Martha Hodes (MH): In describing Frederick Douglass, you have used the word “hero.” Heroes and geniuses are complex people. Your new biography intertwines Douglass’s public and intellectual life with his personal and domestic life. It’s also partly an emotional biography, exploring traumas of childhood, enslavement, abandonment, troubled marriage and family life, and struggles with money. You write in the book about Douglass’s loneliness and need for affirmation and love, about his infidelities, his despair combined with faith, his outrage and embittered sensibility combined with optimism and forgiveness. In such a complete and beautiful portrait, you also make clear the silences in the archives. How did you do that as a biographer, a scholar, a writer?
David Blight (DB): Douglass is going to be a hero whether we say he is or not, because of the Narrative and the way it’s taught. He’s always going to be the slave who stole his own freedom, mastered the master’s language, and wrote better about it than anyone alive.
With Douglass, I’ve come to believe you have to begin with the fact that he’s an orphan, a true orphan. He knew his mother, but barely. He had to invent an image of his mother to have some idea of what she looked like. He never saw her after age six. He never did know who his father was, although he knew he was probably one of his masters, one of his owners. He knew his father was white, but he didn’t know who he was.
So he’s an orphan. And that can mean many, many things. But he’s an orphan in slavery, and he’s an orphan in slavery who experiences just about every kind of trauma slavery could throw at a child, and then a teenager and then a young adult. He’s both a brutalized field hand on the Eastern Shore and an urban slave in Baltimore, where he learns a great number of skills.
Now, you mention silences. One of the biggest problems any biographer faces with Douglass is the autobiographies. He wrote 1,200 pages of autobiography—he’s one of the greatest autobiographers of American history, especially the 19th century. He wrote the greatest slave narrative.
MH: In a way, that seems like the ideal source.
DB: Oh, no. No. They are deeply problematic.
MH: Exactly.
DB: They’re great sources. We have to use them. He reveals a lot in there, but he also leaves a great number of things unsaid. He almost never mentions his children in the autobiographies, for instance. There is one—count it, one—mention of Anna Murray Douglass, his wife of 44 years. He just does not discuss the domestic side of his life in the autobiographies. Now, that’s not terribly surprising. A 19th-century memoir was not a tell-all. And what Douglass is doing in his autobiographies is telling the story of one hero, himself.
MH: He’s crafting the story of his life.
DB: He’s crafting a character, and the main character is him. And nobody gets into that circle around the character unless it serves the ascendance of the character. Now, one can say all of that, and it can sound kind of negative and critical. On the other hand, it’s understandable.