[In the following essay, originally published in 1978, O'Meally claims that, although the Narrative was meant to be read, it was also meant to be preached, drawing as it does on the tradition of the African-American sermon.]

Typically, scholars and teachers dealing with Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (1845) are concerned with the crucial issue of religion, because the tensions and ironies generated by the sustained contrast between white and black religions constitute a vital “unity” in the work. Slavery sends Old Master to the devil, while the slave's forthright struggle for freedom is a noble, saving quest. Douglass's search for identity—paralleling the search of many and varied American autobiographers before him—is tightly bound with his quest for freedom and for truth. The Narrative presents scholars and teachers with a variety of religious questions. How does Douglass reconcile his professed Christianity with his evidently pagan faith in Sandy Jenkins's root? Why does Christian Douglass condone (even applaud!) the slaves' constant “sinning” against (lying to, stealing from, even the threatened killing of) the upholders of slavery? What is suggested by the fact that the most fervently religious whites treat their slaves more barbarously than do even the “unsaved” whites? While such topics are integral to a discussion of Douglass's Narrative and its relation to religion, they leave untouched a vital dimension of this broad subject.

The Narrative does more than touch upon questions often pondered by black preachers. Its very form and substance are directly influenced by the Afro-American preacher and his vehicle for ritual expression, the sermon. In this sense, Douglass's Narrative of 1845 is a sermon, and, specifically, it is a black sermon. This is a text meant to be read and pondered; it is also a Clarion call to spiritual affirmation and action: This is a text meant to be preached.

II

The Afro-American sermon is a folkloric process. More than a body of picturesque items for the catalog, the black sermon is a set of oratorical conventions and techniques used by black preachers in the context of the Sunday morning (or weeknight revival) worship service. The black sermon—especially as delivered in churches of independent denominations, which developed in relative isolation from white control—is distinctive in structure, in diction, and in the values it reflects.

Certain aspects of the black sermon's structure vary greatly from preacher to preacher; indeed, the black congregation expects its preacher to have idiosyncrasies in his manner and form of presentation. In keeping with the thinking of the seemingly remote American Puritans, black church men and women view their preacher's personal style and “voice” as bespeaking his discovery of a personal Christian identity and a home in Christiandom; each telling of The Story is as different in detail as each individual teller. In shaping his sermon, a black preacher may follow the American Puritan formula: doctrine, reasons, uses. Or he may use a historical, an analytical, or a narrative scheme for organizing his presentation of the World. In any case, most Afro-American preachers pace themselves with care, beginning slowly, perhaps with citations from the Bible, or with a prayer, or with a deliberate statement and restatement of the topic for the day.

Most black preachers also build toward at least one ringing crescendo in their sermons, a point when their words are rhythmically sung or chanted in a modified, “ritual” voice. Here the call-response pattern is most marked; the preacher's words are answered by the congregation's phrases, “All right!” “Yes, brother!” “Say that!” Sometimes the preacher will rock in rhythm and chant visions of golden heaven and warnings of white-hot hell to his listeners. Sometimes he becomes “laughing-happy” as he walks the pulpit, declaring in words half-sung, half-spoken, how glad he is to be saved by the grace of the Lord. In this crescendo section of the sermon, the highly rhythmical language is closer to poetry than it is to prose. Such chanting may occur only at the conclusion of the sermon, or there may be several such poetical sections. In them the preacher seems possessed; the words are not his own, but the Spirit's.

Classic rhetorical and narrative techniques also abound in the Afro-American sermon. One notes the rich use of metaphors and figures of speech, such as repetitions, apostrophes, puns, rhymes, and hyperboles. A good preacher will not just report as a third-person narrator what the Bible says, but he will address the congregation as a first-person observer: “I can see John,” the preacher might say, “walking in Jerusalem early one Sunday morning.” He is a master of rhetorical and narrative devices.

Characteristically, too, Afro-American sermons are replete with stories from the Bible, folklore, current events, and virtually any source whatsoever. Whether or not this storytelling aspect of the black preacher is an African “survival,” as some researchers claim, the consistent use of stories determines the black sermon's characteristic structure. Some stories may provide the text for a sermon, while others occur repeatedly as background material.

James Weldon Johnson notes that certain narrative “folk sermons” are repeated in pulpits Sunday after Sunday. Or, a section of one well-known sermon may be affixed to another sermon. Some of these “folk sermons” include “The Valley of Dry Bones,” based on Ezekiel's vision; the “Train Sermon,” in which God and Satan are portrayed as train conductors transporting saints and sinners to heaven and to hell; and the “Heavenly March,” featuring man on his lengthy trek from a fallen world to a heavenly home. Johnson's own famous poem, “The Creation,” is based on another “folk sermon” in which the preacher narrates the story of the world from its birth to the day of final Judgment.

Black sermons are framed in highly figurative language. Using tropes, particularly from the Bible, spirituals, and other sermons, the black preacher's language—especially in chanted sections of his sermon—is often dramatic and full of imagery. In one transcription of a black sermon, a preacher speaks in exalted language of the Creator's mightiness:

I vision God wringing
A storm from the heavens
Rocking the world
Like an earthquake;
Blazing the sea
Wid a trail er fire.
His eye the lightening's flash,
His voice the thunder's roll.
Wid one hand He snatched
The sun from its socket,
And the other He clapped across the moon.
I vision God standing
On a mountain
Of burnished gold,
Blowing his breath
Of silver clouds
Over the world,
His eye the lightening's flash,
His voice the thunder's roll.

Like other American preachers, the black preacher speaks to his listeners' hearts as well as to their minds. He persuades his congregation not only through linear, logical argumentation but also through the skillful painting of word pictures and the dramatic telling of stories. His tone is exhortative: He implores his listeners to save themselves from the flaming jaws of hell and to win a resting place in heaven. The black preacher may speak in mild, soothing prose, or he may, filled with the spirit, speak in the fiery, poetical tongue of the Holy Spirit. The black preacher's strongest weapon against the devil has been his inspired use of the highly conventionalized craft of sacred black oratory—a folkloric process.

III

The influences of the black sermon on black literature have been direct and constant. The Afro-American playwright, poet, fiction writer, and essayist have all drawn from the Afro-American sermon. Scenes in black literature occur in church; characters recollect particularly inspiring or oppressive sermons; a character is called upon to speak and falls into the cadences of the black sermon, using the familiar Old Testament black sermonic stories and images. In his essays, James Baldwin, who preached when he was in his teens, employs the techniques of the sermon as he speaks to his readers' hearts and souls about their sins and their hope for salvation. Just as one finds continuity in tone and purpose from the sermons of the Puritans to the essays of such writers as Emerson and Thoreau, one discovers continuity in the Afro-American literary tradition from the black sermon—still very much alive in the black community—to the Afro-American narrative, essay, novel, story, and poem.

What, then, is sermonic about Douglass's Narrative? First of all, the introductory notes by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, both fiery orators and spearheads of the abolition movement, prepare the reader for a spiritual message. In his preface, Garrison recalls Douglass's first speech at an antislavery convention. Thunderous applause follows the ex-slave's words, and Garrison says, “I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment; certainly my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by it, on the god-like nature of its victims was rendered far more clear.” And then, in stormy, revivalist style, Garrison rises and appeals to the convention, “whether they would ever allow him [Douglass] to be carried back into slavery,—law or no law, constitution or no constitution. The response was unanimous and in thunder—tones—‘No!’ ‘Will you succor and protect him as a brother-man—a resident of the old Bay State?’ ‘Yes!’ shouted the whole mass.”

As if introducing the preacher of the hour, Garrison says that Douglass “excels in pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency of language.” Moreover, in Douglass one finds “that union of head and heart, which is indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and winning the hearts of others. … May he continue to ‘grow in grace, and in the knowledge of God’ that he may be increasingly serviceable in the cause of bleeding humanity, whether at home or abroad.” As for Douglass's present narrative, says Garrison, it grips its readers' hearts:

He who can peruse it without a tearful eye, a heaving breast, an afflicted spirit,—without being filled with an unutterable abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and animated with a determination to seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable system,—without trembling for the fate of this country in the hands of a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the oppressed, and whose arm is not shortened that it cannot save,—must have a flinty heart, and be qualified to act the part of a trafficker “in slaves and the souls of men.”

The choices, Garrison states, are but two: enrollment in the righteous war against slavery or participation in the infernal traffic in “the souls of men.”

In his turn, Wendell Phillips prepares the way for Douglass's “sermon.” In his laudatory letter to the author, Phillips speaks of Southern white slave masters as infrequent “converts.” Most often, the true freedom fighter detests slavery in his heart even “before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.” Phillips thanks Douglass especially for his testimony about slavery in parts of the country where slaves are supposedly treated most humanely. If things are so abominable in Maryland, says Phillips, think of slave life in “that Valley of the Shadow of Death, where the Mississippi sweeps along.”

Douglass's account of his life serves the ritual purpose announced in the prefatory notes: The ex-slave comes before his readers to try to save their souls. His purpose is conversion. In incident upon incident, he shows the slaveholder's vile corruption, his lust and cruelty, his appetite for unchecked power, his vulgarity and drunkenness, his cowardice, and his damning hypocrisy. Slavery, says Douglass, brings sin and death to the slaveholder. Come to the abolition movement, then, and be redeemed. Take, as Douglass has done, the abolitionist paper as a Bible and freedom for all men as your heaven. Addressed to whites, the Narrative is a sermon pitting the dismal hell of slavery against the bright heaven of freedom.

Douglass's portrayal of himself and of his fellow slaves is in keeping with the text's ritual function. Like a preacher, he has been touched by God, called for a special, holy purpose. Providence protects Douglass from ignorance and despair. Providence selects him to extend his vision of freedom and, concretely, to move to Baltimore. The unexplained selection of Douglass to go to Baltimore he sees as “the first plain manifestation of that kind providence which has ever attended me, and marked my life with so many favors.” Of this “providential” removal to Baltimore Douglass further writes:

I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. … From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.

In his effort to convert white slaveholders and to reassure white abolitionists, Douglass attempts to refute certain racist conceptions about blacks. He presents blacks as a heroic people suffering under the lash of slavery but struggling to stay alive to obtain freedom. To convince whites to aid slaves in their quest for freedom Douglass tackles the crude, prejudiced assumptions—which slavers say are upheld by Scripture—that blacks somehow deserve slavery, that they enjoy and feel protected under slavery. Of the notion that blacks are the cursed descendants of Ham, Douglass writes, “if the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.” Furthermore, if cursed, what of the unshakable conviction of the learned and eloquent Douglass that he is, in fact, chosen by God to help set black people free?

What, then, of the assumption of the plantation novel and the minstrel show that blacks are contented with “their place” as slaves at the crushing bottom of the American social order? Douglass explains that a slave answers affirmatively to a stranger's question, “Do you have a kind master?” because the questioner may be a spy hired by the master. Or the slave on a very large plantation who complains about his master to a white stranger may later learn that the white stranger was, in fact, his master. One slave makes this error with Colonel Lloyd, and, in a few weeks, the complainer is told by his overseer that, for finding fault with his master, he is now being sold into Georgia. Thus, if a slave says his master is kind, it is because he has learned the maxim among his brethren “A still tongue makes a wise head.” By suppressing the truth rather than taking the consequences of telling it foolishly, slaves “prove themselves a part of the human family.”

At times, slaves from different plantations may argue or even fight over who has the best, the kindest, or the manliest master. “Slaves are like other people and imbibe prejudices quite common to others,” explains Douglass. “They think their own better than that of others.” Simultaneously, however, slaves who publicly uphold their masters' fairness and goodness, “execrate their masters” privately.

Do not the slaves' songs prove their contentedness and joy in bondage? “It is impossible,” says Douglass, “to conceive of a greater mistake.” Indeed, he says,

The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery.

Instead of expressing mirth, these songs Douglass heard as a slave “told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” These songs, Douglass recalls, gave him his “first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.” In other words, these songs “prove” the black man's deep, complex humanity. Therefore, whites, come forth, implies Douglass, and join the fight to free these God's children!

The tone of Douglass's Narrative is unrelentingly exhortative. Slaveholders are warned that they tread the road toward hell, for even as their crimes subject the slave to misery, they doom the master to destruction. Douglass describes his aged grandmother's abandonment in an isolated cabin in the woods. Then in dramatic, rhythmical language, he warns that,

My poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve children, is left all alone, in yonder hut, before a few dim embers. She stands—she sits—she staggers—she falls—she groans—she dies—and there are none of her children or grandchildren present, to wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death, or to place beneath the sod her fallen remains. Will not a righteous God visit for these things?

Later in the text, Douglass exhorts white readers to sympathize with the escaping slave's plight. To comprehend the escapee's situation, the white sympathizer “must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances.” In a voice one imagines to be as strong and varied in pitch as a trombone, Douglass reaches a crescendo, in black sermon style, when speaking in highly imagistic language of the white man who would comprehend the escaped slave's feelings:

Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land—a land given up to be the hunting ground for slaveholders—whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers—where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!—I say, let him place himself in my situation—without home or friends—without money or credit—wanting shelter, and no money to buy it,—and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by merciless men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or where to stay,—perfectly helpless both as to the means of defence and means of escape,—in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible gnawings of hunger,—in the midst of houses, yet having no home,—among fellowmen, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up the helpless fish upon which they subsist,—I say, let him be placed in that most trying situation,—the situation in which I was placed,—then, and not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know how to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

In this passage Douglass, like a black preacher, uses a variety of oratorical techniques: alliteration, repetition, parallelism. Also, using conjunctions, commas, and dashes, Douglass indicates the dramatic pauses between phrases and the surging rhythms in the sermonlike prose.

Like a sermon, too, Douglass's Narrative argues not only by stern reason but also with tales that may be termed parables. One of the most forceful of these parables, one threaded quite successfully into the Narrative, is the parable of poor Mrs. Auld. Residing in the border state of Maryland, in the relatively large city of Baltimore, Mrs. Auld, who has never owned a slave before she owns Frederick Douglass, is truly a good woman. Before her marriage, Mrs. Auld worked as a weaver, “dependent upon her own industry for a living.” When eight-year-old Douglass is brought into the Auld household, Mrs. Auld is disposed to treat him with human respect and kindness. Indeed, “her face was made of heavenly smiles, and her voice was tranquil music.” Douglass obviously presents this woman as a glowing model of Christian charity: “When I went there,” he writes, “she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner within her reach.” Soon after Douglass arrives in her home, Mrs. Auld begins to do as she has done for her own son; she commences teaching Douglass the alphabet.

Before long, of course, this “kind heart” is blasted by the “fatal poison of irresponsible power.” In Douglass's words, Mrs. Auld's “cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.” In response to her husband's warning that education “would spoil the best nigger in the world,” she forbids Douglass's further instruction. In fact, she becomes at last “even more violent than her husband himself” in the application of this precept that slave education is a danger. Thus, even the mildest forms of slavery—in providential Baltimore—turn the most angelic face to that of a “harsh and horrid” devil.

The central paradox of the story of Mrs. Auld is that Mr. Auld's vitriolic warning against learning actually serves to make Douglass double his efforts to gain literacy. Mr. Auld's words to his wife prove prophetic:

“Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger … how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.

Douglass overhears this warning and feels that at last he comprehends the source of the white man's power to enslave blacks. “From that moment,” writes Douglass, “I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Also, from that moment on, Douglass's holy search for identity and freedom is knotted to his determined quest for literacy and knowledge. For the skill of literacy, “I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master,” writes Douglass, “as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.” It is as if the providentially guided Douglass receives truth from the mouths of family and friends, and even from the mouths of his most indefatigable enemies. And like a preacher he reports his successes (the Good Word) in exalted prose and in parables.

A second major parable in the Narrative concerns the slave-breaker Edward Covey and the wise old slave Sandy Jenkins. Like Mrs. Auld, Covey is a hard worker whose diligence fails to shield him from the blight of slavery. Sent to Covey's plantation to be “broken,” Douglass, in a sense, breaks Covey. Douglass leaves the slave-breaker's plantation stronger than ever in his personal resolution to break free. At first, the deceptive Covey, with his killing work schedule and “tiger-like” ferocity, seems to have succeeded in “taming” Douglass. “I was broken,” says Douglass, “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!” On Sundays, his only free day, Douglass would lounge in a “beast-like stupor” under a tree. His thoughts of killing himself and Covey are checked only by fear and dim hope.

Somehow, though, Douglass's spirits are rekindled. First, he observes the white sails of the ships piloting the Chesapeake Bay—through identification with their bold freedom, and through soliloquies to them and to God, Douglass finds his hopes revived. He too will try to sail to freedom. Quoting a line from a spiritual, he says, “There is a better day coming.”

Second, he faces down Covey. “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” writes Douglass. “You shall see how a slave was made a man.” One day he faints and is unable to do his work. Covey orders him to arise and return to his labor, but Douglass says, “I made no effort to comply, having now made up my mind to let him do his worst.” Then Douglass runs off to his master, Mr. Thomas Auld, to express fear that Covey will kill him. But Auld merely sends Douglass back to the slave-breaker. Back at Covey's, Douglass is chased into the woods by the slave-breaker, who wields a cowskin. Ordinarily, running away could only make things worse for Douglass: “My behavior,” he says, “was altogether unaccountable.” Providence seems to be with him though. In the woods, Douglass meets his old acquaintance Sandy Jenkins, who advises him to return to Covey. But Jenkins does not send Douglass back to Covey unarmed. Jenkins directs Douglass to a part of the woods where he can find a certain root, which, Douglass says, “if I would take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me.” In the years that he has carried his root, Jenkins says, he had never been beaten, and he never expects to be again. Douglass seeks relief from Covey by petition to Auld, then by attempted escape, and then by the spiritual guidance—dependent upon personal fortitude and faith—symbolized by the old slave's root.

Upon his return to Covey's, Douglass is spared an initial attack, presumably because Covey, a leader in his church, does not want to work or whip slaves on Sunday. Monday morning, however, Covey comes forth with a rope and—“from whence came the spirit I don't know,” says Douglass—the slave resolves to fight. They fight for nearly two hours, Douglass emerging unscarred and Covey bloodied. This fight marks an important rite of passage for Douglass:

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. … 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.

From this time I was never again what might be called fairly whipped, though I remained a slave four years afterwards. I had several fights, but was never whipped.

Thus we see Douglass, Providence's hero, maneuvering through deadly dangers. His straightforwardness and courage defeat the serpentine and Pharisee-like Covey. Douglass's hope returns through identification with the white sails on the Bay. He is also given heart by the root, a symbol of spiritual and natural power as well as of the supreme power of hope and faith.

As in a successful black sermon, these parables are well woven into the whole cloth of the Narrative. They illustrate the corrupting power of slavery upon whites; they illustrate the power of the slave to overcome the slaveowner and to return, mysteriously—and by the power of Providence—to the winding road to freedom. Douglass's Narrative is alive with allusions to the Bible. Inevitably, the war waged is between the devil of slavery and the righteous, angry God of freedom. Chapter 3 commences with a description of Colonel Lloyd's garden. In its beauty and power to tempt, this “large and finely cultivated garden” recalls the Garden of Eden:

This garden was probably the greatest attraction of the place. During the summer months, people came from far and near—from Baltimore, Easton, and Annapolis—to see it. It abounded in fruits of almost every description, from the hardy apple of the north to the delicate orange of the south. This garden was not the least source of trouble on the plantation. 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.

This Eden, though carefully tended as God commanded, is vile and corrupt. Colonel Lloyd, merciless owner of the garden and gardeners, forbids the slaves to eat any of its excellent fruits. To enforce his rule he has tarred the garden fence; any slave with tar on his person was deemed guilty of fruit theft and was “severely whipped.” This is an Eden controlled not by God but by greedy, selfish, slaveholding man.

Or is this garden under the charge of the devil? As noted, slavery turns the heart of “heavenly” Mrs. Auld to flinty stone. And Mr. Plummer, Douglass's first overseer, is “a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer” known to “cut and slash women's heads so horribly” that even the master becomes enraged. This enraged master, Captain Anthony, himself seems “to take great pleasure in whipping a slave.” In a grueling scene, he whips Douglass's aunt Hester, a favorite of Anthony's, until only the master's fatigue stops the gory spectacle. “The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest.” Mr. Severe would curse and groan as he whipped the slave women, seeming “to take pleasure in manifesting this fiendish barbarity.” Colonel Lloyd renders especially vicious beatings to slaves assigned to the care of his horses. When a horse “did not move fast enough or hold high enough,” the slaves were punished. “I have seen Colonel Lloyd make old Barney, a man between fifty and sixty years of age, uncover his bald head, kneel down upon the cold, damp ground, and receive upon his naked and toil-worn shoulders more than thirty lashes at the time.” Other slaveowners and overseers, both men and women, kill their slaves in cold blood.

One of the men termed “a good overseer” by the slaves is Mr. Hopkins, who, at least is not quite so profane, noisy, or cruel as his colleagues. “He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it.” His tenure as overseer is a short one, conjectures Douglass, because he lacks the brutality and severity demanded by the master.

Covey is the most devil-like slaveholder in the Narrative. Hypocritical, masterful at deception, clever, untiring, seemingly omnipresent, Covey is called “The Snake” by the slaves. In one of the Narrative's most unforgettable portraits, Douglass tells us that through a cornfield where Covey's slaves work, The Snake would

sometimes crawl on his hands and knees to avoid detection, and all at once he would rise nearly in our midst, and scream out, “Ha, ha! Come, come! Dash on, dash on!” This being his mode of attack, it was never safe to stop a single minute. His comings were like a thief in the night. He appeared to us as being ever at hand. He was under every tree, behind every stump, in every bush, and at every window, on the plantation. He would sometimes mount his horse, as if bound to St. Michael's, a distance of seven miles, and in half an hour afterwards you would see him coiled up in the corner of the woodfence, watching every motion of the slaves.

The Snake has built his reputation on being able to reduce spirited men like Douglass to the level of docile, manageable slaves. Under Covey's dominion—before Douglass gains a kind of dominion over Covey—Douglass feels himself “transformed into a brute.” In the symbolic geography of this text the Garden is ruled—at least for the moment—by none other than his majesty, the infernal Snake, Satan.

Douglass makes clear that slavery, not the slaveowner, is the supreme Devil in this text: slavery, with its “robes crimsoned with the blood of millions.” Mrs. Auld falls from “heavenliness” to the hell of slavery. As a boy Douglass learns from Sheridan's speeches in behalf of Catholic emancipation that “the power of truth [holds sway] over the conscience of even a slaveholder.” These white slave-holders, if devil-like, are nonetheless capable of redemption.

Colonel Lloyd, in fact, is described as possessing wealth equal almost to that of Job—the Old Testament's model of supreme faithfulness. Finally, however, the effect of the comparison is ironical, for Lloyd is a man of increasing cruelty; his very wealth seems to provide his temptation to do evil, and Lloyd yields to temptation with relish.

There are several places in the Narrative where American slavery is compared with the holding of the Old Testament Jews in captivity. Douglass points out that, the more he read, the more he viewed his enslavers as “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” (italics mine). Later in the Narrative Douglass describes the fugitive slave in the North as a dweller “in a strange land.” The language here and the parallel situations recall the biblical psalm that reads

By the rivers of Babylon, there we
sat down, yea, we wept, when
we remembered Zion
          we hanged our harps upon the
willows in the midst thereof.
          For there they that carried us away
captive required of us a song; and
they that wasted us required of us
mirth, saying, Sing us one of the
songs of Zion
          How shall we sing the Lord's
Song in a strange land?

This allusion is even more suggestive when one considers Douglass's careful explanation of the slaves' songs, demanded, in a sense, and misunderstood by the captors, who, thinking the songs joyous, feel the more justified in their ownership of the black singers.

In the Narrative, Douglass calls on the Old Testament God to free His black children. “For what does he hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler?” Douglass also manifests certain characteristics of an Old Testament hero. He becomes Daniel, blessed with supernatural powers of perception and protected by God's special favor. Like Daniel, thrown into a den of lions for refusing to refrain from praying, Douglass never loses faith while he lives in the very “jaws of slavery.” Upon being returned from the Lloyd Plantation to Baltimore, Douglass felt he had “escaped a worse than lion's jaws.” Captain Auld in St. Michael's was a vicious, ineffectual master who, Douglass tells us, “Might have passed for a lion, but for his ears.” Escaping for a brief time from Covey, Douglass, sick and scarred, returns to Auld. The runaway slave supposes himself to have “looked like a man who had escaped a den of wild beasts, and barely escaped them.” Unlike Daniel, Douglass actually has to battle with the lions, tigers, and “the Snake” in the den of slavery. Like Daniel, though, he is protected, and once he has Sandy's root on his right side he can never be beaten. Providentially, too, Douglass is eventually rescued from the crushing jaws of slavery.

Douglass's account of his life follows the pattern of the life of a mythic or historic hero—or a hero of Scripture. His birth, if not virginal, as is so often the case with the archetypal hero, is cloaked in mystery. He is never sure who his father is or even when, exactly, he himself was born. Nor does he feel very close to his natural family; slavery kept mother from son, and brother from sister, so that natural familial bonds were felt only remotely. Like Joseph (the biblical son sold into slavery by his brothers) and like Moses, Douglass feels sure he has been selected by heaven for special favor. And like Jesus, he prays for redemption and resurrection from “the coffin of slavery to the heaven of freedom.” Christ-like, too, is Douglass's faltering faith at the torturous nadir of his enslavement. Under Covey's lash, Douglass nearly surrenders to the bestial slave system, and to murder and suicide. But Douglass turns from the false religion of such “Pharisees” as Covey; like Jesus, Douglass criticizes white institutionalized worship but clings to his faith in a personal Father.

Douglass's personal sense of ethics contradicts the codes of such men as Covey. For instance, Douglass hails the slave's trickery of the master as wit, if not wisdom. Douglass also approaches the attempted assassination of a black informer on runaway slaves; such is justice. Moreover, although Douglass disclaims “ignorant” and “superstitious” belief in the power of the root, his true feeling about root power emerges from the Narrative. Clearly, the root, be it pagan or nonpagan, gives Douglass the strength to master Covey. This “superstition” seems no contradiction in Douglass, for he is presented as a hero who transcends strict adherence to existing law. He is the possessor of pure religion; God speaks directly to him. Like a Christ or a Moses, he not only follows God's law, he gives the law. Clearly, this pure, felt religion of real experience with Providence is not the religion of the white slaveholding churchmen who merely use Christianity to justify their crimes.

Douglass's rejection of the slaveholder's false religion parallels the rejection of popular conceptions of God by such diverse American writers as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and—writing a full century after the Narrative's publication—James Baldwin. Like these writers, Douglass replaces the hollow religion of form for a deep, personal religion—in his case, the religion of abolition, which he practices and preaches with fervent passions.

Furthermore, like many black preachers, Douglass's true religion is a practical one that seeks a “heaven” on earth as well as on high. Salvation is not only a personal matter; Douglass labors for the freedom of a people. Once free (or at least freer) in Massachusetts, he joins the abolition movement: “It was a severe cross,” he writes, “and I took it up reluctantly.” His Narrative is, then, not only the spiritual journey of one soul but also a testimony and a warning, written with the earnest hope that it “may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren.” Like a black sermon, it is the story of a people under the guidance of Providence.

Douglass's message is the message of the progressive black preacher: Be hopeful and faithful, but do not fail to fight for the freedom of your brother men. Douglass recognizes that the God of freedom respects the slave who may lie, cheat, steal, or even kill to stay alive and to struggle for freedom. This freedom ethic, “preached” by Douglass, was in the tradition of many militant black preachers, including the black preacher and pamphleteer, Rev. Henry Highland Garnet.

Douglass's Narrative is in its way, a holy book—one full of marvels, demonstrating God's active participation in a vile and fallen world. The Narrative is a warning of the terror of God's fury. It is also an account of a black Moses' flight “from slavery to freedom.” It is an invitation to join “the church” of abolition, a church that offers freedom not only to the slave and the sympathetic white Northerner but also to the most murderous and bloodthirsty Southern dealers in human flesh. Sinners, Douglass seems to chant, black sermon-style, you are in the hands of an angry God!

Clearly, this is an autobiography, a slave narrative, a fictionlike work shaped by oratory as well as the sentimental romance. But Douglass, who grew up hearing sermons on the plantation and who heard and delivered them throughout his life, produced, in this greatest account of his life, a text shaped by the form and the processes of speaking characteristic of the black sermon. This is a mighty text meant, of course, to be read. But it is also a text meant to be mightily preached.