Frederick Douglass's Travels

Douglass is an interesting figure because he has two transatlantic personas. The first is as a fugitive slave and abolitionist when he takes his two year journey to Ireland and Great Britain in 1845. The second is as post minister to Haiti and wealthy cosmopolitan traveler in the late nineteenth century. Fionnghuala Sweeney's book Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World has got me thinking about how best to address his work in this chapter. Initially, I was going to deal primarily with "The Heroic Slave" and insurrection and mutiny, but I don't know if that's going to cut it. Part of the problem is that Douglass, far more than either Stowe or Delany, revisits maritime scenes in his writing over and over from his early days learning to write by watching the ship builders' markings in Baltimore, to his apprenticeship as a ship's caulker, to his sailor's disguise when he makes his escape, to his subsequent trips to Ireland, Africa, and Haiti. Haiti in particular is something he revisits in his writing both during abolition and in the Reconstruction Era.

The answer might be to deal with "The Heroic Slave" in two different registers. The first would be as I intended: within the context of the 1850 and the history of insurrection and mutiny. The second would be in the context of Douglass's larger project of self-fashioning through rewriting his autobiography. In a similar fashion to how Delany seems to return to Africa as a way of reversing the Middle Passage, Douglass seems to write about his voyages as a way of reconfiguring his view of the sea away from that first apostrophe as he looked over Chesapeake Bay in The Narrative of the Life. Between 1845 and 1882, Douglass goes from yearning to be on the "gallant decks" of the ships leaving Baltimore, to observing of voyage to Egypt that "Nothing in my American experience...ever gave me such a deep sense of unearthly silence, such a sense of vast profound, unbroken sameness and solitude, as did this passage" (Douglass, Autobiographies, 1008).The yearning in the latter quote is quite different from the that of the Chesapeake Bay soliloquy. There is something of Melville's Ishmael in his tone. Yet if being bound to the shore is representative of bondage to him, this "sameness and solitude" smacks more of desolation than anything else.

There's also the issue of Haiti. Prior to the Civil War he invokes Haiti to both point to a successful slave revolution and to talk up how white fears of slave insurrection are behind the United States' failure to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation. After the Civil War Haiti represented the best argument against white hegemony as a black republic, despite its persistent instability.

I'm not sure how much of the Reconstruction era Douglass stuff is going to go in there but it's worth knowing about at any rate. Maybe I can somehow address it in the Billy Budd chapter as a way of demonstrating how these issues persisted after the Civil War.

Blake Post Mortem

Finally finished Blake which is kind of an excruciating re-read. The kind of primary texts I'm working on in this chapter make me long for my Melville chapter.

Not sure at this moment how much of my chapter is going to discuss Blake. I've set up this chapter as exploring the problem of the literary representation of free and enslaved blacks, and Douglass, Delany, and Stowe have written three texts that attack this problem head-on, and have done it in a way that invokes the Middle Passage, the history of sugar production, British abolition, and the Haitian and American Revolutions. The difference between Douglass's and Delany's visions for blacks in a post-slavery world seems to turn on the lessons learned from this history. Delany seems to yearn for full autonomy for blacks away from the United States, and in setting his revolution in Cuba tries to recreate the Haitian experience, albeit with a "full-blooded" black elite. Yet this vision keeps failing. One of the frustrating things about reading this text is how much planning goes into these slave revolts and how little payoff there is.

Of course the reason for this "failure" of vision is in part that this novel was suppose to help raise funds for an African expedition. This raises the question of why abolitionist texts were written. Delany seems to have been taking advantage of Stowe's success in publishing anti-slavery novels. He even sets up the beginning as almost a mirror of the opening of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Is the novel's failure to capture a wide audience due to the timing of publication, or is there something lacking in terms of compelling and sympathetic characters?

By the time the "complete" Blake appeared in weekly installments in The Weekly Anglo-African, it was May of 1862. While the Civil War didn't absolutely put the question of Black emigration to rest--as Bob Levine writes, in 1862 "Lincoln was exploring the possibility of colonizing blacks to the tropics of Central and South America"-- it definitely changed the focus of abolitionists (Levine, Douglass and Delany, 217). Delany in fact turned his efforts to the war upon hearing news of the secession of South Carolina while in Great Britain (220). Identity politics become wrapped up joining forces with Douglass in making a case for the Civil War as a war of emancipation.

In terms of sympathetic characters, it would seem in trying to write something so completely counter to Stowe's work, he also failed to capture that element of sentiment that made her work so successful. This may be a reaction to Stowe's feminized male slaves Tom and Tiff, and preference for a more polemical revolutionary rhetoric.

Moving on to "The Heroic Slave" and possibly Life and Times.

Race and Representation

It occurred to me today as I was alternating between Blake and Levine's book on Delany and Douglass that it's high time for a Douglass biopic. Better yet, an HBO miniseries. Douglass has always seemed to be an impossible figure to cast but for a while now I've thought Jeffery Wright might make a good match. He's still young enough that he could transition from younger Douglass to elder Douglass rather believably. The two problems with him are the voice and the height. Wright may be a trifle too short, but it Joaquin Phoenix can get away with playing Johnny Cash...

Because I still have The Wire on the brain I thought Idris Elba might make a good Martin Delany.

Not bad, you think?

Re-reading Blake is painfully slow but there's too much stuff to ignore. It's fascinating the way in which Delany's back to Africa emigration rhetoric echoes both Clarkson and Equiano in both the potential for Africa to yield riches outside of slavery and in terms of emigrated blacks as "raw material" for new nation builders. What's really strange is how he remains so pro-Christian, even to the point of denigrating native Africans, despite his contempt for the role for prayer over action in some abolitionist circles. A fascinating man, Martin Delany.

Once again it's shaming to realize how much I've pushed aside in just this one decade (1850-1860). Both Levine and Sundquist write about the desire of many in both the North and South to annex Cuba for it's sugar supply. For the South, this is also part of what fuels their push to extend slavery into the Western Territories. Turn the Gulf of Mexico into a sort of miniature version of the Atlantic Triangle (Sundquist, Empire and Slavery in American Literature 1820-1865), even to the point of wanting to reopen the Transatlantic slave trade. Delany's staging a rebellion there is both a reflection of abolitionist anxieties over what the annexation could mean for the extension of slavery in the States, and a strange sort of reenactment of the Haitian revolution.

Thinking about anxieties over Cuba really clarifies why Haiti might be on people's tongues for reasons other than insurrection. I'm thinking of taking a look at Life and Times next to get more of a sense of Douglass's own thoughts on both Haiti and Cuba next.