SOURCE: Hubbard, Dolan. “‘Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around’: Reading the Narrative of Frederick Douglass.” In The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism, edited by Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar, pp. 265-71. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Hubbard, an African-American university professor, describes his experiences reading and teaching Douglass's Narrative.]

Reading Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) is liberating and exhilarating for me. On numerous occasions his words have lifted my spirits such as when I was unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight as chair of the Faculty Senate at Winston-Salem (N.C.) State University, or when I felt worn down during the grind of a rigorous doctoral program as one of three African American students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, or in those moments when I do a self-inventory regarding my position in the academy whose atmosphere, at times, can be lonely and indifferent. I use his narrative as a motivational tool to cope with the stress generated by questions such as: Do I belong? Can I do the work necessary for a productive and successful career? Can I handle the expectations of both community and academy? I draw sustenance from the achievements of this self taught man who rose from his position at the bottom of the social order to become one of the dominant voices in the nineteenth-century fight for freedom, social and economic justice, and women's suffrage.

I first encountered Frederick Douglass (1818-95) in church and elementary school in my Piedmont North Carolina hometown. The teachers at Granite Quarry Colored Elementary School filled the minds of my classmates and me with the exploits and accomplishments of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Langston Hughes. Along with learning Bible verses, we had impressed upon our minds the heroic deeds of these magnificent seven. This ritual action was repeated in church on Sundays. With a quiet confidence bordering on messianic fervor, teacher and preacher encoded our fragile minds with models of success to offset the impact of life in a rigidly segregated American South. As I neared the completion of the eighth grade, another name was added to this list, W. E. B. Du Bois.

The black teachers under whom I studied through the ninth grade constantly reminded us that we cannot take our education for granted—that like Douglass and other blacks who had achieved we must draw upon all of our resources in order to succeed in a system that was designed to see us fail. They saw education as a weapon of liberation. Of all the teachers that I have ever had, no one ever put my classmates and me through the paces like our fourth grade teacher of Ghanaian descent Rosebud Aggrey (1910-1990). On the job training for success in life began the moment we opened the door to the classroom. Just as Douglass was inspired by the stirring words that denounced oppression in The Columbian Orator (1799), Miss Aggrey instilled in us the value of mastering the three r's—'reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic—as the route to independence.

Among this group of teachers and writers, Douglass occupies a special place in my imagination because of the power of his pen and the power of his fists. With his pen, he deconstructed the ideology of slavery; with his fists, he demolished the demons of inferiority in his epic fight with Covey. He won his manhood on the battlefield of life. I now realize that the teachers and preacher held up Douglass and other black men and women of distinction so that we would not allow anybody to turn us around.¹

An inescapable fact of my reading of Douglass's Narrative is the extent to which my personal history shapes and informs my reading of him. Three of my favorite passages from Douglass's Narrative are his learning to read, his fight with Covey, and his description of Col. Lloyd's garden. While I do not claim to speak for all Americans of African descent, I am sure many will hear in this brief record of my experiences an echo of their own.

Without a doubt the most celebrated passage, the defining moment, in Douglass's Narrative occurs in chapter 3 where he describes in riveting detail his accidental discovery of “the pathway from slavery to freedom” (59). The epiphanic moment occurs when Hugh Auld brusquely reproaches his wife Sophia for teaching Douglass how to read with the furious denunciation that “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world” (58).²

The means by which Douglass creates an image of the heroic “self” is intrinsically linked to his ability to read and write. He (re)defines the terms of his humanity and challenges those who use the Bible to justify the enslavement of black people. Moreover, Douglass's encounter with reading and writing as a subversive activity resonates in the works of black writers such as Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Peter Abrahams, and Malcolm X.

I remind students in my Major Black Writers class that Douglass learned to read and write between the age of eight and fourteen, and he went on to write a recognized masterpiece by the age of twenty-seven. In spite of the many accomplishments of Douglass as pacesetter—newspaper editor, entrepreneur, government official, and adviser to presidents—all roads lead back to the major epiphany in his life: his learning to read and write.

Occasionally, I bring to class the Benjamin Quarles edition of Douglass's Narrative, my favorite text—which I found while rummaging through the used-book section of the Goodwill Store in Winston-Salem, N.C., in late 1977 with my friend and mentor Joseph Patterson—and read some of my editorial comments on my favorite passages from its dog-eared pages. I remind my students that Douglass did not suffer and endure the indignities he chronicles in his Narrative in order for them to come here and complain about inadequate funds, insensitive teachers, and indifferent classmates—and be passably mediocre. He wants them, young, gifted, and bright, to give their best and be their best. The ritual action of his life would be refined by a black scholar of another generation into the concept of “the talented tenth.”³ To my words of uplift, some of my black students exclaim, “Ease up, Dr! That was then, this is now.”

As near as I can gauge, the response of my white students to this rhetoric of uplift ranges from muted anger to let's make America a better place for all. In a society that favors them at every turn, many white students think that the world has turned upside down. Douglass unveils the ideology that we commonly refer to as the American Dream; he challenges us to think about what it means to be an American. Having said this, most students respond positively to Douglass for he jump starts their imagination. They admire him for his use of words, for his refusal to be defeated, and for his honesty. I remind my students that the best way they can honor the memory of Douglass is through the development of their critical thinking skills. For Douglass it was not enough to be free; we must be about the business of the development of the total self.

The development of the total self includes the right to defend oneself. In a system designed to break the spirit of the enslaved black people, one thinks twice about defending oneself as Douglass makes clear with his telling of violent incidents he witnessed as a slave. Viewed from this perspective, the emotional center of his narrative occurs in chapter 10 where Douglass describes the epic fight he has with the notorious slave breaker Covey. The fight sets Douglass's narrative apart and gives it a special meaning for me. It triggers a rush of emotions which are almost indescribable, the prime one being the thrill of victory.

Although Douglass couches the fight in apocalyptic language as the triumph of good over evil, students intuitively respond to the larger reality that lies behind the meaning of his words. They tap into a fundamental urge on the part of many blacks to avenge centuries of abuse directed at our community as a result of what Grier and Cobbs describe in Black Rage as “the unwillingness of white Americans to accept [black people] as fellow human beings” (1968: vii). Much of the rap music, as well as Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing, taps into this suppressed rage. Moreover, the fight enables Douglass to exorcise the demons of inferiority, many of which are associated with his impotence in not being able to defend the black woman. Douglass argues, implicitly and correctly, that a man without the essential element of force does not possess the ability to defend himself.

I want my students to see the fight with Covey as the logical culmination of a process rooted in Douglass's ability to read and write. As a result of his mastery of the word, Douglass not only begins the process of rehabilitating his damaged self-consciousness, but he also sees that on a larger scale, “writing is fighting.”⁴ In another classic black American first-person narrative, Richard Wright makes a similar discovery in chapter 13 of Black Boy (1945). He discovers that H. L. Mencken “was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would a club” (272). I experienced the rush that comes from using words as a weapon during my days as a staff writer on my college newspaper as one of eleven or twelve blacks on a campus of 1,200 students (1967-71). I was given plenty of ammunition about which to write: the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and, of course, what it felt like to be one of a handful of black students on an overwhelmingly white campus during an angry decade.⁵

“Writing is fighting” is most apparent in chapters 2 and 3 in which Douglass describes the palatial splendor at Col. Lloyd's Great House Farm. With biting irony, Douglass describes “the home plantation of Colonel Lloyd [which] wore the appearance of a country village” (35) as “the seat of government for the whole twenty farms” (32). The opening paragraph of chapter 3 contains the centerpiece of Douglass's attack on wanton opulence:

Colonel Lloyd kept a large and finely cultivated garden. … Its excellent fruit was quite a temptation to the hungry swarms of boys, as well as the older slaves, belonging to the colonel, few of whom had the virtue or the vice to resist it. Scarcely a day passed, during the summer, but that some slave had to take the lash for stealing fruit. The colonel had to resort to all kinds of stratagems to keep slaves out of the garden. The last and most successful one was that of tarring his fence all around; after which, if a slave was caught with any tar upon his person, it was deemed sufficient proof that he had either been into the garden, or had tried to get in.

(39)

To be sure, many of us recognize in Douglass's description of Col. Lloyd's garden an alternative reading of America as the promised land, the Garden of Eden. I would suggest that for Douglass the garden is a metaphor for government's descent into institutional immorality, which is consistent with his view of slavery as a living hell. It is an extension of his view that the slave traders were nothing but “a band of successful robbers” (67) who had the Bible and government on their side. They rob the enslaved African Americans of their dignity and their labor. For those readers who may have missed his point, Douglass drives it home with his reference to the ubiquitous tar, which signifies on the relation of blacks to America as he unveils a fundamental paradox of life in America. Black people assist in the building and maintenance of many of the carefully coiffured “gardens” in America from courthouses to country clubs; yet they do not benefit in any meaningful way from the fruits of their labor.

Douglass's image of America as “a large and finely cultivated garden” registers strongly in the imagination of many of my students who have ambitions of being successful in the world of corporate America. If fraternity row represents the garden with a lowercase “g” and the country club represents the garden with an uppercase “g,” then I ask my students: What does this mean in terms of the implications for public policy? Who lives where and why? How will this affect their opportunities for success? And to be successful, must my black students become Afro-Saxons, black on the outside and white on the inside? I tell them that these are questions we all have to work our way through.

As an African-American intellectual, I see the academy as a type of garden—a private preserve in which many of us are spoken of but rarely spoken to. By this I mean, we are often out of the loop in regard to meaningful academic discourse; many of us discover upon our arrival in the academy that we are cultural elites without portfolio. Consequently, our presence is tolerated in an atmosphere of benign neglect. This serves to create feelings of inadequacy and ambivalence; it thus raises an interesting question: Are we scholars who are black or blacks who are scholars? As I wrestle with this question, I am aware that those on the outside see us as having made it, while those on the inside see us as necessary but unwelcome interlopers.

I read Douglass's Narrative as an impressive hymn to the indefatigable human spirit. His autobiographical statement is his declaration of semantic independence. He measures his creation of a human and liberated self by the degree to which he is able to articulate imaginatively his experiences. As one who is the first in his family to graduate from college and whose life is now paying dividends on the promise so many people saw in me, Douglass's Narrative puts me in sync with my history and the possibility that lies beyond the restrictive categories of race and gender. That his narrative is so in tune with the spirits that move in the souls of black folk may be gauged by how quickly it assumed scriptural significance.

And like any sacred text, there is room in Douglass's narrative for those with divergent points of view to go “up from slavery,” “stride toward freedom,” or seek freedom and liberation “by any means necessary.” The unmistakable optimism that infuses Douglass's vision makes it possible for all to say in unison, and “still [we] rise” (Washington, King, Malcolm X, Angelou). Frederick Douglass, the heroic voice of black America, challenges us to not let anybody turn us around.

Notes

1. One of the verses to this classic spiritual is:

   Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round,
   Turn me 'round, turn me 'round.
   Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round.
   Gonna keep on decidin'
   To keep on a-ridin'
   Ridin' to the Promised Land.

   (qtd. in Farmer 1985: 15, 185)

2. Subsequent references to Douglass's Narrative, edited by Benjamin Quarles and published by Harvard University Press (1960), will be designated parenthetically.

3. In his essay, “The Talented Tenth,” originally published in the anthology The Negro Problem (1903), Du Bois argues that liberal arts education is essential for creating the “aristocracy of talent and character” that will raise “the masses of Negro people” (1986: 847).

4. Ishmael Reed, one of the most productive black writers of his generation, titles a collection of his essays Writin' is Fightin'.

5. I attended Catawba College in Salisbury where I earned my B.A. in English. I had a very rewarding and productive four years at this institution affiliated with the United Church of Christ.

References

Abrahams, Peter. Tell Freedom. New York: Collier, 1970.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam, 1970.

———. “Still I Rise.” Poems. New York: Bantam, 1986. 154-55.

Bingham, Caleb. The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces. 2d ed. London, 1799.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. Ed. Benjamin Quarles. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Talented Tenth.” 1903. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986. 842-61.

Farmer, James. Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Plume, 1985.

Grier, William, and Price M. Cobbs. Black Rage. New York: Bantam, 1968.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.

Preston, Dickson J. Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 83-96.

Reed, Ishmael. Writin' Is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper. New York: Atheneum, 1988.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. Three Negro Classics. Ed. John Hope Franklin. New York: Avon, 1965.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper & Row, 1945.

X, Malcolm. Autobiography. With Alex Haley. New York: Ballantine, 1965.

———. By Any Means Necessary. Ed. George Breitman. New York: Pathfinder, 1970. 41.