On Being Free Before Setting Yourself Free

When I finished reading Frederick Douglass’s memoir, I came to the conclusion that it can be divided into two main parts: his transformation into a slave and his change into a free man. The idea was given to my by Douglass himself so I can’t take credit for it, but I do believe that this division in the memoir is more important than he made it seem when he mentioned it in passing.

The exact moment where the memoir enters part two is when Douglass fights Covey to the point where the man is scared of him. It is in this moment when he becomes a free man regardless of his position as a slave, in other words, even though he was still “a slave in form, the day had passed forever when [he] could be a slave in fact” (pg. 78) It is at this point in the narrative that we notice a change in Douglass’s passion for freedom. Now he doesn’t just yearn for it, he believes fully in the fact that he deserves it and is confident that he will eventually get it.  Up to this point, Douglass was a slave inside his head as well as by the law.

This idea seems revolutionary to me. The first step towards freedom is, according to Douglass’s experience, thinking of oneself as a free man. It makes sense when considered in perspective from all these years later. Slaves had their inferiority so engraved in their heads that the idea of setting themselves free seemed impossible. It was a mere fantasy because they did not consider themselves free men. Slaves were held captive by themselves as much as they were by their masters. Consider it this way: the ratio of slaves to slaveholders in a plantation was wildly unbalanced toward the slaves’ side. Had they considered the right to be free as something that should be applied to them revolting would have been almost laughably easy.

 In the end slavery was nothing more than a play of power between an aggressive majority and a disenfranchised minority.

It could be said that Douglass was treated better towards the end of the book what with him being able to work for himself and all, but it is easy to understand how this might not be a satisfying arrangement. He was still someone else’s property according to the law. Regardless of the money he saved and the clothes he finally bought for himself, he wasn’t free. Douglass was stuck in a situation where he had the worst of both worlds: the trials and sufferings of a poor free man and the misery of belonging to someone as a slave.

Another interesting issue in the ending of the memoir was Douglass’s refusal to give away the methods he used to escape. On this topic I disagree extensively with Cristina (another blogger in the AP Lang world) and what she mentioned in her last blog post. About this idea of avoiding the escape route details in the memoir Cristina states the following: “I know, he couldn’t just give out the secret recipe for all the freedom-hungry slaves.” I think Douglass’s intention when he didn’t put the route in writing was the exact opposite of that. He wasn’t trying to keep slaves in their place, as an escapee that would make no sense and it would be extremely hypocritical. What he didn’t want was to give the white people the details of the route. He clarifies this when he talks about the well-known Underground Railroad and how it has been so publicly acclaimed that the whites that are looking for an escaped slave know exactly where to go. The open declarations of the Underground Railroad do “nothing towards enlightening the slave, whilst they do much towards enlightening the master” (pg. 100). Douglass kept his route a secret in order to keep white men away from it, not to keep it closed to fellow slaves looking for freedom.

It should also be noted that Douglass gave full names of everyone who helped him get a life once he was in New York, clearly leaving a trail for any escaped slave who arrived to free land with the same confusion as he did. He understood the loneliness and fear slaves might feel when they achieve their freedom. He grasped the “now what?” feeling perfectly and thus he left a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow if they needed help integrating into free lifestyle. A trail that started with a breadcrumb officially known as “MR. DAVID RUGGLES” (pg. 106). Come on, why else would he capitalize the whole thing?

Also important to note is Douglass’s observation that everyone seemed happier in free country. Not only the colored people but whites as well, leaving the reader the distinct feeling that everyone is better off without slavery. In the end, we probably are. Too much power is never good for men.

I say goodbye to this memoir with a quote from Clash of Kings by George R.R Martin, which is extremely relevant to my reflections in this blog post:

“Power resides only where men believe it resides…A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”