Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Book

Frederick Douglass hardly needs to be defended, right? In case you haven't read this, and think it might be speechy or difficult to read, it's not. Douglass is smart enough to know he doesn't have to tell you how to feel; his story is plenty gripping enough without editorializing. And while he's an eloquent writer, and will occasionally engage in rhetoric, the thing's only 100 pages long; it flies. (Besides, he earns his rhetoric. Remember that hundreds of slave narratives were written. Douglass' is the classic because it's very, very good. They didn't pick his name out of a hat.) It's an amazing piece of work, and I can't imagine a reason not to read it.

This edition also includes Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, which I reviewed here. It's smart to put them together; Incidents is very good, so this makes a great introduction to the slave narrative genre.

For some context, the best essay I read was Caille Millner's "The Slave Narrative" in A New Literary History of America.

I generally find writing from this time period difficult to read. Henry David Thoreau, for example, or Herman Melville, are like reading through oatmeal for me. I have long meant to read this particular book (really a long essay, weighting in at less than 75 pages), so yesterday, I did.

A few months ago in New York an eighth grade girl read this book and wrote an essay about how Douglas's words were still relevant to her experiences in a large, poor, and urban middle school. The young lady in question wrote about how teaching slaves to read would eventually lead to their freedom, and how the teachers in her school were not teaching her or her peers very much of anything in order to keep them servile as adults. From her perspective, not much as changed.

Her teachers were not pleased.

I kept that story in mind as I read, and enjoyed, this powerful book. Slavery is hard to imagine, and every time I think about it, I find myself both bemused and horrified. I simply can't imagine a world where children could be torn away from their mothers, where women could be raped with impunity, and where men (and women) could be tortured, mutilated, or murdered at the whim of someone else. It sounds make-believe, like some horror story, but it was all too real (I had a similar experience reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich years ago).

This was the passage that most stuck out for me:

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. ...he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

Having worked in a difficult urban school early in my teaching career, I find that I can't truly blame the teachers who worked there. Many of them were indifferent to their students, but there were others who were deeply committed to educating the (virtually all) minority population of young people who attended. It seemed to me, and still does, that the circumstances of those children's lives--their health, economic, and social difficulties--made it almost impossible for them to thrive in the system we have set up for education in this country. Likewise, the system itself--the rules of the teachers unions, the unimaginable bureaucratic detritus, the top-down political decision making--created what educational researcher Chester Flynn calls "the blob." Our German inspired industrial school program may still work well for children who come to school with the necessary skills and supports to be successful, but for kids like the ones I worked with in Boston, or in places like the one where our determined young essayist went to school in New York...it's simply not sufficient.

Where we go from there, I just don't know. I found this story to be both moving and disturbing in equal measure. I'm glad I finally read it. As for the young woman in New York (13 year old Jada Williams)...she faced such harassment from her teachers and the administrators in her school because of her essay (and the publicity it generated) her mother pulled her out. Where she is now, I have no idea.

"A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people." -Frederick Douglass