[In the following essay, Franklin explores animal imagery in the Narrative and the role of Douglass's story in refuting the commonly held belief, particularly in the South, that slaves were incapable of producing literature.]

Prior to the Black urban rebellions of 1964-1968, what the academic establishment defined as American literature included about as many Afro-American achievements as major-league baseball did before 1947. The subsequent token integration of our anthologies, curricula, and departments has not fundamentally altered the canon of American literary masterpieces, nor the criteria for choosing that canon and the critical methodologies applied to it. By and large, we are still acting as though American literature were a mere colonial implantation, no doubt modified by local conditions but in essence an offshoot of European literature.

But insofar as American literature is a unique body of creative work, what defines its identity most unequivocally is the historical and cultural experience of the Afro-American people. At long last we have come to understand that this is obviously true for American music and dance, and we are on the verge of recovering our lost comprehension of the interrelations between music and poetry. When we grasp the significance of this truth for American literature as a whole, we will be forced radically to change our critical methodologies, our criteria for literary excellence, and our canon of great literature—or perhaps even the entire notion of a canon.

At least until the middle of the Civil War, the dominant American view of Blacks was that they were an inferior kind of being, perhaps even a sub-human species. This view was codified into law and the founding Constitution, implemented thoroughly in social practice, and deeply imbued in the outlook of most American writers. Here is one widely disseminated expression of that view:

The situation of the slave is, in every particular, incompatible with the cultivation of his mind. It would not only unfit him for his station in life, and prepare him for insurrection, but would be found wholly impracticable in the performance of the duties of a labourer. …

Inert and unintellectual, he exhibits no craving for knowledge; and prefers, in his hours of recreation, indulgence in his rustic pleasures to the pursuit of intellectual improvement … the negro never suffers from the thirst for knowledge. Voluptuous and indolent, he knows few but animal pleasures; is incapable of appreciating the pride and pleasure of conscious intellectual refinement. … The dance beneath the shade surpasses, for him, the groves of the academy.

The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists (Philadelphia, 1836)

In the literature of the south, or rather in literature by white southerners, this view was virtually unanimous. William Gilmore Simms, still widely touted as the greatest writer produced by the “Old South,” argued in “The Morals of Slavery” (1837, 1852) that “there are few people so very well satisfied with their conditions as the negroes,—so happy of mood, so jocund, and so generally healthy and cheerful.” The most venerated writer of New England, Nathaniel Hawthorne, shared this view. In his fiction, Black people exist only as stereotyped faithful body servants, such as Caesar in “The White Old Maid,” Scipio in “Egotism,” or that other Scipio whose stock role provides comic relief in The House of the Seven Gables (just like Jupiter in Poe's “The Gold Bug,” Scipio is scared of a ghost that comes to “frighten a poor nigga”). The only distinct Black character is also a stereotype, the stock “nigger” of “Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe,” a mulatto who turns from “yellow” to a “ghastly white” when confronted with a crime he was too cowardly to commit. Twice Hawthorne explicitly stated his views on slavery. In “Old News” (1835), he characterizes “slave labor” in eighteenth-century New England as “a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times.” “The slaves,” he thinks, “were the merriest part of the population,” and all runaway slaves “would have been better advised had they stayed at home, foddering the cattle, cleaning dishes,—in fine, performing their moderate shares of the labors of life, without being harassed by its cares.” And nine years before the Civil War, Hawthorne lashed out at all anti-slavery “agitation,” which, he asserted, threatened “the ruin of two races which now dwell together in greater peace and affection … than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf.” (The Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852).

In response to this view and to the system it defended, there emerged a literary genre whose form and content is uniquely American—the narrative of the escaped slave. The slave narrative is the literary creation of those “inert and unintellectual” bodies without minds, those happy serfs, those “voluptuous and indolent” animals with no human aspirations. The racist mentality of William Gilmore Simms and Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper, is not unique to America; it was, and still is, generally characteristic of European societies and the colonialists exported from Europe to the Americas, Asia, and Africa. The slave narrative, however, is truly American. In fact, it was the first genre the United States of America contributed to the written literature of the world.

This event in literary history was recognized in print as early as 1849, by the Reverend Ephraim Peabody, who put it this way in his article “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves” in the Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany: “America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization—the autobiographies of escaped slaves.” In Many Thousand Gone: The Ex-Slaves' Account of Their Bondage and Freedom, the pioneering twentieth-century history of the genre, Charles H. Nichols demonstrated the vast popularity and influence of these autobiographies by Black Americans. (This study was published in 1963, in Holland, revealingly enough; it was not until 1969 that it finally achieved publication in America.) The genre produced several of the greatest works of nineteenth-century American literature. In 1863 an escaped slave who had written one of these narratives, the man now once again being recognized as America's first Black novelist and playwright, William Wells Brown, included a history of the genre in his vanguard study, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements.

In less than a century, however, this literary achievement had been effectively expunged from the study of American literature. By the time of the 1954 Supreme Court decision against apartheid in education, as Arna Bontemps pointed out in Great Slave Narratives (1969), only one example of the slave narrative was in print. But since then our history has prepared us to understand both the social and the artistic significance of these works.

The slave narrative was usually told by a fugitive slave whose escape from slavery was perceived, quite accurately, as a threat to the entire system. Those who defended slavery argued, like Simms and Hawthorne, that Negroes were happy to be slaves. Every escaped slave was a living refutation of that argument. Another defense of slavery, one underlying the first, was that Negroes were not thinking human beings. Every author of a slave narrative was a refutation of that argument. And if the slave narrative could transcend the literature being published by the apologists for slavery, it would embody even more radical implications—about human potential, about the meaning of culture, about the relations among social classes.

The audience for the slave narrative was generally the reading public of the northern states, overwhelmingly white and relatively “cultured.” An odd relationship existed between the authors and the readers, one exacerbated by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The audience was part of the body of citizens whose lawful duty was to help ferret out the authors and return these runaway pieces of property to their rightful owners. The narratives were frankly polemical, and, whether actually written by the slaves themselves or, as in some cases, ghost-written by their abolitionist friends, generally used the polite literary language and style expected by their audience. But the experience being rendered was brutal and sordid beyond the imagination, not to mention the direct experience, of most of these readers.

From Ephraim Peabody and William Wells Brown to the present, all students of the slave narrative have agreed that the masterpiece of the form is Frederick Douglass' first autobiography, published in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself. And even if the rest of the genre did not exist, the Narrative standing on its own is still, as Jean Fagan Yellin has called it, “a classic American autobiography.” Nevertheless, the book has received scandalously little critical attention as a work of literature, and Douglass himself, one of the most important authors in nineteenth-century America, has remained a virtual nonentity outside the academic ghetto of Afro-American studies.

Articles on American Literature, 1950-1967 (Duke University Press, 1970) includes not a single article on Frederick Douglass, though it lists over fifty articles on Jonathan Edwards, James Kirke Paulding, and William Wirt. The omission cannot be explained by the fact that Douglass' works are mostly essays and autobiographical narratives, for there are 459 articles listed on Henry David Thoreau. Douglass' books are not even included in the standard Bibliography of American Literature compiled by Jacob Blanck. The standard history of American literature is Literary History of the United States, by Robert Spiller, Willard Thorp, Thomas H. Johnson, Henry Seidel Canby, Richard Ludwig, and William M. Gibson. In 1974, a greatly revised fourth edition was published, with 1,555 pages of facts and analysis in small print. There are three chapters on the literature produced in the South through the Civil War; all this literature is by whites. The authors discussed include such eminent apologists for slavery and literary giants at Hugh Legaré, William Wirt, and George Fitzhugh, author of Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters. Nowhere is there any discussion of the slave narrative or slave poetry. Not even the name of Frederick Douglass appears, though Stephen A. Douglas is mentioned at least four times. The Bibliography Supplement (1972) has bibliographies for 218 individual authors, including John C. Calhoun, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, James Allen Lane, and Allen Tate—but not Frederick Douglass. In other words, the white academic establishment still pretends that Frederick Douglass does not exist as a literary artist or that, like Satchel Paige, he is not good enough to play outside the Negro leagues.

Douglass' Narrative has been discussed in book-length histories of Afro-American literature and the slave narrative; Benjamin Quarles did a valuable introduction, mostly historical, for his 1960 Harvard University Press edition of the book; in 1972, two extremely insightful brief analyses appeared in critical books, Jean Fagan Yellin's The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (NYU Press) and Houston Baker's Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (University of Virginia Press). There have been, to the best of my knowledge, prior to this only two published articles on the Narrative, and both appeared in CLAJ [College Language Association Journal], a publication devoted to Afro-American literature (Nancy T. Clasby, “Frederick Douglass' Narrative: A Content Analysis,” CLAJ, 14 [1971], 242-250, and Albert E. Stone, “Identity and Art in Frederick Douglass' Narrative,” CLAJ, 17 [1973], 192-213).

I shall be exploring here the wider significance of one theme and set of images in the Narrative, using some methods we customarily deem appropriate to a short story by Poe or Hawthorne, a poem by Whitman or Dickinson, or an autobiographical narrative by Thoreau or Henry Adams. Frankly, a subsidiary part of my intention is to show that individual early Afro-American works of literature merit the kind of close attention we usually reserve for works of the canon. It is curious that such a demonstration should be necessary for the slave narrative, for it is, of all forms of early Afro-American literature, the one which most thoroughly accepts the dominant European literary conventions.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself is a book created by a being who was once considered an animal, even by himself, for an audience that remains unconvinced that he is in fact a fellow human being. So it should come as no surprise that animal imagery embodies Douglass' deepest meanings.

In Long Black Song, Houston Baker notes that animal metaphors “appear in most of the chapters of the Narrative.” Baker offers several explanations. He observes that “Douglass is aware of American slavery's chattel principle, which equated slaves with livestock, and he is not reluctant to employ animal metaphors to capture the general inhumanity of the system.” He makes an intriguing suggestion about overtones in the Narrative from the animal tales of Black slave culture. And he emphasizes the appropriateness of the animal imagery to “the agrarian settings and characters.” Albert Stone disagrees with Baker, arguing that Douglass' “images of ships and the sea” are far more central than animal imagery, forming a pattern which “connects and defines all stages of his personal history.” Stone's sensitive exploration of the nautical imagery is a valuable contribution to our appreciation of the artistic richness of this book. It is, however, the animal imagery that is crucial, and in ways far more significant than even Baker perceived.

These images not only structure the development of the Narrative, but also locate the book on the front lines of a major ideological battleground of the 1840's and 1850's. Douglass is asking, and answering, one central question in the Narrative: What is a human being? That is, within his historical context, how is a human being different from animals (or machines) that can perform labor? This was also the central philosophical and scientific question of his time, a question that all our subsequent history has been trying to resolve. While Douglass wrote, Darwin and Marx were both wrestling with precisely the same question. And in America, natural science and its definition of what was human was in the process of coming to focus most narrowly on “the Negro.”

Slavery, as we now recognize, went through a fundamental change around 1830, completing its evolution from a predominantly small-scale, quasi-domestic institution appended to hand-tool farming and manufacture into the productive base of an expanding agricultural economy, utilizing machinery to process the harvested crops and pouring vast quantities of agricultural raw materials, principally cotton, into developing capitalist industry in the northern states and England. Prior to the 1830's, as George Fredrickson documents in The Black Image in the White Mind (N.Y., 1971), open assertions of the “permanent inferiority” of Blacks “were exceedingly rare.” In fact, many eighteenth-century and earlier nineteenth-century apologists for slavery defended it as a means of “raising” and “civilizing” the poor, benighted, child-like Negro. But in the 1830's there emerged in America a world view based on the belief that Blacks were inherently a race inferior to whites, and as part of this world view there developed a scientific theory of Blacks as beings half way, or even less than half way, between animals and white people. This was part of the shift of Blacks from their role as children, appropriate to a professedly patriarchal society which offered them the means of eventual development into adulthood, into their role as subhuman beasts of burden, the permanent mainstay of the labor force of expanding agribusiness.

By 1833, this world view had been scientifically formulated in Richard Colfax's Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists, Consisting of Physical and Moral Proofs of the Natural Inferiority of the Negroes (New York, 1833). In his researches into the skulls and facial angles of Negroes, Colfax prefigured the developed science of the 1840's and 1850's known as the “American School of Ethnology.” He argued that “the acknowledged meanness of the Negro's intellect only coincides with the shape of his head.” This can be readily seen in the Negro's “facial angle,” which was “almost to a level with that of a brute.” Colfax concludes that Negroes are half way between animals and white people: “the Negroes, whether physically or morally considered, are so inferior as to resemble the brute creation as nearly as they do the white species.” (Fredrickson cites this and many other works prior to 1845 making the same biological case against the Negro.)

Colfax did not further develop the concept of Negroes as a distinct species, but by the late 1830's this next logical position was achieving its first systematic presentation in a body of scientific literature dedicated to demonstrating “that the black man was a member of a separate and permanently inferior species.” In the early 1840's came the theory of polygenesis. Dr. Samuel George Morton proved scientifically in Crania Americana (Philadelphia, 1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (Philadelphia, 1844) that Negroes did not descend from Adam but were a distinct and subhuman species originating in southern Africa. (Frederickson, pp. 74-77. Carolyn Karcher has shown how Melville satirized this “science” in her “Melville's ‘The 'Gees’: A Forgotten Satire on Scientific Racism,” American Quarterly, 27 [1975], 421-442.)

Frederick Douglass had lived the social reality which these scientific theories were adduced to perpetuate. He had begun life as a farm animal. Looking back, he traces the course of his development into a conscious human being, threatened all along the way by the danger of being reduced once again to a beast. Using the most brilliant manipulation of his audience's literary conventions to display the particularities of his own experience, Douglass is able to show what it means to be a human being in an age and society dominated by racist ideology and maintaining its basic productive activities through the use of one class of human beings as work animals by another class of human beings. For Douglass, as for Karl Marx, writing the previous year in what we now call the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, human beings are distinguished as a species by a creative consciousness which derives from the circumstances of their existence; this consciousness gives us the potential freedom to change those circumstances to meet human needs and desires, and it is in the struggle for that freedom that this consciousness develops.

The first paragraph of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself is concerned with the basic circumstances of his birth—place and date. Douglass has no problem locating the place and he does so, in the first sentence, establishing at once the artfully restrained, almost unemotional, matter-of-fact style which is to be the underlying norm for the entire narrative: “I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland.” (P. 23 in the edition by Benjamin Quarles, Harvard University Press, 1960, which reproduces the text of the first edition, published in Boston, 1845; further references are indicated parenthetically by page number to this edition.) But the second sentence poses a problem for this precise, no-nonsense narrator: “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.” In dryly explaining his predicament to the reader, Douglass can only compare himself and his fellow slaves to other farm animals: “… slaves know as little of their age as horses know of theirs.” This is the starting point of his consciousness, something like a human, something like a beast.

Like most slaves, Douglass never knew his father. He learns, however, that his father was a white man, quite possibly his master, one of those who made the satisfaction of his “lusts” both “profitable as well as pleasurable” by increasing the number of his slaves (26). So Douglass himself apparently was created through the sexual union of the two “species” of beings defined by those scientists of the 1840's, and one of these—the loftier—would probably gain a profit from the transaction when the little suckling became marketable. Following the “common custom,” his mother is deliberately separated from him while he is a small baby: “I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night.” (24)

The little boy's first consciousness of the meaning of slavery comes through the spectacle of his beautiful aunt being whipped by his master, apparently because of sexual jealousy. The master “stripped her from neck to waist,” tied her hands to an overhead hook, and then proceeded to “whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood”:

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. 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 any thing.

(28)

The words the master uses over and over again to define Douglass' aunt while he flagellates her cannot be repeated to the polite readers of the Narrative. Douglass has to record them as “‘you d—d b—h’” (29-30). But their meaning is clear enough, for they signify the essence of the slaveowners' views of their Black slaves. The human master is merely punishing a female animal.

As for the little boy, he was but “seldom whipped,” as Douglass tells us in a passage that I believe stands as one of the most brilliant achievements in style and content of nineteenth-century American prose:

I was seldom whipped by my old master, and suffered little from any thing else than hunger and cold. I suffered much from hunger, but much more from cold. In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked—no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.

(51-52)

After the first two sentences, simple but meticulously balanced, the style becomes stripped and stark, almost as naked as the little boy it describes living, or rather existing, on the level of brute survival. On the surface almost laconic, the passage virtually explodes with artfully arranged, highly volatile tensions. The first great disparity is between the little boy and the man writing his story, who is the little boy grown up. The two worlds in which they live are brought into direct physical contact as the writer takes his pen and lays it in the frost-cracked gashes on the boy's feet. By using the tool with which he is communicating to his polite audience as the implement of yoking in these two worlds, he also forces that audience to join him in contacting the boy. And in that conjunction, he brings his readers face to face with the first of many moral inversions: to survive, the slave must violate the property rights defined by society; he must steal a bag intended to help produce profit. In all this, we are forced to sense a tremendous disparity between the emotional level of the prose, running on that matter-of-fact norm, and the potential rage and violence implicit in the slave's situation. This is all part of Douglass' patient preparation for the climax of his Narrative, and for his final warning to his audience.

Douglass next describes how he ate: “our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush. …” (52) In the very next paragraph, Douglass tells of his leaving this plantation. He thus establishes the juxtaposition which will provide one underlying dialectic for the rest of the narrative, the dialectic between rural and urban existence. Here we see most clearly an opposition of values between Douglass' vision, which is generally representative of his Black contemporaries, and the vision dominant in most of the white literature of the period.

The movement from country to city, and the conflict between the values of these two worlds, was of course a highly conventional literary theme in ante-bellum America, with its rapid industrialization and urbanization. This is, most typically, envisioned as a fall from rural innocence and natural freedom into the artificialities of the infernal city, as in Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and Melville's Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities. Outside the city is the Eden to which the conscious person may wish to return, rarely with as much success as in the visions projected by Thoreau.

For Frederick Douglass, the movement primarily means the opposite. The city to him represents consciousness and the possibility of freedom; the country represents brutalization and the certainty of slavery. So the boy, now “probably between seven and eight years old,” spends almost three days “in the creek, washing off the plantation scruff,” “for the people in Baltimore were very cleanly, and would laugh at me if I looked dirty” (52-53). He is going to be given a pair of trousers; “The thought of owning a pair of trousers was great indeed!” (53) To merit the trousers and the city, he must no longer be a young pig: “It was almost a sufficient motive, not only to make me take off what would be called by pig-drovers the mange, but the skin itself.” (53)

In the city, Douglass becomes a house boy. His expectations about life in the city are not disappointed: “A city slave,” he discovers, “is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation.” (60) And there he encounters simultaneously two great sources of knowledge. The first, introduced by his mistress, is the alphabet. The second, confronting him in the form of his master's reactions, is that all the values of the slave must be the opposite of those of the slaveowner. The master forbids his wife from any further instruction of the boy because “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read”:

To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

(58)

So the master points to consciousness as the means to freedom, to the written language as a means to increase consciousness, and to himself as the negation of consciousness, the negation that must constantly be negated in order to achieve freedom:

These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. … I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. … The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.

(58-59)

This experience, which foreshadows the climax of the Narrative, defines for Douglass the path to consciousness and freedom, that is to humanity. Unlike Pinocchio, who can become human only by learning to be honest, Douglass can attain his humanity only by learning deceit and trickery. He reveals to us some of the wily and devious tricks he uses, still as a small boy, to gain from the hostile white world around him the ability to read and write. Frankness, trustfulness, humility, passivity are all for him just so many snares that would put him back in the barnyard with the horses and pigs.

Douglass succeeds in learning how to read, and the master's worst fears come true:

The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery.

(67)

But as his eyes are opened, as he gains intensifying consciousness of his own condition, without seeing how to change it, his own transformation becomes the source of his greatest torment. He now sometimes yearns to be deprived of consciousness, to be, in fact, an unthinking animal: “I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!” (67)

In the following chapter his urban sanctuary is disrupted by a temporary fall back into the barnyard. The death of his legal owner forces him back to be present at the redivision of all the property. Although now only about ten or eleven years old, he understands the scene all too well. It is perhaps the most conventional scene in the slave narrative genre, undoubtedly because it was such a critical event in the actual lives of the slaves and one that displayed most dramatically the essence of chattel slavery. It is when the slaves are “divided, like so many sheep” (76). For Douglass the young city slave it is a revelation, which Douglass the author presents as the literal embodiment of his animal imagery:

We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth, maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection.

(74)

He concludes this paragraph by foreshadowing a reversal that will take place in the function of the animal imagery: “At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder.”

Earlier, Douglass had traced the degradation of his mistress, who “at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness.” In order to become “equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute,” she must be transformed from being a “tender-hearted woman” to a creature of “tiger-like fierceness.” (63-64) As the Narrative progresses, Douglass makes us increasingly aware of this other kind of animal. Just as the slaves in the early part of the book are likened to barnyard animals, the slaveowners later are compared more and more to predatory beasts. So when Douglass is lucky enough to be returned temporarily to Baltimore, the fate he thus escapes is “worse than lion's jaws” (75). But at the age of about fourteen, this is just the fate he meets, as he is returned to the plantation.

His new country master cannot tame him, even with “a number of severe whippings” (87). So he decides to rent young Douglass out to Edward Covey, a farmer notorious as a “‘nigger-breaker’” (88). Douglass now finds himself, “for the first time in my life, a field hand” (89). It is now 1833, the very year in which Richard Colfax was publishing his evidence that “the Negroes, whether physically or morally considered, are so inferior as to resemble the brute creation as nearly as they do the white species.”

Edward Covey is known to his slaves, significantly enough, as “the snake” (92). Vicious as he is, Covey's main weapon in breaking slaves is not the whip but work. At the very moment that Colfax is propagandizing the concept that Negroes are inherently and permanently subhuman, Douglass is learning that through unending work a person can be transformed into a beast:

We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and then vanished.

(94-95)

This is the lowest point in Douglass' life, and its essential crisis. Reduced to animal existence, his human consciousness seems to serve only the function of self torture. But even this ultimate degradation contains the potential of human liberation.

Douglass' authorial strategy here is crucial. He is aware that his audience has been conditioned to think of him as half human. He does not protest by proclaiming that he is every bit as human as the reader. Instead, he takes the reader through his own experience of becoming, in fact, “beast-like,” and not through extraordinary or exceptional torture but through unremitting, mindless labor without end, the ordinary life of the slave. By conceding that he himself had become like an animal after attaining a much higher consciousness, Douglass forces the reader to recognize that he or she, merely by being cast down from his or her relatively comfortable social existence, could also be reduced to the semblance of an animal. This experience is quite different from the one in which Douglass the child had first awakened to find himself a slave. How could Douglass' readers possibly imagine themselves as beings who had never known any existence but that as a rural beast of burden? The Douglass who returns to the animal farm is much closer to the typical reader: he has lived in the city; he has thought philosophically about freedom and slavery; he can read and write; he has read books. Thus Douglass can serve as a surrogate for the reader, and the reader may be able to share a portion of Douglass' slave experience. The readers can discover that all their book knowledge and philosophical consciousness would not serve to distinguish them from animals if they were suddenly plunged into plantation slavery. The situation resembles those in many science fiction stories, from Gulliver's Travels and Voltaire's Micromegas to Planet of the Apes and James McConnell's “Learning Theory,” in which human beings find themselves incapable of demonstrating to alien creatures that they are part of an intelligent species.

Douglass, however, does find the way to demonstrate—to Covey, to himself, and thus to the readers—that he is a human being. This is the key event in his life, the climax of his narrative, and the core of his philosophical, historical, and practical message. Frederick Douglass now speaks in the second person, addressing the reader directly: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” (97)

Douglass discovers that it is not cranial capacity or facial angles or book knowledge or intelligence in the abstract that distinguishes the human species from brutes. It is the consciousness which allows people to alter the conditions of existence, a consciousness that develops in the struggle for freedom from brute necessity. Faced with slavery, that can mean only one thing before all: “I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat … I told him … that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer.” (103-104) They fight for what seems hours. Douglass overcomes Covey, “the snake.” Then comes the famous passage which all students of the Narrative have seen as its heart and climax:

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. He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. 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.

(104-105)

This is a troublesome passage for many professors of literature, for it challenges their most fundamental assumptions about the relations between body and mind, and between life and art. I noted earlier that no journal except one devoted to Afro-American literature had ever found an article on the Narrative acceptable for publication. There may be many possible reasons for this, but one that is in hand reveals what is fundamentally at issue in the rejection of Douglass' art and vision. In recommending rejection of an article on the Narrative submitted to an academic journal, a referee insisted that the author made a serious error in not finding any “irony in the situation in which Douglass must reduce his conflict with the slaveholders to a question of brute strength and physical violence in order to assert his ‘manhood.’” This referee went on to explain the values the author of the article ought to have shared to have his view of the Narrative acceptable:

Does he [Douglass] learn that in matching the brute in himself against the animalism of his enslavery that he becomes the victor? If [the author of the article] is right about Douglass' genius, it would seem more convincing that Douglass recognized that his real victory over slavery and his most splendid assertion of his manhood was the Narrative itself: his triumph over language and his own rage.

Characteristic of his social class, this academic referee equates the body and physical violence, no matter how it is exerted, with “the brute,” and the mind, especially evidenced in its verbal products, with what is really human. This is based on the underlying academic dichotomy between mind and body, an expression of bourgeois ideology, which envisions workers as mindless bodies and intellectuals as pure minds whose bodily physical comforts have nothing to do with their thinking. In “On the Teaching of Literature in the Highest Academies of the Empire” (College English, 1970), I showed how this dichotomy structures the most fundamental unexamined assumptions governing the study and teaching of literature in America. The primary of these assumptions I caricatured in these terms:

First, there is the overall relationship between art and life. Great literary art transcends life. That is, literary achievements are more significant than social or political actions.

Or rather, I thought this was a caricature until I saw that statement by the anonymous referee about the climax of Douglass' Narrative.

Douglass' individual rebellion, his personal repelling “by force the bloody arm of slavery,” has tremendous importance for him, for the history of nineteenth-century America, for us. As Nancy T. Clasby has shown, “Douglass' act of violent resistance and the mysterious rebirth he experienced” are “crucial thematic elements” not just in this Narrative but in Black literature up through the present. As Clasby perceives:

The institutions under which Douglass had lived had failed to give him a viable identity—his manhood. The fight with Covey symbolically shattered the institutions and the old identity.

To be reborn as a human being, to shed his animal identity imposed upon him by the white man, this Black slave must commit the most forbidden crime of all: he must strike the white man who oppresses him.

Not to understand the meaning of this is to fail to comprehend not only Douglass' Narrative but the historical epoch we ourselves live in, an epoch characterized by the anti-colonial struggles of the non-white peoples of the world. Frantz Fanon, the Black psychiatrist and revolutionary theorist, has written several books unfolding the historical implications of the psychological truths Douglass was able to compress into a paragraph. As Fanon puts it, the act of violence against the oppressor, even on the individual level, is the primal event that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” (The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 1966, p. 27.) For Douglass, as for the peoples studied by Fanon, the initial act of violence is the premise of a new community for the oppressed. As Clasby argues, Douglass' entire subsequent life as a leader of his people flowed from this act:

From the time of his resolution that “the day had passed forever” when he could be “a slave in fact,” Douglass experienced his own integrity, a love for his brothers, and a relationship to spiritual realities which had been denied him by the conventional societal mechanisms. For the family which had been denied him by slavery he found a new brotherhood among his fellow rebels. He traded “slaveholding Christianity” for a closeknit and loving community of suffering slaves.

Douglass' creation of this Narrative is also a monumental act, but it was contingent upon what he did that day on the plantation. And the brilliant art of this narrative embodies in animal imagery his rebirth into a new identity. Unlike those professors who think a person becomes a “brute” when he or she fights back against oppression, Douglass has shown us that the brutes on the farm remain sheepish and that it is human beings who can learn how to resist and defeat slavery. Prior to this, as we have seen, Douglass compares himself and other slaves to those domesticated farm animals—horses, pigs, sheep—and compares the slaveowners and their accomplices to wild predators—lions, tigers, snakes. From this point on in the Narrative, Douglass never again likens himself or any slave to an animal. The animal imagery associated with the slaveholders, however, continues, actually building to a climax after his escape from both enslavement and the rural world. This climax takes place in the least agrarian setting—New York City. The main animal in this vision is a crocodile, not a mammal but a reptile, not American, but African. The jungle fantasies of the American ethnologists, facial angles and all, are brought back to their origin.

“Immediately after my arrival in New York,” he tells us, “I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions.” (143) But this feeling “very soon subsided,” as he realizes that this great metropolis of America is part of a “hunting-ground for slaveholders—whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers” (143-144). He becomes aware that he is “every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!” (144) He is frighteningly alone in this urban jungle, “among fellow-men, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts”: “I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey.” (143-144) So Douglass turns his readers' world upside down. They may still wonder if he is really a human being like themselves or just some lower species in human clothing. He knows that he is human, and he warns them of what they will be if they collaborate with the crocodiles and other beasts whose laws govern America.

Frederick Douglass was about twenty-seven years old when he published the Narrative, his first book, in 1845. The following year another twenty-seven-year-old American author, Herman Melville, published, in England, his first book, Narrative of a Four Months' Residence Among the Natives of a Valley of The Marquesas Islands; Or, A Peep at Polynesian Life. Douglass, writing as a non-white slave in white America, had to veil some of his message in imagery. Melville, writing as a white American who had lived in a non-white society under the shadow of imperialism, spoke more bluntly when he distinguished “the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” (London, 1846, P. 138) When Melville's Narrative was published in America as Typee, these words, along with many other crucial passages, were deleted. When Douglass' Narrative was published in America, he had to flee his native land. His owner, backed up by the laws of the United States of America, was seeking to hunt down and recapture his runaway beast of burden, the author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself.