VINCE BREWTON
University of North Alabama
"Bold defiance took its place"—
"Respect" and Self-Making in
Narrative ofthe Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave
The creative artistic personality is thus the first work of the productive individual,
and it remains fundamentally his chief work, since all his other works are partly the
repeated expression of this primal creation-—Otto ^nk Art and Artist {1922)
THE 1845 NARRA TIVF OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS REMAINS THE BEST KNOWN
of the self-representations in which he chronicles his experiences as a
slave, obscures his escape to freedom, and sketches the formation of his
early identity as child and man. His unforgettable opening declaration,
"I was bom in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles
from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland" (12), situates the text within
the narrative context of mid-nineteenth century first-person hterary
productions—Poe's fictional narrators; the persona of Emerson's essays;
Thoreau's joumals; Whitman's Song of Myself, Melville's Ishmael;
Hawthome's Coverdale. Identity and origin are the subjects of this essay,
which will examine the essential circularity inherent in the exchange
between white and black social identity in the South—particularly as it
bears on the phenomenon of "respect."
A number of critics have already done interesting work in examining
the different strands of identity found in the Narrative: Sterling Lecater
Bland, Jr.,writes that in the Narrative Douglass "created an individual
identity for himself firmly based on the entithng power of biblical
precedent" (67). While Robert B. Stepto agrees that the Narrative's
"linguistic model is obviously scriptural," he and other more recent
scholars have focused on the discursive identity implicit in the work—in
short, on Douglass's identity as author. Stepto puts it succinctly:
"Douglas is about the business of discovering how personal history may
be transformed into autobiography" (22). For Wilham L. Andrews, the
emphasis lies in how Douglass may endeavor to tell a "free story" while
negotiating the constraints of Garrisonian discourse, that "crucial
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parameter in the text that dictated . . . the range of Douglass's thinking
about some key questions and the rhetorical form of his expression of
that thinking" (217). Bertram Wyatt-Brown points us in the direction I
would Uke to take with the Narrativein his analysis ofthe enslavement
ofthe remarkable Abd-al-Rahman Ibrahima. Wyatt-Brown observes of
slave behavior that the "identification with the owner's perspective
rather than with their own suggests the mimetic feature of dependence"
("Mask" 31) and uncovers in the story of Ibrahima the slave a
deployment of the owner's perspective against himself: "an acceptance
ofthe master's power involves adaptation to his ways" ("Mask" 31). The
self-representation of the Narrative, however, reveals how Douglass
adapts his master's ways in order to deny the master's power. Further,
the form of identity articulated in the text, I wiU argue, has no single
point of origin in American culture but arose out of a continuous
interaction between owner and owned, a rocking back and forth in the
Foucaldian sense between white Southemers who drew on European
traditions of personal honor and sought to maintain class position and
authority over slaves through violence on the one hand, and, on the
other, the ever-present absence of physical liberty and potential for fatal
defiance in the experience ofthe slave. This is the crucible Douglass so
ably depicts in the Narrative, and we can trace the emergence of his
identity out ofthe call and response of these two sets of conditions.
We are familiar in contemporary culture with the form of identity
that flourishes in the Narrative under the designation "respect," and it is
the distinguishing characteristic of what has come to be known,
somewhat misleadingly, as inner-city culture. "Respect" is an
exaggerated version of ordinary self-respect and has been studied in
many historical contexts, from the Mediterranean to Japan.' While
"respect" uses physical and psychic violence to police the territorial
boundaries of the self, in a crucial sense it requires the insult, the
offense, as the means for its self-assertion. "Respect" does not tolerate
disrespect, and as a form of identity utilizes active disrespect of others to
lay claim to power and the boundaries of that power. Wyatt-Brown
places this feature of "respect" in the context of slavery when he writes:
"The very debasement of the slave added much to the master's honor,
since the latter's claim to self-sufficiency rested upon the prestige,
power, and wealth that accrued from the benefits of controlling others"
'See Kieman, Wyatt-Brown's Honorand Violeocein the Old South, and Pitt-Rivers.
"BoIddeSance took its place"
705
{Honorand Violence ix). Richard Nisbet and Dov Cohen have argued
that "cultures of honor" (i.e. respect) invariably arise in communities in
which an individual's reputation for strength and toughness are essential
to his status.'^ In recent popular culture "respect" has been
overwhelmingly associated with (and represented by) inner city African
American males. "Hip hop" culture broached the national consciousness
in the 1990s, when a wave of films including Boys in the Hood (1991),
New Jack City (1991), Juice (1992), and Menace II Society (1993)
introduced the term "respect" into the American popular lexicon. These
films and other pop cultural representations, especially music videos Uke
those ofthe late Tupac Shakur, the late Biggie Smalls, Ice Cube, and Dr.
Dre, depict an urban miUeu in which "respect" is the commodity par
exceUence, the indispensable first condition on which aU else—wealth,
pleasure, and power—depends.
More recently, "respect" has figured in a territorial dispute originating
in academe but spilling over into the larger media culture. Most
observers, I believe, would concur that the power struggle between
Harvard president Lawrence Summers and then Harvard University
Professor Cornel West made its way from behind the schoolhouse to a
national stage because of its racial subtext—the white boss dressing
down the black subordinate for alleged inattention to duty. However, it
was the fact that the confrontation played out as an issue of "respect"
that gave the racial subtext its energy and interest. "The one thing I do
not tolerate is disrespect," West told Tavis Smiley on National PubUc
Radio (West). Whatever events and grievances, real or imaginary, were
at issue in the controversy that led to West's departure for Princeton,
what found representation in media venues as diverse as The Boston
Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vanity Eair, and The
National Review was a struggle for "respect," appropriately restrained
within an academic setting but nevertheless indicative of a process
whereby identity is constituted by a diligent maintenance ofthe surface
markers of dignity and self-worth. UnwiUingness to tolerate disrespect
and the calculated giving of offense as an assertion of worth and power
are the essential features of "respect." Frederick Douglass's account of his
fight with the slave-breaker Edward Covey provides a literary prototype
for the identity configuration of "respect," a formula for being in the
^For an excellent study of the dynamics at work in cultures where respect is critical,
see Nisbet and Cohen.
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world constituted by the dynamics of power in the relations between
slaves and their masters.
In the 1845 Narrative of Frederick Douglass are two competing
authorial personae: the fugitive slave who seeks to transform himself
into the slave's opposite, the free man; and the de facto free man
regarding his former life as a slave fTom the safe distance of the
memoirist. By signing his name and address to the pubUshed Narrative,
Douglass stages a literary confrontation with his would-be pursuers, the
slave-catchers who can by law return him to the Aulds. Douglass's
biographer WiUiam S. McFeely has raised serious questions about the
accuracy of some of Douglass's claims, but scholarship on the issue of
Douglass's factual accounts remains divided (158-60)."^ Stepto contends
that in one place in the Narrative "Douglass is reproducing his language
from memory, and there is no reason to doubt a single jot of his
recollection" (24). Dwight A. McBride views passages in the Narrative
that move "back and forth from what he knows and what he does not
know" as evidence that he is "a reliable witness" (159). Houston Baker
begins an essay on the A^arrat/Vepromisingly by noting the "egotism and
self-consciousness" conspicuous in the American intellectual tradition,
but nevertheless treats the events of Douglass's work as historical record
rather than Uterary representation (94). Andrews offers one solution to
the problem in these terms:
Today our sensitivity to the relativistic truth value of all autohiography and to the
peculiar symbiosis of imperfect freedom and imperfect truth in the American
autobiographical tradition makes it easier for us to regard the fictive elements of
black autobiography as aspects of rhetorical and aesthetic strategy, not evidence of
moral failure. (3)
While there is most certainly a rhetorical strategy at work in the
Narrative, McFeely's observation concerning Douglass's "fertile mind,
constantly fashioning itself' is more to the point of this essay, and it
'For example, McFeely calls attention to the distortions in Douglass's
characterization of Thomas Auld. In that Auld was not only the man Douglass believed
to be his father but his owner as well, there are sufficient grounds for Oedipal murder
in print. But it makes equal sense to see the profile of Auld as a literary convenience that
Douglass for polemical purposes uses as representative of slavery's evils.
"Bold defiance took its place"
707
seems clear tbat a similar "fashioning" takes place with narrative fact to
achieve narrative effect. The 1845 Narrative corvXmMes to be one ofthe
most widely read nineteenth-century texts and is indeed, in Bland's
phrase, "a double act of self-creation." But while Bland focuses on
Douglass's freedom rhetorically to create the events of his life— i.e. his
self-creation as an author—what remains to be explored is the authorial
creation of a social identity modeled on the pattern ofthe master.
An important step in the self-making of the Narrative involves
Douglass's creation of an embedded consciousness—what Bland calls "a
middle-ground persona who observes, who has been both within and
outside the circle"—to narrate several highly stylized events. One highly
relevant example in the A^a/7ar/Veof literary stylization is the account of
the whipping of Douglass's Aunt Hester by his master Captain Anthony,
an event Douglass calls the "blood-stained gate" (15). The child as unseen
witness to an act of sexually charged sadism receives pov^^er from its
operating within nineteenth-century sentimental discourse. The brutal
whipping of his Aunt Hester introduced Douglass to a consciousness of
his slave status, a social fact of which he was previously unaware.
Douglass attributes the whipping to Anthony's sexual jealousy and
remarks: "The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where
the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to
make her scream, and whip her to make her hush" (15). When
punishment diverges from correction as it does in this scene, we are
reminded of George P. Rawick's commentary on slave discipline:
"Whipping was not only a method of punishment. It was a conscious
device to impress upon the slaves that they were slaves" (Rawick 59). In
the Narrative, this scene marks a momentous change in Douglass's life
and forms an important symbolic juncture in the text. But it is significant
on another level as well. His aunt's whipping constitutes an extreme
version of identity-related violence. Each blow of the whip instructs
both victim and audience (Douglass) about the logical premise of slavery.
To be a slave, the whipping makes clear, means that one cannot hinder
physical insult or violation; the territorial integrity ofthe body by which
we conceive our most basic sense of self does not apply. The lesson of
Captain Anthony's "text" is that the slave body may be violated with
impunity, the somatic Umits in which selfhood gains a footing
disrespected at will. Hester's whipping ushers young Douglass into the
institution of slavery and his condition of slave, a condition marked by
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the inability to respond to disrespect. For the slave, these intrusions were
fundamentally physical since the legal fact of slavehood, to be un-free,
begins with a loss of ownership over one's body.
The conception of "free" that Douglass assembles in the Narrative^
and its consequences for his successful quest for liberty, owe a
considerable debt to the white-master consciousness that had enslaved
him. The antithesis of "slave" is "free," but this new condition requires
some clarifying weight, an identity more psychologically and socially
concrete than merely not-slave. Douglass has available to him in his
repertoire of identity options the self-made man, the Franklinian owner
and proprietor of the self, and if any person literally realized the
conception "self-made" it would be a self-freed slave. Once Douglass
escapes from Maryland into Massachusetts be characterizes a similar
revolution in his condition, a new life defined by a willingness to work
hard at any dirty job ready to hand; to subscribe to newspapers; to
participate in civic life; to bring Anna, his wife, north to join him; and
to support his family by the labor of his hands. This persona, however,
cannot contend for significance in the Narrativev^'ith. the psychic energy
and drama of the "free" man.
The "free" man Douglass becomes, based on the evidence of
autobiography and biography, both draws from and contributes to the
identity model ofthe white slaveholder, a social group whose definition
of liberty was hardly synonymous with good citizenship or hard work."
The social being of tbe slavebolder in an honor culture, in which worth
is predicated on reputation, resides necessarily on an exaggerated
self-respect and a readiness for violence. Eugene D. Genovese speaks
aptly of the slaveholder's "touchiness," (116), while Wyatt-Brown
usefully connects identity and liberty in his description of the white
Southerner:
When Southerners spoke of liberty, they generally meant the birthright to
self-determination of one's place in society.... If someone, especially a slave, spoke
or acted in a way that invaded that territory or challenged that right, the white man
so confronted had the inalienable right to meet tbe lie and punish the opponent.
Witbout sucb a concept of wbite liberty, slavery would bave scarcely lasted a
moment. {Southern Honor'ill)
•"Tbat Douglass was a slave*owner's son as well as a slave adds interest to his adoption
of tbis form of identity.
"Bold defiance took its place"
709
I contend that the concept of "white liberty," in Wyatt-Brown's
coinage, is crucially indebted to the presence of slaves who in physical
confrontations with their masters provoked the assertion of "white
liberty" and provided the possibihty of "free" for white Southerners.
Orlando Patterson calls our attention to the constant wakefulness of
"respect," and in this vigilance we survey an entire mode of being in the
world: "the free and honorable person, ever alive to slights and insults,
occasionally experiences specific acts of dishonor to which, of course, he
or she responds by taking appropriate action" (11). To be "free and
honorable," Patterson asserts, means erecting prickly defenses on a
highly territoriaKzed sense of self. Indeed, as Wyatt- Brown suggests,
this hyper-sensitivity defines "free" in the antebellum South because it
is necessary to maintain the dialectic of power between master and slave.
The experience of slavery for Douglass was so intimately bound with its
corollary, respect-conscious freedom, that Douglass internalizes the
slaveholder's honor as he forges his new identity. Richard D. Webb, an
Enghsh antislavery publisher and acquaintance of Douglass, attests to
this appropriation: "F. Douglass was a very short time in my house before
I found him to be absurdly haughty, self possessed, and prone to take
offense" (qtd. in McFeely 121). Webb has more to say about his
houseguest: "In all of my experience of men, I have never known one
not insane so able and willing as be is, to magnify the smallest cause of
discomfort or wounded self esteem into insupportable talk of offense and
dissatisfaction" (qtd. in McFeely 122). "Offense" and "dissatisfaction" are
key terms in the language of honor. Douglass clearly made an
impression, and his inclination to take offense and his choice of a career
as an antislavery activist are at least in part responses to the violation of
identity he had received as a slave. Within the Narrative there is an
objective correlative to his assumption of the slaveholder's identity
formula, of his realization of a sense of liberty defined by an
unwillingness to tolerate slights. That moment, what Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., rightly calls the "structural center" ofthe Narrative, is the physical
encounter with the slave-breaker Edward Covey (90).
The Narrative vividly depicts the "blood-stained gate" episode that
inducted a small boy into consciousness of his bondage. The fight vAth.
Edward Covey, drawn with equal mimetic power, marks Douglass's
second transformation. Borrowing a device from the genre of
sentimental fiction, as he often does in the Narrative, Douglass addresses
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the reader directly: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you
shall see how a slave was made a man" (47). For this pivotal scene to
carry the significance ofthe hero's transformation, a suitable villain was
necessary to stand in synechdochally for the institution of slavery.
Douglass devotes greater space in his first autobiography to the portrait
of Covey than to any other character, black or white. Douglass's
antagonist conveniently embodies all of the despicable qualities of the
slaveholding class—and more, for ironically Covey is a poor man,
despicable enough for a slave owner, but more to be despised in his
practice of breaking recalcitrant slaves for other masters. Douglass
depicts Covey as a deceptive, cunning man, "the snake," who worl« his
slaves relentlessly day and night and, worst of all, typifies the sexual
hypocrisy ofthe slave owner and the slave system as a whole. Douglass's
nemesis in his transformation scene is "a professor of religion—a pious
soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church" who
according to the Narrative purchased a slave woman as a "breeder,"
locking her in a cabin at night with a married slave man (42, 45). In the
language of honor, ostensibly the language ofthe slave-owning class but
now brought to bear on slavery itself, Douglass "gives the lie" to slavery,
unmasking its claim to uphold moral virtue and the Christian sanctity of
marriage. In his essay on the Narrative Gates employs a structuralist
analysis to explain Douglass's inversions ofthe "system of signs we have
come to call plantation culture" and how those inversions unravel its
logic (86). We must add to Gates's critique that some of Douglass's
inversions are themselves couched in that same system of signs of
plantation culture—i.e., in the language of honor (respect)—and thus
can unravel at best only a part of slavery's logic. Douglass's "giving the
lie" to Covey's hypocrisy marks an ideological challenge to slave-owning
culture as a whole, and the gesture is formally intrinsic to power
relations in a system of honor relations. "Giving the lie" is an example of
what Andrews describes as "the appropriating of empowering myths and
models of the self from any available resource" (7). I suggest that the
model of the self Douglass appropriates came about as the product of
daily interaction between master and slave. The habit of mind revealed
by this appropriation, rhetorically marked in the text by the repetition
of short sentences and the use of plentiful exclamation marks and italics
for emphasis, bears all the hallmarks of the pugnacious Southem
gentleman ofthe ldnd Mark Twain satirizes in Pudd'nhead Wilson.
"Bold deGance took its place "
'J\\
With regard to narrative structure, it is important that the fight with
Covey occur at a moment when Douglass has hit rock bottom in his life
as a slave: "I was broken in body, soul, and spirit," he tells us. "My
natural elasticity w^as crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition
to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the
dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed
into a brute!" (45). On the day of the climactic fight Douglass had
collapsed from heat exhaustion and failed to perform a piece of work he
had been given. The Narrative describes Douglass's seeking out his
owner/father Thomas Auld, who had rented him to Covey, asking
permission to leave Covey's employ. Refused in this request, Douglass
resists the slave-breaker's physical assault on his return: "at this
moment—from whence came the spirit I don't know—I resolved to
fight" (50). The autobiography of a slave here represents a claim to
"respect" where according to law, custom, and the ideology of honor
there should be no claim. Writing on the subject ofthe sexual coercion
of slave women, for instance, Genovese reports that "many black men
proved willing to die in defense of their women" (423). Wyatt-Brown
observes similarly that "Male honor was richly prized in the slave
quarters, and defense of it established rank among fellow slaves" ("Mask"
43). In theory, slavery denies the slave every tenet of humanity, but
historians paint a more complex picture of the reality of slave life. For
any oppressed person, the breaking point at which resistance arises, even
in the likelihood of death, bears a relation to the boundary dimension of
"respect" that establishes an array of acts and conditions which are not
to be tolerated no matter the risk. Of the African tribes from which
African American slaves were bought or kidnapped, some like the
Dahomey were warrior cultures with conceptions of honor as ancient
and highly evolved as any to be found in Ulster or Prussia. So we must
allow that the form of "respect" underwriting masculine relations in the
antebellum South—and the ground for representational reality in this
pivotal scene in the Narrative—was the product of no one group or
culture but a process of exchange in a set of social conditions; these
conditions included the "honor" of the slaveholder, the constant
presence of human beings in legal bondage who lacked liberty, and the
slave struggle for respect and dignity as it sought to gain traction amid
a daily negotiation of intimidation, compulsion, and violence.
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Vince Brewton
The fight between slave-breaker and the slave to be broken lasts two
hours, a duration McFeely believes to be hyperbole intended to reinforce
Covey's humiliation, and the length of the fight certainly adds an epic
dimension to this life-changing conflict in the life of the slave Douglass
(47). In the end, both are exhausted, but Douglass has clearly overcome:
"This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a
slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived
within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed
self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free"
(50).
Freedom and manhood meaningfully intersect in this passage, as they
do in what Douglass tells us of his thought processes after the fight: "My
long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its
place.... 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"
(50-51). Speaking of this particular passage in the Narrative., Richard
Yarborough asserts that "the term manhood comes to stand for the
crucial spiritual commodity that one must maintain in the face of
oppression in order to avoid losing a sense of self-worth" (160).
Yarborough's assessment clearly requires some modification in that
within the symbolic structure of this work, Douglass reacquires his
"manhood" not to endure slavery but precisely in order that he might
resist his captors and ultimately escape to freedom. To repeat Douglass's
own words: "It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and
revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed
self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free"
(50). It is no disservice to Douglass to consider that his reflections are
rhetorical and a part of the Narratives literary function for the "free"
Douglass in establishing his new identity. Douglass may well have fully
appropriated this model of identity, this new "respect" complete with
"bold defiance" only after his escape to freedom. That the text may resist
a single interpretation on this point, that both factual particulars of the
fight and private resolves thereafter are unknown, should give us no
serious concern if we stress the self-creative dimension to Douglass's
Narrative. This passage, in short, like the famous apostrophe to the ships
in the Chesapeake, which has been characterized by Bland as
"allegorized, figurative fiction," might be better understood as effect
rather than cause, as a "free" man's response to the violation of slavery.
"Bold defiance took its place "
713
One thing is certain: as his contemporaries observed, the "free" Douglass
brooked no further disrespect in his life, and he endows the persona of
the Narrative v^\t\i an intolerance of disrespect that is hardly compatible
with physical survival in slave culture but serves instead as the key to an
archetypal wakening that opens the door to his deliverance.
The persona of the Narrative of 1845 demonstrates the cultural
transfer between the "touchiness" of the slave owner and the slave's
diminished but very real capacity for "respect." Patterson usefully
highlights one aspect of this transfer when he contradicts the premise of
Samuel Johnson's famous remark about American slavery: "How is it that
we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"
(454). Patterson counters, "[Tjhose who most dishonor and constrain
others are in the best position to appreciate what joy it is to possess what
they deny" (94). As a prototype of the existential hero, Douglass's
persona "comes to himself' as a result of the fight, acquiring an infiected
meaning of liberty from those who would deny it and from those who
helped establish its connotation. "Slaves," as Patterson asserts, "were
always persons who had been dishonored in a generalized way," and in
the Narrative Douglass claims to put an end to the generalized
dishonoring he had suffered by grounding a new identity in the sanctity
of his person (10).
The transformation from slave to the equivalent of "free"—i.e. worthy
of "respect"—is an astonishing feat in antebellum Maryland, and
Douglass registers his wonder that he was not simply taken to the
constable after his rebellion and whipped. He writes: "[T]he only
explanation I can now think of does not entirely satisfy me," and goes on
to suggest that Covey feared the loss of his reputation as a slave-breaker
and thus did not seek outside help (51). By offering no satisfactory
explanation for his lack of punishment, Douglass implicitly opens a door
for a providential interpretation of his fight with Covey. Here as
elsewhere in the Narrative Douglass expresses the idea that "divine
Providence" has intervened in his personal history and aided in his
ultimate deliverance. Nancy Clasby defines this feature of autobiography
in general and Douglass's in particular as "the puer hero's completion of
the passage from anonymity to singularity to universal significance"
(354). On the subject of being sent to Baltimore, for example, Douglass
speculates:
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I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a
special interposition of divine Providence in my favor..., From my earliest
recollections, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not
always be able to hold me within its foul embrace. (28)
The persona of the Narrative has a destiny, not merely to win his own
freedom but to champion the cause of the oppressed through the literary
recreation of his life. It is no modest claim that Providence has taken a
special interest in his affairs, but the idea runs throughout the work and
permeates his interpretation of the symbolic contest with Covey. The
reader complicit in Douglass's design comes to see the subject of the
Narrativeas emboldened, strengthened, and spared the consequences of
his radical insubordination by a Providence that has ordained him for
the higher cause of abolition. Thus, Douglass inscribes the persona of the
Narrative •within the great providential tradition of American literature
that begins with the Puritan accounts of Winthrop and Rowlandson and
continues into the twentieth century with characters like Faulkner's
Isaac McCaslin, who, justifying his desire to relinquish his inheritance,
makes the extraordinary claim that all human history has been a
preparation for his gesture (246-48). Providential self-representations are
frequently variations on a theme of good versus evil, and American
history has framed the conflict of good and evil in terms of long familiar
oppositions: settlement versus wilderness, Puritan versus Indian, faith
against unbelief. North against South, mm and temperance, native and
immigrant, freedom opposed to slavery. The Narrative pivots on the
struggle between slave-breaker and slave that allows Douglass to adopt
a heroic character in the "the dark night of slavery" and likewise invoke
a heroic discourse suitable to titanic struggles in this tradition. Although
the Narrauvevalidates an identity dynamic substantially indebted to the
social relations of slavery, what it loses in discursive coherence with the
ideology of abolition it recovers in rhetorical power by invoking the
imagery of good versus evil.
The contemporary culture of "respect" that spans white, Hispanic,
Asian as well as African American communities has undoubtedly
emerged from a confluence of distinct historical discourses, including
antecedents in the African American traditions of call and response and
"the dozens." Nevertheless, the evidence suggesting a dialectical origin
involving the psychology of the slaveholder and the object of slave
domination—the living, breathing, recalcitrant humanity of the
"Bold defiance took its place "
715
slave—reinforces a useful lesson about influence. At a time when the
culture of "respect" continues to register with many commentators as a
somehow anomalous disturbance in normative social relations, tracing
"respect" back to its intersection with the fine old propriety (and amour
propre) ofthe "master" reminds us of our common culture as Americans
and exemphfies what Stephen Greenblatt has called "metissage," the
mixing and cross-influences in shifting communities of race, class, and
culture (61). Going beyond the appropriation of "empowering myths and
models ofthe self," Douglass goes on record by appropriating himself in
an act of justifiable self-ownership and similarly takes hold of a model
of identity premised on taking and giving offense. But there is a final
irony concerning the evolution of Douglass's literary persona. Writing
about Douglass's final installment of his life story. The Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass (1893), Houston Baker describes the emergent
persona of that later work as "a man determined to put readers at ease by
assuring them of his accomplishments (and the sterling company he
keeps) in language that is careful not to offend readers' various
sensibilities" (106). Giving offense, giving the lie to the legal institution
of slavery and its apologists, has given way to Victorian decorum. It
would be left to Ida B. Wells to give offense to the American realities of
race in the 1890s.
Works Cited
Andrews, William L., ed. Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass. Boston:
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