“I felt so tall
within”— Anthropology in Slave Narratives
Paul Richard Blum,
Loyola University Maryland
Abstract
"What does it mean to be
human in the face of slavery?" I will examine three autobiographical
documents from African-American slaves of the 18th/19th
century (Sojourner Truth, Victoria Albert, and Frederick Douglass) and ask: do
they allow for new insight into anthropology? Slaves are able to be human in
the face of physical and ideological denial of their humanity. Humans can
separate their bodily conditions from themselves. Deprivations of all kinds
show, paradoxically, what is essential to human beings: in this study,
religion, name, and resistance. I will also show to what extent René Girard’s
anthropology applies to the structure of slavery.
Slavery—we all seem to know about
it: that it is bad, that it was and is rampant in the human world, that it
caused the Civil War in the United States in the 19th century; and
also that it is at the origin of the race problem in the US.
We also seem to know what anthropology is: apart from
social, ethnological, medical, biological and a few other anthropologies there
is philosophical anthropology, however not very popular in the English speaking
world.
Philosophical anthropology addresses the question: what does it mean to be
human? The answer usually takes two forms: either it sets humans apart from
animals or it tries to determine the essence of man. Between that there are
many shades that are all variants of the Renaissance humanist definition of man
as the peculiar being that, somewhere between beasts and God, determines
itself.
If it is the essence of humans to define their essence, then humans as humans
cannot be an object of empirical observation, even if one were dealing with an
unknown tribe, but only of hermeneutical research into the ways how humans
express their attitude towards themselves and to fellow humans insofar as they
express, assert or otherwise state their own humanity. Needless to say that
actions, work, and language are the most probable resources for that.
One commonality of most anthropologies, even the
existentialist ones, is to define a ‘human being’ as endowed with peculiar
skills and somehow worthy of being elevated; and thus they tend to swerve into
Sunday school exhortations and glorifications of "man as man",
usually combined with normative virtue ethics.
The religious discourse about the fallibility of man is an antidote against
optimism and yet not sufficient to constitute a philosophical anthropology,
unless fallibility seen in non-exhortative terms (which contradicts religion
and ethics), that is, the weakness of human beings as such and while
interacting with fellow humans is identified as a marker of what makes a human,
then including also the ability to strive for overcoming flaws.
Therefore I suggest looking at humans from the angle of their
endangerment, from the moments of utter denial of humanity. What is it that is
being denied; how does a human being survive at the fringes of humanity; and
what is it that remains in spite of denial? Here I propose to read first person
slave narratives with the question in mind: what makes a slave human? The
answer will be universal: the humanity of a slave is truly human; it is the
core of the meaning of being human; and the endangerment and denial of humanity
to slaves yields an anthropology that by its origin and nature defies being
denied.
Most American slave narratives are written with an abolitionist
agenda, and most of them are taken from oral reports and recast according to
the mind and capacity of the writer. The case of Nat Turner is interesting
evidence: as an exception, it had been produced by an interviewer in order to
expose the bad character of Turner while detained. It appears that the
religious section of the text is rather authentic compared to the section on
Turner’s active rebellion. The reason is that the properly confessional parts
are such that they could not have been forged by the interviewer, who was
naturally alien to Turner’s feelings.
As a matter of fact, those slave narratives are the closest we can get as first
hand witnesses, and the writers only could work with the facts and the elements
offered by the slaves. In that perspective those first person narratives –
whether written by the slaves or reported by others – are as reliable and
deserving interpretation as any firsthand witness. Consequently, I propose to
read slave witness reports with a certain sensibility that pays attention not
only to the horrors and appeals of the text but also to the importance given to
details and to ask: what does it say about a slave as a human, and whatever it
says it must be valid for the notion of humanity. Let me tell a few examples
and see what we can get out of them.
In my examples, I will focus on three topics:
religion,
names, and
resistance. As
sources I will limit myself to Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Octavia
Albert. The first source is the narrative of the life of a slave woman as
rendered by an empathic woman; the second, the autobiographical narrative of a
slave turned abolitionist; the third is a collection of interviews written by
an emancipated slave woman conducted with other slaves, mostly women. These
sources are sufficiently diverse to serve as a specimen of how I suggest to
understand slavery anthropologically and to investigate philosophically human
nature with the help of sources that talk of the risk of being human.
Religion
Sojourner Truth was a woman in the State of New York who was
legally emancipated in the 19th century, fought for the liberation
of her son and became an abolitionist prophetess. Her access to religion was at
the same time hermeneutic and self-reliant:
… when she was examining the scriptures, she wished to hear
them without comment … In consequence of this, she ceased to ask adult persons
to read the Bible to her, and substituted children in their stead. … . She
wished to compare the teachings of the Bible with the witness within her; and
she came to the conclusion, that the spirit of truth spoke in those records ...
This is one among the many proofs of her energy and independence of character.
What enabled her to have her own
mind on religion? She had experienced religion in the distorted way of a slave.
As her biographer reports:
I asked her if her master, Dumont, ever whipped her? She
answered, 'Oh yes, … And the most severe whipping he ever give me was because I
was cruel to a cat.' At this time she looked upon her master as a God; and
believed that he knew of and could see her at all times, even as God himself.
We have here an analogy of
proportion: a cat is to a human as a human to God; or: God is to slave owners
as slave owners to slaves and slaves to animals. In scholastic philosophy we
would have to ask: is the proportion only analogous, or does it express a unity
on all levels? The episode also reminds us of aphorisms of the pre-Socratic
Heraclitus who compared animals in relation to humans in order to explore the
relation of humans to divinity. Dumont is cruel to a slave in order to correct
the slave's cruelty to a pet. Said in this way the act appears unjust and
disproportionate. The master treats a slave like a beast who treated a beast
like a beast. The master, whom Sojourner viewed as a god, reveals himself as a
god of correction and revenge; he reveals himself as unconditionally powerful.
Instead of subduing the woman even further, his cruelty that outdoes her
cruelty kindles in her the sense of the supreme eminence that now is looking
for a true realization.
Sojourner Truth always had the feeling to presage decisive
events. So, after she had escaped her master Dumont and lived legally with the
Van Wagenens, one day she predicted that Mr. Dumont was coming, and he came. Strangely,
she intended to return with him "home":
He answered, with a smile, 'I shall not take you back again;
you ran away from me.' Thinking his manner contradicted his words, she did not
feel repulsed, but made herself and child ready …
Now, instead of pursuing Dumont's
reaction we learn of her mystical musings:
But, ere she reached the vehicle, she says that God revealed
himself to her, with all the suddenness of a flash of lightning, showing her,
'in the twinkling of an eye, that he was all over'--that he pervaded the
universe--'and that there was no place where God was not.' … But she plainly
saw there was no place, not even in hell, where he was not: and where could she
flee? … When at last … her attention was once more called to outward things,
she observed her master had left, and exclaiming aloud, 'Oh, God, I did not
know you were so big,' walked into the house, and made an effort to resume her
work.
This is too outrageous; it cannot have been invented by the
interviewer. The episode sheds light on the meaning of religion among slaves. The
turning point in her life comes when her master refuses to take her back, for
the very reason that she ran away. We must be aware that running away used to
be the worst thing a slave could do. Mr. Dumont acknowledges her spontaneous
liberation. At least, it appeared to Isabella that way, because she was first puzzled
by his attitude, not believing that he meant what he said. The only meaning she
could find in his being her master and not taking her back after she fled had
to be that he approved of her self-emancipation (as we may name it with little
exaggeration), thus making his imputed ambiguity unambiguous. He had played the
god-role in her life as a slave; now, in this very moment the true greatness of
God reveals itself to her. She literally experienced autonomy granted from an
autonomous and paradigmatic force.
In terms of anthropology, that is to say: to the slave, the
master is the ideal and source of freedom. On the fringe of freedom, there is a
spark of divinity and unconditional spontaneity, which in ordinary language
amounts to religion.
And yet, there is one more aspect, to it. Mr. Dumont was her
god, and that is why she longed prophetically to return home with him. We find
more of the link between home and religion in Octavia Albert's interviews with
slaves, which she published in 1890. In Charlotte's story we read:
Aunt Jane asked me did the people have churches here. … She
had religion, and she was as good a woman as you ever saw. She could read the
Bible, and could sing so many pretty hymns. Aunt Jane said it seemed to her she
was lost because she could not go to church and hear preaching and singing like
she used to hear in Virginia. She said people didn't care for Sunday in
Louisiana.
Unmistakably, "to have religion"
means to have a home, because both women were displaced from Virginia. Leaving
aside the tension between "American" and Catholic denominations, we
read that religion is an identifying force for the slave:
Old mistress used to have balls on Sunday. … Mistress's
religion did not make her happy like my religion did. I was a poor slave, and
every body knowed I had religion, for it was Jesus with me every-where I went.
I could never hear her talk about that heavenly journey.
Home may be Virginia or Heaven.
"The older I got the
more I thought of my mother's Virginia religion."
So she was happy to hear a minister sing:
'O where are the Hebrew children? Safe in the promised land.'
I did not have religion when I came out here. .. [But] I never would fail to
say my prayers, and I just thought if I could get back to my old Virginia home
to hear some of my mother's old-time praises it would do my soul good. But,
poor me! I could never go back to my old Virginia home.
Of course we could apply the Marxist adage and say: religion
is the slave's opium. It is peculiarly revealing that in this text religion is
something to 'have' and 'get'
Religion, we are tempted to say, has turned into a commodity one can have or
miss. On the other hand, slaves were a commodity, and hence they treated the
transcendent in kind. But more importantly we can observe in this story that
home, belonging, kinship, eschatology form a syndrome which expresses the
self-assertion of the human being. Sojourner Truth was lucky to look up to her
master as the temporary god, before she discovered divination and divinity in
her inner self. Charlotte, thrown into the loss of home and family, clings to expressions
of religion; and where
Heimat is
unattainable, it still remains as a promise. The desire is what remains when
fulfillment is out of sight.
The famous master-slave dialectics (on which I cannot dwell,
here) is obvious in the god-like Dumont who frees his slave by the word and
makes her believe in the real big god. More earthly is Frederick Douglass’s
account of the role of religion in slavery, expressing the enlightened
perspective of an abolitionist. He commented upon the scarce permission to
slaves to observe the Christian holidays:
I believe them to be among the most effective means in the
hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.
He sees religious feasts as "safety-valves"
for the suppressed sprits of the slaves. On the other hand, the secret meetings
in which he discussed with fellow slaves the Scripture were at the same time
means of education and – within his narrative – the seed of self-liberation. Many
slave owners had a double standard of religious apartheid; they effectively Jim
Crowed salvation. In showing such blatant inconsistence they spurned the
craving for the transcendent. From Douglass it is obvious that critique of
religion was not within reach of the slaves, it appears to be a post-liberation
achievement, as in Douglass himself. Upon writing his autobiography he was able
to observe that "after his conversion, [his master] found religious sanction
and support for his slaveholding cruelty."
As a slave he ran twice a Sabbath school for the fellow slaves to learn
"to read the will of God," as he whimsically explains, and he was not
ashamed of ascribing the beginning of his self-liberation to the use a a magic
root, which he obtained from a wise friend.
Looking at these findings, it appears clear to me that under
the given conditions and with all necessary precautions we may state that slave
narratives reveal something like a natural religion so that we may conclude,
again with all due qualifications, that religiosity appears to be an
anthropological given. This is especially true because it is the target of
suppression and its means; it is also the means of liberation that can be
abandoned once liberation has been achieved; it is what master and slave share
and what tells them apart. I dare say, this finding is peculiar to the slave
situation as narrated by the witnesses.
Names
Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass both chose their
names for themselves. As Douglass reported:
The slave is a human being, divested of all rights – reduced
to the level of a brute-a mere "chattel" in the eye of the law … – his
name, which the "recording angel" may have enrolled in heaven, among
the blest, is impiously inserted in a
master's ledger, with horses,
sheep, and swine.
In this theoretical statement,
Douglass locates the function of name between property, law, and heaven. He
takes for granted that a human being has a name, that the individuality of the
person must have a guardian, for instance an angel, and that a name goes beyond
bookkeeping. Let us assume the slave holder knows all that. This means that the
denial of a personal name denies humanity to a chattel-slave – ergo a name is
what makes up a human being.
At this point it might be worth reflecting on the ‘chattel’
nature of slavery. From the legal and economic point of view it is well known
and uncontested that slaves were treated as chattel, as movable property on a
similar level as tools or cattle (no pun possible). Without engaging in
Aristotle’s famous definition of slaves as ‘tools with a soul’, it is obvious
that slaves were a specific kind of property, closer to domesticated animals
than to dead tools. It happens, but mostly jesting, that modern people give
utilities a name (especially cars, or very important devices); but to name a
slave entails the paradox of denying and recognizing the humanity of a slave. So
it is intuitively clear that the denial of a proper name instrumentalizes the
slave, while imposing a name on him or her is a second rate acknowledgment of
the status of the slave, superior to any tool, but on a par with a pet or
livestock.
If we follow this line of thought that slaves play a role
similar to livestock, we come to surprising observations. René Girard has explained
that the root of holding livestock is not the economic advantage of having
domesticated animals ready for work and consumption. Rather, humans lived
together with animals as the potential victim whose sacrifice serves to
stabilize community and to reconcile with the transcendent. The economic
usefulness of domestication evolved only over a very long time. It is therefore
possible to speculate that African slaves, as they appeared in the life of farmers
in America, were immediately welcome as labor force, of course, but at the same
time perceived to be livestock. On livestock Girard says: “The domestication of
animals requires that men keep them in their company and treat them, not as
wild animals, but as if they were capable of living near human beings and
leading a quasi-human existence.”
A very similar structure occurred in American slavery: the Africans inevitably
lived close to their masters so that they could not possibly be treated just as
tools; rather, they had to be granted a quasi-human level of life. One move to
keep the difference patent was to deny the ownership of a name. It is also
intuitively obvious that this closeness at a reinforced distance made the slave
prone to victimization in the Girardian sense; but that is not at issue, here.
But if we set aside all we know about the meaning of naming
and just look at what happened to Sojourner and Frederick, we can glean the
importance of names on the anthropological level. The first thing that should
be noted is that all slave narratives awkwardly refer to slaves not plainly by
their names (“there was Jack”, or “Jim”) but with the epithet "a slave
named Jack." It seems to have been wired in the grammar of slave narrative
that names are always arbitrarily given and hence do not naturally and
necessarily name one unique individual. Jack as a person cannot be a slave; the
topic of the story is not Jack but the slave who happens to have that name.
Sojourner's original name was Isabella.
When she enters the service of Van Wagenen she receives his as her surname, and
her biographer explains:
… a slave's surname is ever the same as his master; that is,
if he is allowed to have any other name than Tom, Jack, or Guffin. Slaves have
sometimes been severely punished for adding their master's name to their own.
An example of this practice can be
found in Octavia Albert’s stories: The son of a white man was not allowed to
bear his father’s name, so the mother gave him her name.
Eventually, Isabella feels her
calling to become a preacher and lecturer, and that is the moment she chooses
for herself the name Sojourner.
We have no record of her rationale for her name,
so we only can take it at face value: the self-emancipated slave woman
proclaims the truth of her elementary human situation, as the Bible says:
For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all
our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding. (1
Chronicles 29, 15)
Whereas Frederick Douglass changed his names
haphazardly, and eventually accepted one suggested incidentally by a friend,
Sojourner chose one to express her state in life. And yet, both come together,
because Sojourner's message is that of transience. Therefore, beyond the more
sophisticated mechanisms of naming and necessity, we may state that contingency
and fortuitousness come to the forefront in slave narratives. Interestingly,
Frederick Douglass does not spend much time on explaining the first occasions when
he changed his name; he simply states in a footnote that at some point, after
his escape he had changed his name from Frederick Bailey to Johnson.
He then explains that he had inherited the name Bailey from his parents, but he
dropped the additional middle names that were given to him by his mother.
Immediately after his departure from
Baltimore Frederick called himself Stanley, obviously a simple disguise. Then
he picked the name Johnson, which incidentally was also that of the couple that
received him in New Bedford. Since this name was all too common, he asked his
host to find him a new name, or rather, he “gave Mr. Johnson the privilege” to
do so:
Mr. Johnson had just been reading the ‘Lady of the Lake,’ and
at once suggested that my name be ‘Douglass.’ From that time until now I have
been called ‘Frederick Douglass;’ and as I am more widely known by that name
than by either of the others, I shall continue to use it as my own.
Douglass, as a gifted writer,
creates the punch line that emphasizes the claim that his name is what he adopts
(however also with regard to “the others”) rather than being adopted. A few
lines before Douglass emphasizes that this privilege of naming did not extend
to his first name: “I must hold onto that [first name], to preserve a sense of
my identity.”
One interviewee in Octavia Albert’s collection includes
names in a list of the most essential things black slaves were missing:
Twenty-seven years ago we did not own a foot of land, not a
cottage in this wilderness, not a house, not a church, not a school-house, not
even a
name. We had no marriage-tie, not a legal family—nothing
but the public highways, closely guarded by black laws and vagrancy laws, upon
which to stand.
From this list we gather that in his
later age the speaker held it to be natural that a human being has a place to
stay, social institutions, marriage and family, and a name.
Resistance
Many of the stories in Victoria Albert’s book narrate about
slaves escaping into the woods. There was no need to explain why they hid, of
course. But for us it is important to see, to what length a fugitive is willing
to go rather than to return to the master. Again, as a matter of course, that
needs no explanation, because Victoria Albert reports these stories for the
very purpose of illustrating the cruelty of the slaveholders. From the anthropological
point of view, however, it is important that humans are able to risk their life
and to choose one misery over another. At one point we read on the subject of
running away:
Aunt Charlotte said to me, ‘I tell you, my child, nobody
could get me to run away in those Louisiana swamps. Death is but death, and I
just thought if I'd run off in those
swamps I'd die
.
I used to hear old people say it was just as well to die
with fever as with ague; and that is what I thought. …’
That seems to contradict the general
impulse to escape; at least it shows the options a slave had to weigh. Those
many slaves that did hide in the woods or made it to the Underground Railroad
chose to be masters of their own suffering rather than the victims of their
masters’ wrath.
One interesting incident in this collection is that of
Nellie Johnson. She is described as almost white and good looking. After she
was recaptured from an attempted escape she was forced to dress as a harlequin and
a male with “
deer-horns on her head to punish her, with bells on them.”
This was certainly a mockery and revenge from the side of the slave owners for
her daringness that betrayed masculinity and resolve – features not imputed on
slaves, let alone women. This is the only case narrated in which the punishment
was not physically cruel but psychological and social. For that very reason it
allows interpreting the standard punishment by beating and other physical abuse
as inherently attacking the status and humanity of the fugitive slaves. Fleeing
is what a human being can freely choose.
One of the most cruel stories about escaping slaves is that
of Hattie, and the plot is this: she was abused by her mistress and forced to
serve as the sex-slave to her owner’s son, of whom she had two or three
children. Hattie is described as losing one of her children in the woods, which
she buried in a piece of her clothing. Consequently, she is almost naked, and
her being naked is emphasized repeatedly in this short story that ends in
Hattie being captured and beaten to death.
We can compliment Victoria Albert for the impressive density of her rendering
this case, and yet, there would have been nothing to tell if it had not
happened – and there is no reason to doubt that. This story of the almost nude
woman, mourning in the woods (“
I had my child here in the woods; it is
dead and I buried it in a piece of my frockshirt.”) is like an emblem to tell
us that resistance does not need weapons or ruses; it originates from the naked
existence of being human.
The Narrative of
Sojourner Truth tells of an interesting case of retribution by a slave. A
slave woman was appointed to tend to her ailing master who had been
particularly mean and cruel.
She was very strong, and was therefore selected to support
her master, as he set up in bed, by putting her arms around while she stood
behind him. It was then that she did her best to wreak her vengeance on him.
She would clutch his feeble frame in her iron grasp, as in a vice; and, when
her mistress did not see, would give him a squeeze, a shake, and lifting him
up, set him down again, as hard as possible. ... She was afraid the disease
alone would let him recover, -- an event she dreaded more than to do wrong
herself. Isabella asked her, if she were not afraid his spirit would haunt her.
'Oh, no,' says Soan; 'he was so wicked, the devil will never let him out of
hell long enough for that.'
The narrator Olive Gilbert adds to
that some observations on the cluelessness of slaveholders concerning the mood
and feelings of their slaves, which are also to be found in Douglass’s Narrative. However, Soan’s motive is
interesting of itself. She is aware of being strong and physically able; she
has a sense of revenge; she works with the natural course of the illness,
making sure it ends fatal; she believes in the ghosts and the devil but not in
the moral evil she is committing. When the physical prowess has turned to her
advantage, she exerts cruelty on her tormentor, the only difference being that
she has to act stealthily and slyly. What makes her competitive with her owner
is her capability of scheming and purposefully exerting physical power.
Morality set aside, what makes her superior to her master is her ability and
resolve to torment another with the fatal end in view, whereas the slaveholder
only had been thoughtlessly wicked. She has wickedness on her side being
convinced that the master of all wickedness would hold the ghost of her victim
at bay.
In terms of Girard’s victimization theory, Soan is probably
mimicking the violence of her master. In that sense she is emphasizing through
her action the mechanism of victimization: the master did not need torment for
his own survival but only for his entertainment and positioning as the master. His
victim, however, exposes this very relationship by activating violence with a
terminal physical goal.
In Isabella/Sojourner’s own life her rescue of her son who
had been sold South is an interesting example of the humanity of resistance. We
cannot but be amazed by her naiveté with which she fought legally for her son.
But the opening scene of this event is telling about her motivation: after her
former mistress had ridiculed her for that “
fuss to make about
a little nigger”
Isabella spoke of her trust in God and herself:
I was sure God would help me to
get him. Why, I felt so tall within – I felt as if the power of a nation was
with me!
Resistance, retribution, revenge,
and escape – they all are rooted in the fundamental awareness of oneself. The
capability to choose death, one’s own or that of the oppressor, is the capability
to be consciously oneself. This Self may well extend to humanity or, in
Sojourner Truth’s language, “a nation”.
Frederick Douglass, with a keen eye for human nature, has
written a monument to slave resistance in the description of his standoff with
his master. Let us remind ourselves that for Douglass’s fellow slaves it was
“considered as being bad enough to be a slave
; but
to be a poor man's slave was deemed a disgrace indeed,” because slaves were
trained to see themselves ‘transferring’ the personal value of their master
upon themselves.
To become conscious of the derivative nature of the self was an important step
towards inner emancipation. Hence, to despise a slave owner could of itself be an
act of rebellion long before any attempt at violence or evasion could be
envisioned. This is the background against which we should read Douglass’s
brawl with Mr. Covey, as narrated in the tenth chapter.
He alerts his reader about the importance of the event: “You have seen how a
man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”
Of course, it was the individual slave Frederick who was ‘made a man’, and
there may be implications regarding slave masculinity, but the event is also
symbolic as it depicts an essential feature of being a man in the sense of
being human.
As Mr. Covey, the slave breaker, tried to whip Douglass,
“[h]e held on to me, and I to him.” The slave manages to get at the master’s
throat “causing the blood to run”. (71) This standoff, I think, is crucial. The
first slave who happened to pass by tried to help his master, but was kicked
off by Douglass, which had the almost comical effect that Covey’s “courage
quailed” and he asked the slave if he “meant to persist in his resistance” (71
f.). What a question! The next slave flatly refused to interfere with the
argument he was not hired “to help whip” another slave. So we have the violent
defeat of one slave and the legalistic opposition of another surrounding the stalemate.
This is the point when the slave breaker gives up “saying that if I had not
resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much.” Douglass adds immediately
that Covey had not whipped him at all. Covey becomes ridiculous through his
childish after-threat of tormenting only “half so much” leaving it open what
the other half would have looked like.
What Covey must have realized without understanding was the
definite turn of superiority. In Douglass’s words: “he had drawn no blood from
me, but I had from him.”(72) The brawl made it physically visible that the
master was a coward and the slave ‘a man’. We should notice that Douglass did
not beat his master, the standoff was what he needed to assert his position:
when two people get even they may return to their natural humanity. “The
physical struggle dragged Covey into a
moment of equilibrium; it was a point at which the only way for any of them to
survive was by moving
upward.”
That is, the impasse opened the way back to humanity. The slave breaker’s fault
was not violence as such but the inherent cowardice that consists in denying a
fellow human a chance to be human. Therefore it was sufficient for the slave to
exert as much violence as needed to show equality on the level of physical
competition. Once again, what broke Covey’s ability to subdue Douglass was the confluence
of three types of resistance: the non-fatal violent back fighting, the physical
defeat of one slave by another, and the rational verbal defiance of another
slave. These might be the major components of all resistance and rebellion. We
should not be surprised seeing Douglass summarize the meaning of this moment in
a hymnal religious tone: “I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious
resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom.” The
restoration of the human essence is expressed, if not caused, by the act of
resistance.
Later, Douglass concluded that resistance as such might also
persuade slaveholders to renounce on slavery by appealing to their conscience
when they learn to perceive slaves as not voluntarily submitting to their
control, thus breaking the vicious circle that slaves admit to be inferior
through being submissive.
However, I think this is not a moral appeal but one that is rooted in the structure
of self-ssertion. “I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white
man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.” This
concluding remark to the Covey episode (p. 73) may be read as a challenge, but
it actually says that slavery (being whipped) is the negation of humanity
(being killed). Hence resistance may be just, may be moral, may be a
psychological urge, a habit, a duty, a last resort – in the anthropological
sense it is the feature of being non-denied to exist. In Sojourner Truth’s
words, it is a ‘power of a nation’; in Douglass’s terms it is a resurrection
before death. Sojourner’s defiance and Douglass’s standoff express what Aunt
Charlotte expressed as the right to establish the terms of one’s death.
Conclusion
If we look at these episodes from the point of view of René
Girard, we find a few puzzling components. Here is not the place to investigate
the slaveholders’ roles in victimizing African people in order to establish the
American society.
For that approach we would have to look into the justification of slavery from
their perspective. The interesting question that arises from reading the slave
narratives is this: are there traces of the mimetic cycle? The mimetic cycle,
in Girard’s anthropology, consists in jealousy for
being the other as exemplified or fetishized in the other’s
possession.
In
the religious sphere, we see that the slaves in Louisiana do not covet the
masters’ religion; rather, they (and at least their reporter, Victoria Albert)
utterly despise it, as does Douglass. Sojourner Truth receives the notion of
divinity from looking at her master – and outdoes him in all respects. The
spark of divinity she obtains from domination sets her free. So, in this sphere
we may say the mimetic cycle does not work upwards. Which reminds, again, of
the fight with Covey: Douglass fights not in order to
be Covey, he fights in order to make Covey at least as human as he,
Douglass, just realized to be. It may be the case that Douglass was fighting
for recognition by his tormentor and that this motive prevented him from
killing him; but the case of Soan in Sojourner Truth's story shows that
self-assertion of a slave may not depend of the master's survival. Therefore it
is likely that Girard's theory that desire for recognition as the basis of
every duel
does not apply to the slaves of our narratives. The slave Frederick does not
covet Covey’s cowardice; he wants to liberate himself from that cowardice that
would keep him to be a slave.
It is plain and easy to understand that naming is as close as one can come to
mimicking the other. However, the namelessness that has been imparted on slaves
deprives them of an essential feature of a human being, but at the same time it
keeps them from
being like their
tormentors. So in naming their slaves randomly the slave owners also reminded
every single individual of their not being their master. Not to mistake one’s
master for a model might have been beneficial for the slaves in their quest for
humanity. So, in a Girardian perspective, we learn that the mimetic cycle and
the resulting violence and victimization is broken on the level of utter
denial.
This brings to further general conclusions. Religion,
onomastic identity, and resistance take on very strange forms on the level of
slavery; and it is this we can learn from the slave narratives and the facts
they convey. As we saw, critique of religion requires religious freedom. We may
also state that onomastic identity is an absolute requirement of being human,
so much that it does de facto not
depend on a legitimate name-giver. Ultimately humans are baptized as wanderers
on this earth. And resistance and rebellion? In all three sources we see that
morality is not a condition of being human it comes only after humanity ceased
being questioned.
