Pronami
Bhattacharya
Dr.
Pronami Bhattacharyya is an Assistant Professor in English, Royal Global
University, Assam. She is an avid reader and a keen researcher, and has
published one book, and several papers in national and international journals
of repute.
Abstract
The subaltern “Other”
has had no voice on account of race, class or gender, or the very intersectional
nature of all these socio-cultural forces. This involves and institutes the
fact that “norms” are determined and disseminated by the ones in power (centre)
and imposed on the “other” (margin). The history of a state is usually the
history of the ruling classes. As such, the subjugated voices get lost in the
narrative of the powerful ‘other’. In Prison
Notebooks (1971), while referring to the working class as ‘subaltern’,
Antonio Gramsci makes a clear distinction between the history of the ruling
classes and the history of the subaltern classes. Raising a similar concern,
Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, in “Can a Subaltern Speak” (2010), tries to examine
the condition and the resulting fate of the subaltern ‘subject’ and that how it
can be disfigured by the politics of representation. With an aim to recover
submerged histories and legitimize the ‘other’ gaze or point of view, this
paper attempts to analyze Frederick Douglass’s Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845). Douglass’s
narrative is written from the perspective of one (slaves) who had been denied
the right to gaze for long. The study, thus, acknowledges the presence of the “spectres”-
taking cues from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994)- that could challenge the Western
notions of space and time while functioning as revolutionary mediums of
postcolonial recovery.
Keywords:
Subaltern, African American, mobility, slave narrative, gaze, ‘other’
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the
deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”―
Historically, the subaltern “other” has
had no voice because of race, class or gender, or the intersectionality of all
these. It involves and institutes the fact that ‘norms’ are determined and disseminated
by the ones in power (centre) and imposed on the “Other” (margin). In Prison Notebooks (1971), while referring
to the working class as ‘subaltern’, Antonio Gramsci makes a clear distinction
between the history of the ruling classes and the history of the subaltern
classes. The history of a state is usually the history of the ruling classes. As
such, the subjugated voices get lost in the narrative of the colonial
oppressors.
Raising
a similar concern, Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, in “Can a Subaltern Speak” (2010),
tries to examine the condition and the resulting fate of the subaltern ‘subject’
and that how it can be disfigured by the politics of representation. This always
keeps the subaltern in the marginal topography, which is a silent ‘periphery’ but
acts as the ‘centre’ of voicelessness. She contends that the subalterns cannot
be represented by an advantaged group; rather, they should speak for themselves
and emerge as ‘speaking’ subject rather than the silent ‘other’ and thereby cease
to be subaltern subjects. This emphasizes the self-reflexivity of the
subaltern.
Recovering
submerged/subalterned histories is instrumental in neutralizing colonial
(cultural) hegemony and its persistent attempts to erase the past of the
silenced ‘objects’. In Toni Morrison’s novels reclaiming the past is an
indispensible condition for subjectivity. It restores a voice and appropriates history
to those who were deprived of and denied the awareness of both. In postcolonial
context, reclaiming the past means more than a literal or linear narrating of
historical facts. Rather, redeeming the past is a process that requires that
victims of oppression and marginalization recuperate their obliterated
traditions and unearth the buried communal memories and personal histories. In Beloved (1987), Morrison
recuperates a lost, painful chunk of history through the ‘ghost of memories’. A
physically absent ghost places a silenced past into the very centre of the
narrative and the ‘present’ (as against the past or future) in the timeline of
history. Derrida, in Spectres of Marx
(1994) says,
To haunt
does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the
very construction of a concept….that is what we would be calling here a
hauntology…(202)
Thus,
what Jacques Derrida proposed as Hauntology, an amalgamation of ‘haunting’ and
‘ontology’, could be taken as a way of thinking about the presence of absent
figures, which haunt the ‘present’ world in an perplexing state of being
neither alive nor dead. Acknowledging the presence of the ‘spectres’, could annoy
the western notions of space and time, while
functioning as revolutionary mediums of postcolonial recovery. It could make
space for the synchronization of the past with the present and identifying and
acknowledging the existence of alternative/parallel histories. By examining Douglass’s
narrative through the lens of postcolonial studies, this paper seeks to discover
the ways in which humanity could reconcile with those events or phenomena that modern
history has reduced to be ‘ghostly’ or absent. Hauntology
as a critical tool could supplant the canonical understanding of ontology and
make the erstwhile ‘silences’ produce multiple layers of perspectives.
Addressing the writings
of the African American (‘slaves’, bonded labours, etc.), thus, could suggest
ways to engage with such unresolved histories, while making the world learn to look
through a different gaze, the ‘black’ gaze. With this aim, this paper endeavours
to read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845).
The study would engage in assessing how the text could suggest ways of ‘alternate’ knowledge
production and ways of writing that could embody the mutilation of the
historical alternative. The resulting knowledge/discourse could bridge the
uncanny gap between subject and object (of knowledge), between past and
present, between knowing and not-knowing. This study also aims at establishing
the ‘black’ gaze as a legitimate, natural way of looking at life while trying
to dismantle the prevalent understanding of history as a linear progression
from a colonial/slave past to a liberated ‘postcolonial’ present. It is very
important to accept and understand the ‘other’s’ ways of seeing if, as Derrida
says, we look for a possibility of a just future.
Travel writers, while detailing the ‘other’ during the
cultural/social/political encounters, build on the structure of two vital
elements, the “subject” and the “object.” It has been well established that the
subject position is a hegemonic fundamental (central) force that ‘discovers’,
locates and catalogues the peripheral locations and people therein. For a long
time, the colonial or ‘imperial’ travellers have embodied this central
hegemonic dynamism. Thus, the colonial-male-white traveller has been the manufacturer
of the ‘ways of seeing’. In the words of E. Ann Kaplan, “The imperial gaze
reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central much as the
male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject” (Looking for the Other 78). The present study is an effort
delineated towards the recognition and examination of the “peripheral”
locations and the “ways of seeing” as is manifest in the Douglass’s narrative.
While trying to take
note of and analysing the ‘voices from the margins’, this paper also tries to work at distinguishing
the ‘black’ gaze from the classic white-colonial-male
centric gaze, and thereby instituting the former as a valid institution in
itself. In doing so, the study employs the theory of gaze that is evident in every
travel narrative. A ‘black’ travel narrative at that is a source of wider and newer
range of scholarships informing and adding to the theory. Travel writing has
long been very authoritative for understanding the relation between the
‘west-vs-rest’. In this respect, it is proposed that ‘black’ travel narratives proliferate
various forms of gazing that might synchronize or clash with the hitherto extensively
studied and dispersed ‘white’ gaze.
In narrative representations of a journey, these texts often foreground the
need to transcend the color bar, besides the variety and authenticity of the gaze
of an African American.
As the first recognized American
slave narrative, Olaudah Equiano’s first person testimony of his travails in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah
Equiano, a Slave, Written by Himself (1789) is invaluable in providing
agency to the ‘marginalized. He also records eyewitness accounts of Europe in
its institutionalizing the brutal system of slavery. In this credible account
of a slave and then a freeman, “the rhetorical devices defining embodies
discourse…reappear continually in travel accounts emerging throughout the
African diaspora” (Smith 198). He can be seen as configuring an emancipatory
form of travel writing using devices and images which released a set of archetypal
patterns in slave narratives. Of these, the symbol of the “slave ship” (Smith
198) spans across the African American literary world, and most importantly African
American travel writing. During the ill-repute ‘middle-passage’, for almost
every African forced into the New World, the slave ship stood for a “hole” or a
“dark hole”, “hopeless and unending” (Smith 198). These and much more, slipped
into the “collective unconscious” of the African American race for an eternity.
Apart from delineating such manifest
features, the African American travel writing also upholds that: The history of
the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain
self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
(DuBois 615). The mobility of African
Americans, thus, struggles with multiple conception of self, a “double
consciousness”. Moreover, the survival of these two states—the African American
at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’—has to do with more than the simple assessment of ‘home’
and ‘away’ that all travelers undergo. There is an eternal presence of a
“two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from
being torn asunder” (DuBois 694).
This paper works on the varying
perspectives of African American travelers when they look at different places,
cultures and people. Their gaze/s, also presents parallel narratives of the
world, allowing the readers to revisit the colonial alternatives. This entails
an analysis of the theory of gaze, for, perspectives are ways of gazing. It is
the gaze and its mutuality between the ‘subject’ (gazer) and the ‘object’
(gazed) that results in the existential forces at work. John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1972) develops the
concept of the gaze as an ideological construct, and goes on to discuss the ‘ideal’
spectator or the gazer, who is always considered a male. Modern-colonial
history has been from the perspective of the active-male traveller in which the
‘feminine other’ has largely been absent. The African American narratives
counter this binary and provide ample matter to fill in the gaps in the process
of colonial meaning making. As Julian Wolfrey contends, if “the spectral is at the
heart” of any modern narrative, then, ‘to tell a story is always to invoke
ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns’ (Victorian Haunting 1-3)
Relating this to Postcolonial
studies one contends that the colonial surveyor completely silenced its object
of survey, and hence the gaps in meanings, and that the surveying gaze,
synonymous with the Colonizing force, was always ‘masculine’, registering and
narrating the ‘feminine’ colonized subjects. What this study also borrows from Berger
is the idea that the act of gazing is always relational, i.e., we are also
being seen by the other while we are looking at that other. According to him,
this reciprocity of vision or gaze is more fundamental than that of spoken
dialogue. Even Sartre develops that the gaze, that sanctions the subject to
identify that the ‘Other’, is also a subject, as when he says, “my fundamental
connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred back to my
permanent possibility of being seen by the Other” (Being and Nothingness 256). Thus, encryptions in the act of seeing
are significant in relation to gender, subject-object binary and predetermined
ideological outlining of a particular culture and its people. Black travel narratives pose specific
challenges, while representing a history of a habitually captivating, yet
characteristically unknown or little known, subject. The rhetoric of
‘blackness’ inevitably encompasses cross-cultural growths and hybridity while
stressing the interrelations between ‘black’ and white cultures.
The
‘Subaltern’ Speaks
I
am invisible; understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the
bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have
been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me
they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination,
indeed, everything and anything except me.
—
(Ralph Ellision, Invisible Man)
The horrors of slavery
are usually dismissed with remarks such as “it’s done; it’s over”. However, Morrison’s Beloved establishes how history
is not over and done with. She lets the reader to re-vision and comprehend the
hitherto obliterated African American history through non-western, ‘coloured’ gaze
by re-telling history in the words of former African slaves transported to and
‘dumped in’ America. As James Berger opines, “violence within the African
American community can only be understood in a context in which […] [the white
power] continue[s] to violate African American lives.” (“Ghosts of
Liberalism” 191). Like denying the ‘holocaust’ (see Lipstadt 1993), the racist
centre denied the violation of the ‘blacks’ on the margins, and the “American
racial trauma submerged” (“Ghosts of Liberalism” 192).
African American traveller’s gaze endures
a consciousness which is rooted in the ‘color of their body’, leading them to
be placed lopsided (negatively) in a racialized power relation for long. Bell
Hooks, in her seminal essay, “The Oppositional Gaze” (1992), deliberates how ‘blacks’
(slaves) were punished mercilessly for ‘looking’ and that how “this traumatic
relationship to the gaze…had informed ‘black’ spectatorship” (115). The slaves
were completely “denied their right to gaze” (115), an experience which exhibited
itself unto what we understand now as the “oppositional gaze”. In a relation of
power, subordinates procure knowledge through experience which mirrors that “there
is a critical gaze that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional” (116).
As such, gaze has a restricting
control over those who receive it and ends up making them almost invisible, or
‘ghostly’. Hence, African American travel writing comes back as a haunting phenomenon
that seeks to speak for the absent past and destabilize the colonial fillers. The
‘black’ gazes, narrates and thereby adorns various defining standard of being a
white/civilized: “Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra
striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white” (Black Skin White Masks 63). The black
zebra striping can be considered as the colored/‘black’ consciousness that constructs
the ideological veil that a ‘black’ person looks through. Thus the black
person attempts to look back thereby produce “a return of knowledge”
(“Power/Knowledge” 81).
The ‘white’ gaze was considered to
be predominantly armored with a powerful gaze, a gaze of racial superiority, a
gaze that was ‘all-knowing’. African-Americans, because they are ‘black’, are
already the racially marked body that is not expected to be able to say
something knowledgeable, meaningful, and important about race. As Frederick
Douglass says in his Narrative, “for
they had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us
behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings” (113). On the other
hand, when ‘blacks’ render knowledge and look around at the world and produce
multiple layers of gazes, that knowledge renders the racist operations of white
bodies on the one hand, and engages the ‘black’ person in a series of polemics
and eventually portrays ‘black’ viewpoints, aesthetics and cultural and
individual archetypes.
In his Narrative, Frederick
Douglass says, “for they had much
rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like
intellectual, moral, and accountable beings” (113). Due to the repeated denial
of the right to see and articulate, writers like Douglass, are more aggressive
of their right to ‘gaze’, and articulate (speak and write), and their writings
seem to strongly emulate the consciousness of the ‘black’ society at large. The
‘slave’ writings attempts at uncovering the phantom and dispelling the guarded
myths and secrets.
From the Margins to the Centre: Douglass’s Accounts
Beginning 1820s, the endeavours of the
thousands who were attempting at establishing an egalitarian society, have left
a striking impact on the literature of the period. Circulation of slave stories
from the past point toward a haunting that is rooted in tyrannical slave
histories and that the gory past is being brought to the surface through the
narratives.
It is incontestably remarkable to read about the slave lives: their atrocious
masters, overseers, and the multiple flight attempts by the slaves themselves
to a free/er world, in the words of the slaves themselves. In the search for a
“Utopia” (see Foster 329), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative outlines his journey from the fetters of slavery to that
of being a free traveler. His travels, however, may not be extensive spatially,
nonetheless, he makes diligent use of any escape route that he comes across,
and thereby, creates the American space. He especially paints the South, in the
Antebellum America, and becomes one of the celebrated names amongst the “moving
slaves” (see Cox 65). Mobility remains,
perhaps, the single most important factor in a slave’s life, as when Douglass
says he could see his mother, who lived on another plantation, only at night.
He writes, “She made her journeys to see me in the night, traveling the whole
distance on foot, after the performance of her day’s work” (25). The invisible
journeys have surfaced as a haunting account in Douglass’s narrative.
People
Douglass' Narrative begins
with the inadequate facts about his birth and parentage that he is aware of;
his father is some slave owner (that he is unacquainted with) and his mother
is, Harriet Bailey, a slave. He says, “My father was a white man….The opinion
was also whispered that my master was my father” (24). Being a Mulatto child
(slave), he is not accepted by his father publicly and thus left to perish with
his mother at a very young age; eventually he gets separated from his mother
too like all other mulattos. For a child, this separation is pointless, besides
being painful, and Douglass wonders if this is done “to hinder the development
of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the
natural affection of the mother for the child” (24). This is the unavoidable
outcome in almost all such cases. The ‘blacks’ were rendered with a crippled
ontological self— black as they were, their existence was spun into a black
invisibility.
The lack of knowledge of birth
dates, place of origin or even the parentage was a customary trait of the
slaves— it was almost a ‘spectral’ life being forced on them. Douglass notices
that ‘blacks’/slaves know as little of their age as horses know of theirs” (23)
and in his knowledge “it is the wish of most masters…to keep their slaves thus
ignorant” (23). Whereas, the “white children could tell their ages” (23). As a
child, he could never understand as to why the ‘black’ people are “deprived of
the same privilege” (23). It is considered “improper and impertinent, and
evidence of a restless spirit” (23) if a slave makes inquiries of any sort.
He meets his first master, Captain
Anthony, while in Tuckahoe, Maryland. He is a owner of about 30 slaves in his
two-three farms; he is not a rich master in comparison to many others who own
hundreds of slaves. Colonel Lloyd, another of his master, keeps three to four
hundred slaves, and “owned a large number more on the neighboring farms” (32).
In fact, Lloyd owns so many slaves that “he did not know them when he saw them”
(41-42). The slaves are simply a lot of chattel to him ‘to be owned’.
The Slave owners “could not brook
any contradiction from a slave” (41). On one occasion, Colonel Lloyd says, “a
slave must stand, listen, and tremble; and such was the literal case…. 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”
(41). Lloyd’s three sons “enjoyed the luxury of whipping the servants when they
pleased” (41). Also, none of the masters could tolerate other’s slaves on their
farm, even if it happens by mistake. Once, a slave of Llyod mistakenly enters
Mr. Beal Bondly’s farm while fishing for oysters to make up for his scanty
allowance. He is shot down without a moment of hesitation by Mr. Bondly. In the
white community, it was prevalent amongst the little white boys that: “It was
worth a half-cent to kill a ‘nigger’, and a half-cent to bury one” (50). One
Mr. Freeland, another of Douglass’s owners, is the “best master” (115), for he
didn’t portray a duplicity of wearing a religious cloak and torturing the
slaves, or keeping a watchful eye and lash the slaves on every drop of a
hat.
The slave owners appoint an overseer
on every farm to overlook and manage slaves. Overseers are mostly the
personification of devil himself, as the narrative mirrors. Colonel Lloyd’s
slaves are overlooked by Mr. Severe; Douglass observes, he is “rightly named:
he was a cruel man” (34). He is always armed with “a large hickory stick and
heavy cowskin” (34). He speaks of his inhuman ways:
I have seen him whip a woman,
causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this too, in the midst
of her crying children, pleading for their mother’s release…was a profane
swearer…scarce a sentence escaped him but that was commenced or concluded by
some horrid oath…. From the rising till the going down of the sun, he was
cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field. (34)
As the severity of Mr. Severe
reaches peak and he is replaced by Mr. Hopkins as the latter succumbs to death;
the slaves regard his death as “the result of a merciful providence” (34).
Hopkins is considered a different man as he is “less cruel, less profane, and
made less noise, than Mr. Severe” (35). It is a deplorable irony that slaves call
him a “good overseer” (35) just because he whipped, all right, but he did not
seem to take pleasure in it. Due to his supposed lack in the “necessary
severity” (45) to suit colonel Lloyd, Hopkins is supplanted by Mr. Austin Gore,
“a man possessing, in an eminent degree, all those traits of character
indispensable to what is called a first-rate overseer” (45). Austin proves to
be “proud, ambitious, and persevering…artful, cruel, and obdurate” (45); “He
tortures with the slightest look, word, or gesture, on the part of the slave”
(45). He perfectly replicates the aphorism laid down by slaveholders: “It is
better that a dozen slaves suffer under the lash, than the overseer should be
convicted, in the presence of the slaves, of having been at fault” (45). One Captain
Anthony keeps Mr. Plummer on his farm who is a “miserable drunkard, a profane
swearer, and a savage monster” (27) and is perennially “armed with a cowskin
and a heavy cudgel” (27-28). It is the ‘white man’s rule’ that governs the
lives of the ‘blacks’.
People
who argued in favor of slavery, routinely opined that slaves were happy, citing
the fact that slaves would sing as they worked. However, on the contrary,
“slaves sing most when they are most unhappy” (38), and the “dense old woods,
revealing at once the highest joy and deepest sadness…sing the most pathetic
sentiment in the most rapturous tone” (36). In his narrative, Douglass tries to
capture the most wounding sentiments that come alive in slave songs, whose
profound meaning, however, he could not comprehend when he was in their circle.
When he becomes free and comes out of the circle, the spectres of the songs
haunt him and intensify his hatred for the institution of slavery. For him the
songs:
Told a tale of woe…. Every tone was
a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains….
I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them…. To those songs I
trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery….
If anyone wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let
him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. (37)
The songs act as a vent for
relieving their pain just as “an aching heart is relieved by tears” (38). Thus,
throughout his life Douglass could hear the echoes of such melodic pain—“slavery
has ended but something of it continues to live on…” (Gordon, Haunting and the Social Imagination
139).
A peculiar trait about the slaves is
that they “imbibe prejudices” (43) and engage in a race to decide and declare
as to whose master is better. Douglass observes, “Many, under the influence of
this prejudice, think their own masters are better than the masters of other
slaves…. Indeed, it is uncommon for slaves even to fall out and quarrel among
themselves about the relative goodness of his own over that of the others”
(43). Meanwhile, the truth that prevails is that none of the masters are even
human, let alone being good or bad. Carrying on in their peculiar line of
thought, the slaves affirmed that “the greatness of their masters was
transferable to themselves. It was considered as being bad enough to be a
slave; but to be a poor man’s slave was deemed a disgrace indeed!” (44). On the
other side, these slaves prove to be “noble souls; they not only possessed
loving hearts, but brave ones” (115). It is there simplicity that makes them
get easily manipulated too. The oppressive and restricting hegemony of the
‘whites’ rendered the ‘blacks’ with a myopic understanding of grace as against
disgrace.
When Douglass is around five to
eight years old, he has plenty of leisure time for himself since he is not old
enough to work in the fields and, thus, gets “seldom whipped” (51) by his
master. However, he intolerably suffers from another evil, hunger and cold. His
memory races past, “In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost
naked-no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing but a coarse
linen shirt…no bed…used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to
mill…crawl into the bag, and there sleep” (51). The only food that the slaves
receive is a “coarse corn meal boiled…called mush…put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the
ground” (52). They are fed like animals; sometimes even worse.
Then arrives “three of the happiest
days” (52) in his life when he is told that he would travel to Baltimore to
work for Captain Thomas Auld’s brother, who is Captain Anthony’s son-in-law,.
Straight away, as directed by Mrs. Lucretia, he starts washing and cleaning
himself: “I must get all the dead skin off my feet and knees…for people in
Baltimore were very cleanly, and would laugh at me if I looked dirty” (53). He
is also delighted on the promise of a pair of trousers if he gets himself
cleaned.
To his downright surprise, Mrs.
Auld, his new mistress in Baltimore, has “a white face beaming with the most
kindly emotions” (55). He is appointed to look after her little son. For a
white to have a softer countenance for a ‘black’ is an unusual experience for
him: “It is a new and strange sight to me, brightening up my pathway with the
light of happiness” (55). He regards himself as being divinely privileged for
having come to such a state of unexpected bliss; the irony is that he is still
a slave. He claims his mistress to be:
A woman of the kindest heart and finest
feelings…had never had a slave under her control previously…. I was utterly
astonished at her goodness…. The meanest slave was put fully at ease in her
presence. (57)
However, this is a fleeting
experience as “the fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her
hands, and soon commenced its infernal work” (57). Mrs. Auld starts teaching
him the language of the masters, English letters. As he progresses, Mr. Auld
finds this out and chastises her heavily. The masters considered this as a
process of defiling the best nigger in the world. Mr. Auld instructs his wife,
“‘If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know
nothing’” (58). Thus, Douglass learns what is white man’s power and that “it is
almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian
country” (65). These moments seasoned his journey of becoming a future
abolitionist as he “understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (59).
The mistress, however, slowly
transforms and starts unbecoming of herself while slowly donning the typical
garb of a white that Douglass had known before coming to her. He writes,
“Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was
a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman…. Slavery soon proved its ability to
divest her of these heavenly qualities…. She finally became even more violent
in her opposition than her husband himself” (64). On the other hand, he
prepares to drop his slave-self and become a different person altogether—by
receiving the inch, he now prepares
to take the ell.
However, now that Douglass is
outside the immediate chains of slavery, the incapacity to look at the
situation of the ‘black’ people slowly ceases to exist and the existential
plight of countless becomes clear to him now. As he reads more and more, his
vision and mission becomes clearer and stronger; his understanding of the
whites and ‘black’s extends. He says, “The more I read, the more I was led to
abhor and detest my enslavers” (67). His sojourn at Baltimore lays bare another
cunning trait of the white community. The whites “encourage slaves to escape”
(69), and in order to get reward, catch them and hand them over to their
masters. His gaze could now perforate through the wretched condition of his
brethrens. The myriad imperceptible
spectres now act as become visible and produce
knowledge within an episteme of memory, and inheritance.
Eventually there ensues a fight
between Master Thomas and Master Hugh, and Douglass is called back to Maryland.
Thomas finds him “unsuitable for his purpose” (86) and deduces that this is the
result of the city life and its malicious effects. Douglass writes to his
master (Thomas), “It had almost ruined me for every good purpose, and fitted me
for everything which was bad” (86-87). Immediately Douglass is placed “to be
broken” (87). He comes across a group of people who break the slaves just like a horse is broken and tamed; they are
called the “negro-breaker and slave driver” (109). Mr. Covey who has “acquired
a very high reputation for breaking young slaves” (87) is appointed to ‘break’
Douglass. He is one of those (rare) slaveholders who “could not and did not
work with his hands” (91). Slave breakers mostly work like spies. Douglass outlines
Covey:
His comings were like a thief in the
night…. 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 wood-fence,
watching every motion. He would, for this purpose, leave his horse tied up in
the woods. (92)
The apparatus of corporeal vulnerability
circumscribed the body from encompassing its
co-inhabited space, thereby, eliminating it (body) from that space altogether.
Places
The first place that Douglass, as a
child, familiarizes with is a plantation farm where his mother is a slave
worker. Plantation farms became floating signifiers of suffering obliterating
the ‘other’ in the process. Douglass is supposed to be a mulatto, a white
master’s child, but the plantations have the rules that, “the children of slave
women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers” (26). A hellish
place trafficked with lust and torture, Douglass is, thus, born as a mulatto
child on a plantation. The masters trade off mulattos for the downright detestation
and cruelty of the (white) mistress towards the latter that navigate all boundaries
of tolerance. And until a mulatto is sold off, the master “must not only whip
them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother…and
ply gory lash to his naked back” (26). The state of the mulatto kids thus, is
worse than the ‘black’ ones.
The ‘inhuman’ plantations have vast
areas for growing tobacco, wheat and corn are in great abundance. Colonel Lloyd’s
production from his huge farms is sold in Baltimore. Many plantations taken
together act as platform of great business and governance, where “disputes
among overseers were settled” (32). Several mechanical works such as, black
smiting, shoemaking and mending, cartwrighting, grain-grinding, coopering,
weaving, etc., are also all carried out on the plantations wearing “a
business-like aspect” (35). Such places display power and grandeur. Llyod’s
plantation is known as the Great House Farm. Douglass notices that “a
representative could not be prouder of his election to a seat in the American
Congress, than a slave on one of the out-farms would be of his election to do
errands at the Great Farm House” (35). It is a matter of pride for the slaves to
work in this ‘Great House’ and earn great confidence in them by the master.
Moreover, this place is also acts as a shield from the endless whiplash of the
overseers and masters while in the field. Nevertheless, Douglass could not find
“anything great in the Great House, no matter how beautiful or powerful” (54)
with not even the basic of the amenities for the slaves. The house is a place, which,
despite every demonstration of majesty or defence to the slave, breeds
slavery.
Thus, “going to Baltimore laid the
foundation, and opened the gateway” (56) to all his subsequent affluence and he
looks at it as a manifestation of some kind providence. He thinks how “there
were a number of slave children that might have been sent from the plantation
to Baltimore…. I was chosen from among them all, and was the first, last, and
only choice” (56). He considers himself blessed, and finds Baltimore a place a
with a “marked difference, in the treatment of slaves” (60) from his erstwhile
place. Here people are “better fed and clothed, and enjoy privileges altogether
unknown to the slave on the plantation” (60). In fact in “every city
slaveholder is anxious to have it known of him, that he feeds his slaves well;
and it is due to them to say, that most of them do give their slaves enough to
eat” (60). It is a peculiar kind of duplicity and double-standard of the city
slave-owners though.
On being frequently asked about his
feelings on being Free State vs slave state, Douglass uses a few brilliant
images to generate his feelings on free lands like New York and Baltimore: “It
was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced. I suppose I felt as
one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly
man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate”; “immediately after my arrival at New
York…I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions” (143). These
expressions narrate the distinct atmospheres of a free state as against the
slave state.
However, such places also make him go
through forlorn feelings as “he is in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect
stranger” (143). Slavery birthed ecologies of forlorn
nonexistence.
Although he is with his own brethren, he is cynical about laying bare his
sadness in front of them “for the fear of speaking to the wrong one” (143) as
“the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey” (143). In fact,
he adopts the dictum “‘Trust no man!’”, as he starts his journey from slavery
to freedom (144). Moreover, he is amidst abundance, and is yet hungry; in a
place full of gorgeous houses, yet homeless. Something is amiss in him, as may
be in many other ‘blacks.
Douglass persistently keeps changing
his name as he tries to leave behind slavery. It is New Bedford which gives him
his final name, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. He is however, quite surprised
at the general appearance of the New Bedford, a northern place:
I found to be singularly erroneous….
I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts, and
scarcely any of the luxuries, of life were enjoyed at the north, compared with
what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the south…came to this conclusion
that…northern people owned no slaves…in the absence of slaves, there could be
no wealth, and very little refinement. And upon coming to the north, I expected
to meet with a rough, hard-handed, and cultivated population, living in the
most Spartan-like simplicity, knowing nothing of ease, luxury, pomp…how
palpable I must have seen my mistake. (148-49)
Everything is “clean, new and
beautiful” (150). There are no ramshackle houses with poverty-stricken inmates.
It’s a habitable, content place. The spectral invisibility of his existence
finds ecology of visibility, peripheral though.
Conclusion
Douglass’s gaze through his past and
present is enthralling in its refined and intelligent accounts of people and
places; even an unfeeling reader can get stimulated by its brilliance if not
moved by its passion. He ontologically positions the “black”
life into discernibility that threaded through ‘ecologies of nonexistence’ for
long. Douglass’s gaze (perspective) seems to disdain pity, but his
narration is suggestive of sympathy, as he meant life to be, in the colored
world, that he lived in and gave his life for. In delineating characters, it is
not easy to make real people come to life. Douglass’s writing is extremely
brief and episodic to develop any rounded character. Nevertheless, he effectively generates a wholesome
of America— place that break him and pull him down or resurrect him. At one place
he meets people to whom he is a ‘black’ to be scorned, and at other places,
people find splendour in that very color.
In
the words of Fanon: “Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the
black man, since it ignores the lived experience…” (Black Skin, White Masks 90). Thus, texts like Douglass’s call for the
creation and spread of a ‘hauntology’ of color (blackness) to vouch for the epistemology
of both presence and absence, born out of accounts of extremes of pain, loss, and
absence. African American travel writing and the activity of gazing (and the
eventual meaning making)— gazing and mobility being the ‘master’s’ tool for
long— together make one of the most effective ways to ‘haunt’ (counter) the
canon and make submerged stories surface, while legitimizing the ‘black’
perspective or point of view.
Thus, Douglass’s gaze paints a candid abolitionist
horror tale, albeit a remarkably humane and compelling one. He provides a
fuller and more nuanced narrative account of the African American slaves while
trying to relate an account of the ‘others’ (whites in his case) as well,
thereby blurring the traditional understanding of ‘centre’ and ‘margin’. His
narrative is a strong portrayal of the voice of the ‘subalterns’, one that
makes the almost forgotten, ‘obliterated’ history of the slaves take
centre-stage.
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