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Language in Slavery: Frederick Douglass's Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Ann Kibbey
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Extract

For historians who use slave narratives to document the immediate physical and social facts of slave life, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself offers a frustratingly low yield. Beside Solomon Northup's detailed account of living quarters, diet, work life, holidays, and family relations, Douglass's Narrative must seem spare, incomplete, even misleading in its portrayal of the slave experience—an incendiary polemic written more to fuel the abolitionist cause than to convey the nature of the slave experience. To read the Narrative from this point of view, however, is to misapprehend how Douglass's text treats slavery and to be needlessly disappointed. Unlike Northup, Douglass focuses on the linguistic significance of bondage: He tersely portrays masters and slaves almost solely in terms of their linguistic acts because, for him, the reality of slavery is a profoundly rhetorical one. He charts his own relentless progress to freedom as the acquisition of an ever deeper understanding of language use in a slave economy, and the realization of his own freedom at the Nantucket antislavery convention is preeminently a linguistic event. Douglass's perspective is an important one, for as sociolinguists have discovered, “peoples do not all everywhere use language to the same degree, in the same situations, or for the same things. … Languages, like other cultural traits, will be found to vary in the degree and nature of their integration into the societies and cultures in which they occur.” Douglass was acutely sensitive to the linguistic system of slave society, of the ways in which language was used—and withheld—by one human being to enslave another.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 8 , October 1983 , pp. 163 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

NOTES

1. Northup, Solomon, Twelve Years a Slave, in Osofsky, Gilbert, ed., Puttin' on Ole Massa (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 225–406.Google Scholar

2. Hymes, Dell, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), p. 18.Google Scholar

3. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: New American Library, 1968), pp. vi–viiGoogle Scholar. All quotations are from this edition, and page numbers will be noted hereafter in parentheses.

4. For a discussion of this concept of the subject, see Volosinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka, Ladislav and Titunik, I. R. (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), pp. 65–98.Google Scholar

5. Specifically, antimetabole (a repetition of words, in successive clauses, in reverse grammatical order) played off against parallelism.

6. For a more elaborate exposition of the nature-culture opposition and of Douglass's general use of binary oppositions to describe the slave system, see Gates, Henry-Louis Jr., “Binary Oppositions in Chapter One of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” in Fisher, Dexter and Stepto, Robert, eds., Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1978), pp. 212–32.Google Scholar

7. My discussion excludes his grandmother because Douglass does not mention her until the last sentence of the chapter, where he acknowledges that in his early years he was raised by her. Apparently he knew her well, and this was Douglass's own loophole (and perceived as such) in the system he describes. His grandmother also appears outside the system of slavery, in a sense, on page 62, where she is the example of the slaveholder's perverse idea of a free laborer. Too old to work, she is forced to live in the woods and fend for herself, since she is no longer economically profitable to keep as a slave. See also page 45, where Douglass mentions a brother and two sisters but says his relationship to them was not important. Like the additional personal material in his later autobiographies, the presence of these family members—whom he obviously knew rather well—raises the question of how far Douglass was nonrepresentational in his self-references in the Narrative in order to represent the general system of slavery. I should like to thank my colleague Michele Stepto for several conversations on the significance of familial relationships in Douglass's Narrative.

8. For the distinction between a sign and a signal, see Volosinov, , Philosophy of Language, pp. 68–69Google Scholar. He points out that mechanistic philosophy tends to substitute the notion of signal for the notion of sign.

9. Mrs. Hamilton, on page 51, also seems worthy of this description, although she was not, strictly speaking, an overseer. She probably did not herself own the slaves she whipped, and this would make her similar to the overseer in her economic relation to her slaves.

10. Gore could speak in the imperative form, but this is merely a grammatical construction, whereas a command indicates a social relationship requiring a linguistic reciprocity between speaker and hearer. My discussion of performatives and imperatives is indebted to Benveniste, Emile, Problems in GeneralLinguistics, trans. Meek, Mary Elizabeth (Coral Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 223–38Google Scholar. Especially useful is his critique of J. L. Austin's conflation of the two forms.

11. Douglass introduces the nonsocial status of the slave commodity in his explanation of the slaveholder's relationship to his illegitimate children. There were individual slaveholders who, unlike Douglass's father, evinced a “parental partiality” for their slave progeny, who sought to “protect and defend” them from the worst abuses of the slave system. Such attempts at protection were ultimately unsuccessful, not only because such favoritism marked the child as one who exposed the ideology of slavery for what it really was—an attempt to conceal the common humanity of master and slave—but also because there was no way, finally, to avoid the violence intrinsic to slavery. The slaveholder often resolved the inherent conflict of this “double relation of master and father,” Douglass says, by selling his children. He thereby avoided whipping them himself or witnessing the extraordinary brutality their peculiar status invited. But Douglass is only too aware of how sardonic it sounds to say that the sale of children proved to be the “dictate of humanity” in this circumstance. Douglass carefully juxtaposes a cliché of humanitarianism with the slaveholder's affirmation of his child's status as a commodity to show how bizarre slavery was. In any case, the market proved a convenient way of making the slave child disappear. The slaveholder father exploited what was most horrifying about the slave market, its capacity to render the slave utterly anonymous, supposedly because he had personal feelings for his child as an individual. In protecting his child from the immediate and obvious brutality of his own plantation, he delivered him over to the anonymity of the slave market and the violence of another plantation.

12. The definitions of exchange value and money follow Karl Marx's analysis in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Engels, Frederick (New York: International, 1967), vol. 1, part I, 35–47, 55–62, 71–99Google Scholar. See especially page 95, where he says “the price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of [exchange] value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form.” See also Marx, Karl, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nicolaus, Martin (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 193Google Scholar, where he discusses the “attribute of price” in the following way: “A particular exchange-value must first be exchanged for exchange-value in general before it can be in turn exchanged for particulars.… Commodities are really exchanged for money, transformed into real money, after they have been ideally transformed into money beforehand—i.e., have obtained the attribute of price as prices.”

13. The slave commodity continues to be a social hieroglyph in the usual sense too. Like the commodity with which he is equated, he also contains a contradiction—between his abstract and invariable identity as a slave commodity, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, his particular human capacity to function in concrete social situations.

14. “The Fugitive Blacksmith,” in Bontemps, Arna, ed., Great Slave Narratives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 242–43.Google Scholar

15. For a longer description of biblical types and the structural prominence of the journey in slave narratives, see Smith, Cynthia J., “Escape and Quest in the Literature of Black Americans,” diss., Yale Univ., 1974, pp. 1–44.Google Scholar

16. “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,” in Bontemps, , p. 313Google Scholar. See also pp. 293, 309, and 311 for similar uses of The Pilgrim's Progress to interpret the meaning of the journey. Henry Bibb's narrative is more ambiguous, and certainly more like Douglass's. Because Bibb escaped on several occasions over quite a long period of time, his narrative manages to give lengthy accounts of life in slavery even within the constraints of the journey as his major theme. Bibb does make serious biblical allusions, however.