach and move white readers. Like George Harris's former employer, Mr. Wilson, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Listwell gives the white audience a figure with whom to identify; as Listwell comes to endorse Washington's behavior—to evolve literally before our eyes into an abolitionist—Douglass hopes that the white reader will too.

In none of the three later versions of the revolt do we encounter a white character who plays the central role that Listwell does in The Heroic Slave. Brown, Child, and Hopkins all depict a sympathetic white named Dickson who employs Madison after he first escapes; but there is no great intimacy between the men. Furthermore, whereas Douglass has Listwell slip Washington the files and saws that he subsequently uses to free himself and his fellow slaves on board the Creole, Brown, Child, and Hopkins all tell us that Madison obtains these implements on his own, before he returns to Virginia in the ill-fated attempt to free his wife. By having Listwell provide Washington with the means of his escape, Douglass doubtless intends the white audience to see that they should not only sympathize with the slaves' plight but work actively to help them gain their freedom. As a result, however, he implies that even the most self-reliant and gifted black male slave needs white assistance.

In composing The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass could have easily taken a strictly documentary approach. The unadorned story of Madison Washington's exploits certainly contained sufficient drama and courageous action to hold an audience. Moreover, Douglass's writing to that point had been primarily journalistic; the novella would hardly have seemed the form with which he would have felt most comfortable. In depicting Washington in fiction, however, Douglass ambitiously set out to do more than demonstrate the slave's determination to be free; he sought to transform his black male protagonist into a heroic exemplar who would both win white converts to the antislavery struggle and firmly establish the reality of black manhood. The route that Douglass chose in order to achieve these goals was to master the codes of Anglo-American bourgeois white masculinity, and his own internalization of the values informing mainstream masculine paradigms made this strategy relatively easy to adopt. In addition, as Robert Stepto observes, the act of fictionalizing this story of successful violent male resistance to slavery offered Douglass the opportunity not only to express his ideological independence from Garrison but also to present a potent alternative to the model of the black male hero as victim promoted so successfully in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.⁵¹ Ultimately, however, Douglass's ambitious agenda was undermined by his intuitive sense that he could challenge white preconceptions regarding race only so far without alienating the audience that he sought to win and by problems inherent in the masculine ideal that he so eagerly endorsed.

Douglass's strategies for appealing to white readers in The Heroic Slave were flawed in at least three important ways. The first involves the extent to which his representation of Madison Washington as the embodiment of black manhood inevitably emphasizes the distance between his hero and the average slave. In celebrating this unusually self-aware, courageous, aggressive, conventionally educated, and charismatic figure, Douglass never explains his attractive capacities in terms that would encourage the reader to extrapolate a general sense of the black potential for heroic action from the extraordinarily endowed Washington. The gap between Douglass's protagonist and less gifted blacks is widened even further by the presence of Listwell. That the one character both emotionally and intellectually closest to Washington is white indicates the extent to which Madison's strengths and capabilities, training, and manner distinguish him from other slaves and thereby weaken his usefulness as a counterargument against claims that most blacks were inferior to whites.

A second problem derives from Douglass's attempt, in William Andrews's words, “to domesticate a violence that easily could have been judged as alien and threatening to everything from Christian morality to the law of the high seas.”⁵² Employing a common abolitionist gambit, Douglass works to establish a link between Washington's rebellion and the American War of Independence. However, doing so, Andrews contends, precipitates Douglass and other antislavery writers into a troublesome conceptual trap: “Even as they violate the ideals of Uncle Tom's pacifism and declare blacks free from blood-guiltiness for killing their masters, they justify such actions by an appeal to the authorizing mythology of an oppressive culture.”⁵³ That is, the very figures whose patriotic heritage Douglass claims for his hero won their fame by working to establish a social order in which the enslavement of blacks like Madison was a crucial component.

In his careful packaging of Washington's manly heroism, Douglass also chooses not to dramatize a single act of physical violence performed by his protagonist. One might argue that this approach reinforces the statesmanlike quality that Douglass may have been striving to imbue in his portrayal of Washington—after all, how often do depictions (literary and otherwise) of George Washington fully convey the violent nature of his heroism? Ultimately, however, Douglass's caution here strips his fictional slave rebel of much of his radical, subversive force. As Douglass knew from personal experience, revolution usually entails violence, and black self-assertion in the face of racist attempts at dehumanization often necessitates a direct and forceful assault upon the very structures of social power that provide most whites (especially white males) with a sense of self-worth, security, and potency.

In his public statements regarding the Creole revolt both before and after he wrote The Heroic Slave, Douglass apparently felt little need to undermine the implications of the black militancy that Madison Washington embodied. We have already examined his celebration of Washington's heroism in his 1847 speech. In commenting on West Indian emancipation ten years later, Douglass goes even further:

Joseph Cinque on the deck of the Amistad, did that which should make his name dear to us. He bore nature's burning protest against slavery. Madison Washington who struck down his oppressor on the deck of the Creole, is more worthy to be remembered than the colored man who shot Pitcairn at Bunker Hill.⁵⁴

Granted, the exhaustion of Douglass's patience with the limited efficacy of moral suasion as an antislavery tactic surely informs this quite remarkable repudiation of the popular appeal to an American patriotic past as a way to validate black slave violence. I would argue, however, that there was something about the mode of fiction itself (and possibly about autobiography as well) that stifled the radical nature of Douglass's anger. The “controlled aggression” that Donald Gibson sees as informing every aspect of Douglass's Narrative underlies the depiction of Madison Washington in The Heroic Slave as well.⁵⁵ The key may lie in what Houston Baker describes as the “task of transmuting an authentic, unwritten self—a self that exists outside the conventional literary discourse structure of a white reading public—into a literary representation.” Baker continues: “The simplest, and perhaps the most effective, way of proceeding is for the narrator to represent his ‘authentic’ self as a figure embodying the public virtues and values esteemed by his intended audience.”⁵⁶ Baker's argument applies with particular force to The Heroic Slave, for it appears that the freer rein the form offered Douglass in his depiction of the exemplary black male hero paradoxically also confronted him more directly than possibly ever before with the restrictions imposed by the expectations of the whites to whom he was appealing.

The third weakness in his attempt to use fiction to shape his white reader's attitudes toward slavery is structural. That is, by rendering the Creole revolt through the recollections of a white sailor, Douglass cuts us off not just from Washington's heroic violence but from his emotional responses to the dramatic events in which he plays such a crucial part. William Wells Brown's straightforward depiction of Washington's rebellious behavior in his sketch dramatizes by contrast the extent to which Madison's role in The Heroic Slave is primarily catalytic, as Douglass emphasizes through shifts in point of view his impact upon the whites around him. Such elaborate formal manipulations result in what Raymond Hedin terms “an emphatically structured fiction,” which serves to convey a sense of the writer's control and thus to permit a release of anger in a rational and somewhat unthreatening manner.⁵⁷ As one result of this strategy, at the end of the novella Washington stands not as the embodiment of expressive, forceful self-determination but as an object of white discourse, a figure whose self-assertive drive to tell his own story—to reclaim, in a sense, his own subjectivity—is ultimately subordinated by Douglass to a secondhand rendition by a white sailor who did not even witness the full range of Washington's heroic action. This decentering of the black voice in The Heroic Slave may be the greatest casualty of Douglass's polemical appeal to white sympathies.

Finally, like the majority of nineteenth-century black spokespersons, Douglass was unable or unwilling to call into question the white bourgeois paradigm of manhood itself. Consequently, his celebration of black heroism was subverted from the outset by the racist, sexist, and elitist assumptions upon which the Anglo-American male ideal was constructed and that so thoroughly permeated the patriarchal structure of slavery. As Valerie Smith points out, “Within his critique of American cultural practices, then, is an affirmation of its definitions of manhood and power.” That is, “Douglass … attempts to articulate a radical position using the discourse he shares with those against whom he speaks. What begins as an indictment of mainstream practice actually authenticates one of its fundamental assumptions.”⁵⁸ It should go without saying that one can scarcely imagine how Douglass might have extricated himself from the conceptual briar patch into which he had fallen, given both the political purposes to which he directed his fiction and the extent to which he sought validation in the most conventional, gender-specific terms for himself in particular and for black men in general from a white society unwilling to acknowledge the complex humanity of blacks in any unqualified way.

The dilemma so powerfully rendered in Douglass's attempt to dramatize the Madison Washington story in fiction is one that has plagued most African-American fiction writers—and, indeed, most African-American thinkers—over the past century and a half.⁵⁹ His failures do not qualify the boldness of his attempt, and one can argue that the short-term benefits of his approach must be taken into account in assessing the overall success of his enterprise. Ultimately, however, Douglass's The Heroic Slave may be most valuable insofar as it enables us to understand better the complex internal and external obstacles to a balanced, complex depiction of black men and women in African-American fiction. If nothing else, it leaves us wondering whether the tools of the master can ever be used to achieve the complete liberation of the slave.

Notes

1. Albery A. Whitman, The Rape of Florida (1885; rpt. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Gregg, 1970), 8.

2. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr. (1845; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1982), 105, 107.

3. Ibid., 113.

4. David Walker, Walker's Appeal (1829; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), 27.

5. Henry Highland Garnet, An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (1848; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), 96 (emphasis added). Garnet first delivered this speech in 1843; in 1848 he published it bound together in one volume with Walker's Appeal.

6. Calvin Hernton, The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1987), 38.

7. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly 18 (Sept. 1966): 151-74. For more on nineteenth-century black women's ongoing engagement with this feminine ideal, see Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter … : The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984). Also see the work of, among other scholars, Hazel V. Carby, Barbara Christian, Frances Smith Foster, Deborah McDowell, Valerie Smith, and Mary Helen Washington.

8. Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The Black Male's Role in American Society (San Francisco: Black Scholar, 1982), 2.

9. Review of Negro-Mania, by John Campbell, Southern Quarterly Review (Jan. 1852): 163-66; emphasis added.

10. James M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York: Vintage, 1965), 101; emphasis added.

11. Ibid., 102.

12. William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853; rpt. New York: Citadel), 171.

13. Ibid., 224.

14. Ibid., 171; William Wells Brown, Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864), rpt. in William Wells Brown and Clotelle, by J. Noel Heermance (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1969), 46.

15. Brown, Clotel, 224; idem, Clotelle, 57.

16. Brown, Clotelle, 57-58.

17. Ibid., 11.

18. Marian E. Musgrave, “Patterns of Violence and Non-Violence in Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery Fiction,” College Language Association Journal 17 (1973): 426-37. Also see John Demos, “The Antislavery Movement and the Problem of Violent ‘Means,’” New England Quarterly 37 (1964): 501-26. The literary event before the Civil War that brought the issue of black heroism and violence to center stage was the publication and astounding success of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. For a survey of the diverse black literary responses to Stowe's novel, see Richard Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 45-84.

19. Brown, Clotel, 226.

20. This appeal was complicated by what Sundquist terms “the ambivalence that pre-Civil War generations felt and expressed toward the legacy of the founding fathers” (Eric J. Sundquist, “Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985], 2).

21. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989), 14. Douglass was an especially powerful spokesperson for this view of the war. See, for instance, his “Men of Color, To Arms!” Frederick Douglass' Monthly 5 (1863): 801; and “Another Word to Colored Men,” Frederick Douglass' Monthly 5 (1863): 817-18. For a detailed look at black military involvement in the Civil War, see Mary Frances Berry, Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy: Black Citizenship and the Constitution, 1861-1868 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1977).

22. Garnet, Address, 96.

23. Douglass's novella was serialized in his North Star, beginning in March 1853; Julia Griffiths also included it in her Autographs for Freedom of that year.

24. Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 179.

25. Douglass, “Slave,” 179.

26. “Anti-Colonization Meeting,” North Star, 2; second emphasis added.

27. Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered (Rochester, N.Y.: Lee, Mann, 1854), 30.

28. Ibid., 31.

29. Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), 237. For a thorough discussion of Douglass's ethnological views, see 197-250. Much later in life, Douglass called this speech “a very defective production,” but Martin argues that Douglass's ethnological views did not change substantially over time (Martin, Mind, 230).

30. Douglass, “Slave,” 233. In the most thorough modern examination of the Creole revolt, Howard Jones reports that Washington was “the slaves' head cook” (“The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt,” Civil War History 21 [Mar. 1975]: 29). If Jones's information is correct, it is understandable that Douglass would refrain from mentioning this somewhat undignified aspect of his hero's life. It should be noted that Jones draws primarily upon testimony provided by white witnesses at an inquiry after the revolt. (See Senate Documents, 27th Cong., 2d sess., Jan. 21, 1842, no. 51, 1-46.) One must not take for granted the objectivity of such individuals, most of whom had reasons to create their own fictional versions of the Creole incident. For a southern proslavery reading of the event, see the article “Mutiny and Murder” from the New Orleans Daily Picayune (Dec. 3, 1841), in which the author notes with admiration how the captain's dog “fought furiously against the negroes” until he was killed.

31. A number of scholars have examined the strategies that Douglass adopts in shaping the narrator's persona in his autobiographies in general and in this scene with Covey in particular. See, for example, William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986); Houston A. Baker Jr., The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980); Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979); Donald B. Gibson, “Reconciling Public and Private in Frederick Douglass' Narrative,” American Literature 57 (1985): 549-69; David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989); Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987); Robert B. Stepto, From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979); Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978).

32. Howard Jones notes, “Casualties were light on both sides because there was little resistance to the revolt and because Washington and another mutineer, Elijah Morris, restrained the others from killing the whites” (Jones, “Creole,” 30).

33. Douglass, “Slave,” 234-35.

34. Ibid., 232.

35. Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976). One also wonders if it is mere coincidence that the version of Douglass's speech published in the Liberator (run by the pacifist William Lloyd Garrison) matches that in the North Star exactly, except for the striking omission of Douglass's comments on the Creole episode (“Great Anti-Colonization Mass Meeting,” Liberator, 11 May 1849, 74). This speech contains some of Douglass's most openly militant statements. Perhaps the best known is his prediction that “unless the American people shall break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free, that spirit in man which abhors chains … will lead those sable arms that have long been engaged in cultivating, beautifying and adorning the South to spread death and devastation there.” This portion of Douglass's comment was, in fact, carried in the Liberator in full.

36. For Douglass's stance on violence as an antislavery weapon, see, among other studies, Allison Davis, Leadership, Love, and Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983); Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass (1950; rpt. New York: Citadel, 1969); and Martin, Mind.

37. Douglass's speech “Self-Made Men” was one of his most often-delivered presentations. See Martin, Mind, 253-78.

38. See Jones, “Creole,” 30 n. 7.

39. Leverenz, Manhood, 128. Frances Smith Foster suggests that Douglass's withholding information regarding Anna enables him to suppress certain positive aspects of his slave experience (Witnessing, 113). Also see Gibson, “Public and Private,” 551.

40. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 107. The closest we get to hearing Susan speak is Madison's explanation that in his extreme concern for her safety after his flight to Canada, he “could almost hear her voice, saying, ‘O Madison! Madison! will you then leave me here? can you leave me here to die? No! no! you will come! you will come!’” (Douglass, “Slave,” 219).

41. William Wells Brown, “Madison Washington,” in The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), 75-83; Lydia Maria Child, “Madison Washington,” in The Freedmen's Book (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 147-54; and Pauline E. Hopkins, “A Dash for Liberty,” Colored American Magazine 3 (Aug. 1901): 243-47.

42. Some of the minor distinctions among these four versions are revealing as well. For example, Brown's description of Washington is far more ethnically specific than Douglass's: “Born of African parentage, with no mixture in his blood, he was one of the handsomest of his race” (“Washington,” 75). This emphasis on Washington's African background recalls Brown's treatment of Jerome in the 1864 Clotelle, published one year after The Black Man appeared.

    It must be noted that there are several instances where Brown, Child, and Hopkins employ remarkably similar phrasing. Brown had appropriated material from Child before, in the first edition of Clotel. There is evidence of extensive borrowing here as well—either by Brown from an earlier version of Child's sketch or by Child from Brown's in The Black Man, or by both Brown and Child from an earlier text by another writer. In a letter written in 1865, Child had this to say regarding the composition of The Freedman's Book:

    The reason my name appears so often in the Index is that I re-wrote all the Biographies. They are not only interspersed with remarks of my own, but are so completely and entirely told in my own way, that I cannot, with any propriety ascribe them to anyone else. …

    You will find William and Ellen Crafts the most interesting. I collected it from various sources; some of it verbal information. James Madison Washington is also very romantic, and every word of it true.

    (Child to James T. Fields, 27 Aug. 1865, Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880, ed. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, assoc. ed. Francine Krasno [Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1982], 458-59.)

    Pauline Hopkins was familiar with the work of both Brown (whom she had met personally) and Child, and thus would likely have encountered their versions of the Creole revolt. To complicate matters, Hopkins cites neither Brown nor Child as her primary source but rather an article by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

43. Brown, “Washington,” 80.

44. Ibid., 83.

45. Ibid., 81. Brown's portrayal of Susan closely resembles the sentimental depiction of his light-skinned heroines in Clotel.

46. We find what is perhaps the first suggestion that Madison Washington's wife may have been aboard the Creole in “Madison Washington: Another Chapter in his History,” Liberator, June 10, 1842. In his recent article on “The Heroic Slave,” William Andrews quite rightly suggests: “This effort by the Liberator to infer a romantic plot underlying the Creole incidents testifies to the strong desire of American abolitionism for a story, if not the story, about Washington that would realize him as a powerful symbol of black antislavery heroism” (“The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 105 [1990]: 28).

47. Child, “Washington,” 147.

48. Characteristically, Hopkins provides an extensive discussion of Susan's mixed racial pedigree. For a look at the role of ancestry in her most important fictional work, see Yarborough, introduction to Contending Forces, by Pauline E. Hopkins (1900; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), xxvii-xlviii.

49. Hopkins, “Liberty,” 247; emphasis added.

50. Robert B. Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass's ‘The Heroic Slave,’” Georgia Review 36 (summer 1982): 363 n. 8.

51. For a further discussion of what Robert B. Stepto calls the “antislavery textual conversation” between Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Douglass's “The Heroic Slave,” see Stepto's “Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, 135-53. Stepto contends that Washington's revolt also appealed to Douglass because it “in some measure revises his own story” (“Thunder,” 359).

52. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986), 186.

53. Ibid., 187.

54. Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2, Pre-Civil War Decade, 1850-1860 (New York: International, 1950), 438.

55. Gibson, “Public and Private,” 563. See also David Leverenz's discussion of the tension between Douglass's “genteel self-control and his aggressiveness” in the 1855 edition of his narrative (Manhood, 114).

56. Baker, Journey, 39.

57. Raymond Hedin, “The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction,” Novel 16 (fall 1982): 37.

58. Smith, Self-Discovery, 20, 27. Also see Baker, Journey, 32-46; Leverenz, Manhood, 108-34; and Annette Niemtzow, “The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative,” in The Art of Slave Narrative, ed. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner (Macomb: Western Illinois Univ. Press, 1982), 96-109.

59. In “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition,” Deborah McDowell examines how the tendency to give Douglass's Narrative, with its uncritical inscription of sexist Anglo-American concepts of gender, a central position in constructing the African-American literary tradition marginalizes black women's texts (Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William Andrews [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991], 192-214).