Introduction

In The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016), Robert S. Levine advocates a critical approach to Douglass's autobiographical writings that emphasises their dynamism and interconnectedness. The three autobiographies Douglass produced over a period of almost half a century – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; revised and expanded 1892) – ‘can be read in isolation’ from one another as ‘artfully constructed’ and ‘finished work[s]’ in their own right and yet are more accurately and fruitfully seen, Levine contends, as ‘one large autobiographical project’ that ‘require[s]’ the reader to move ‘across and through the [texts] with a heightened attention to the ways in which Douglass revises his representations of key moments of his life’ (2).

Such a process of revision is not something performed solely by Douglass himself but has been continued, in the wake of his death in 1895, by a number of other African-American figures. One of these is Jacob Lawrence, who offers an artistic reworking of those ‘key moments’ to which Levine refers in his Frederick Douglass, a series of thirty-two paintings created in 1938–9, one hundred years after Douglass, ‘rigged out in sailor style’ (Life and Times 644), finally ‘left [his] chains’ and made his way to freedom in New York on ‘the third day of September, 1838’ (Narrative 159). Yet if Lawrence revises Douglass – turning texts into images – so those images have themselves been turned into texts in F. Douglas Brown's Icon (2018), a kaleidoscopic collection of poems whose date of publication has its own significance, not so much commemorating Douglass's emancipation as his birth into slavery in Tuckahoe, Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818.

Brown's profound imaginative investment in Douglass is perhaps at least partly explicable in terms of the biographical fact that the poet's given names bind him with such conspicuous intimacy to his iconic subject, with ‘F.’ standing for ‘Frederick’ (which is also the given name of Brown's father). Either way, in gravitating towards Douglass so strongly, Brown makes what is to date the most sustained contribution to African-American poetry about this multidimensional historical figure, as Icon extends and enriches a tradition that runs from the early elegies of the 1890s to the present, while adding something distinctive to this body of poetic reimaginings by mediating the construction of Douglass through Lawrence's art.