LITR 5731: Seminar in American Multicultural Literature
Sample Student Midterm, Fall 2007

Gary Pegoda

Saturday, September 29, 2007

The Moments:

Reactions to Freedom

Autobiographies such as those of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs; Toni Morrison’s visionary social commentary, Song of Solomon; and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” are direct reflections of a society struggling with slavery and racism and their aftermath. One uplifting facet of these reflections includes their widely varying reactions to freedom. I am going to examine each of their first statements upon becoming free. Assimilation, I will argue, leads to voice and freedom. I will provide evidence by examining the degree to which the writers or characters assimilated in reference to using their voices and choices.

Equiano’s, Douglass’s, and Jacobs’s statements in reference to achieving freedom from slavery come first, illustrating what freedom feels like, or what it means, to each of them. Accompanying biographical information explains that assimilation gives them voice and the nature of that voice. As Rosalyn Mack wrote in 2003 of Equiano, “He used his natural skills and hard work to make his name known and earn his freedom, then he used it to fight for the abolition of slavery in Britain by writing his life’s history.”

Equiano is born free in Nigeria in 1745, but as a child, suffers kidnapping by other peoples in Africa, and is traded onto a slave ship in 1756. After ten years of transfer from master to master, he acquires sufficient money to buy his freedom in 1766. After his last master agrees to this transaction Equiano says, “These words of my master were like a voice from heaven to me, and I most reverently bowed myself with gratitude, unable to express my feelings, but by the overflowing of my eyes, and a heart replete with thanks to God.” One notes the tremendous assimilation in Equiano’s words, which suggests how he achieves voice and even his freedom. He speaks excellent English, with very good grammar. He uses a simile: “like a voice from heaven.” He demonstrates familiarity with his captor’s religion as he says, “with thanks to God,” and mentions heaven. Also showing assimilated behaviors, he bows. He does not cry, but shows “an overflowing of my eyes.”

Refusing the request for freedom justly earned by one so completely acculturated as to greatly resemble one’s self, would be far more difficult than turning down the request of a person still resembling his native people. As a result, assimilation for Equiano leads to voice, leading to freedom. Equiano speaks better English than most Englishmen, and believes in their religion more sincerely than most of them. He is a living mirror of the dominant culture and stings their consciences by his perfection in their own culture.

Why does Equiano assimilate so well? As a child, Equiano endures sale into slavery by fellow African peoples and suffers hardships beyond imagining in the Middle Passage, a nightmare voyage during which many died from killing, filthy shipboard conditions dictated by the economics of optimal slavery profit. Equiano barely survives, at nine years of age, and encounters friendlier people who offer him assimilation. Given his life story, it seems perfectly natural that he accepts wholeheartedly their religion, language, and custom. His mental slate, wiped clean by terror and force, has a new identity. Freedom is simply living without fear and having autonomy. Yet by accepting assimilation, Equiano’s request to be free is granted and he is able to write The Life of Olaudah Equiano, with a strong abolitionist voice against slavery.

Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in 1818, is beaten often and severely, until one day he fights back with such strength that no one ever beats him so harshly again. Finally, partly due to the conviction his strength gives him, he escapes North for freedom. Douglass, when asked about his feelings on gaining freedom says, “It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced. I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate.”

As with Equiano, assimilation evidences itself in Douglass’s every word. His statement comes wrapped in near Homeric simile. The subject, his freedom, is almost diminished by the elaborate comparison he makes. Douglass absorbs not only a language, but also a gentleman’s nonchalant manners. Doubtless, as with Equiano, Douglass’s hardships made assimilation necessary, but parallels between the two stop at this level. As will be seen, Douglass gains his greatest voice and freedom by resisting assimilation into the culture around him and escaping, risking life itself.

Douglass witnesses brutality often, and he suffers severe beatings while under slavery. Having been forced to overwork, and with too little food, he almost dies. He occasionally encounters friendlier people who offer assimilation. He accepts this gift with apparent wholeheartedness, but not so fully as Equiano. Douglass is neither so isolated from other persons under slavery as Equiano, nor in a somewhat friendly dominant society, but he has a deeply hidden culture among others captive to slavery.

In the sense of having a cultural support group, Douglass is born straddling two worlds: freedom and slavery. He is born into his captors’ language, yet into his fellow captives’ society within slavery. Therein are strong variations on, and rejections of, his captors’ language, religion, and culture. With that support, he never completely loses himself, never loses his human dignity. Rather than surrender his dignity, if not his life, in the crucible of Mr. Covey’s barn in 1834, Douglass stands and resists. When slavery for life seems ineluctably enclosing him, he offers the ultimate resistance and escapes to New York for freedom in 1838.

Refusing assimilation into the voiceless, choiceless slave culture of the South, Douglass earns Douglass the right to escape North, to develop his own voice in assimilating that culture. In other words, he gains his voice by assimilating enough to express himself in the northern culture’s language, but he is able to use that voice as he did not allow himself to be assimilated into the culture of brutality.

Equiano (freedom in 1766) and Douglass (freedom in 1838) are born into different worlds with regard to slavery. Each endures a different kind of unnamable horror. Equiano suffers permanent kidnapping as a child, loss of every shred of identity, and the Middle Passage, but writes against slavery from the viewpoint of one who has a successful life. Douglass, living in the nineteenth century in the United States as slavery nears its final brutalities, endures far worse physical punishment, but emerges stronger with a powerful voice for freedom, in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845. 

Jacobs is born into slavery in 1813, and as an adult hides for seven years (1835-41) in a tiny attic. Actively hunted, but never captured, she finally escapes North (1842), but eventually has her freedom purchased (1852). Jacobs’s feelings on finding she is free are stated, “My brain reeled as I read these lines.” She reads, “money for your freedom has been paid to Mr. Dodge.” She responds, “Those words struck me like a blow. So I was sold at last! A human being is sold in the free City of New York!”

Jacobs’s statements regarding her freedom in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861),  are very different than Equiano’s when he buys his own freedom, or Douglass’s after he escapes to freedom. Rather than deep gratitude, rather than gentlemanly simile, Jacobs demonstrates resentment that “free” New York, her person must be sold into freedom. Undeniably, her statements may simply be her personal responses, but given the timeframe of Incidents’s release in United States history, one must consider them as relevant, not only to the time of her having spoken them, but to the time of her publication.

Jacobs’s feelings reflect strong differences in these Equiano’s, Douglass’s and her times of freedom, and in the times of their publication. Equiano’s gratitude is possible before the polarization against slavery grows so strong. Douglass’s memoirs are written some fifteen years before the Civil War, when the polarization has begun--written and published to stir abolitionist sentiment, whereas Equiano’s are written in much calmer social seas, though also for freedom.

Jacobs publishes in 1861 after Lincoln’s Inauguration. The Civil War is practically inevitable, in this January of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as President of Confederacy, in heated passions building to this nation’s worst conflagration. Her story jets out like gasoline thrown on fire. She describes burning shames epitomizing those incendiary evils for which men of the inflamed North would soon walk into fire. She writes in a time of fratricidal righteous indignation when it seems the nation has promised a freedom and equality in the Declaration of Independence, which cannot be delivered. Jacobs’s resentment on the eve of her freedom seem peculiar, only until one sees the world into which she writes and reflects. Jacobs’s Southern resistance and Northern assimilation is in a world bursting into flame, and her voice mirrors and magnifies that fire.

In conceptualization of universal freedom, King’s words differ from those more individual, yet still unselfish responses of Equiano, Douglass, and Jacobs. King’s life, as theirs, lay in the balance, but his life is not characterized by those systematic beatings and horrors which those three endure. King’s is born (1929) into an era which although post-slavery does not yet witness full freedom and equality. He assimilates the language not only well enough for personal eloquence, but well enough to use the dominant culture’s own words against it. Therefore, like Douglass, King assimilates the language while keeping to his roots; his sense of community and self. However, unlike Douglass, in tragic irony, long after the war and long after slavery’s reign ends, King dies expressing his views.

King’s famed “I Have a Dream” expresses feelings about freedom, as do Equiano, Douglass, and Jacobs, though in a much more general way as befitting one speaking for many in a time when one not subject to slavery could rise to speak publically for a large number of people:

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

One hears words of faith Equiano could have spoken, but with Douglass’s fighting dignity added, Jacobs’s righteous indignation amplified, and new sensations of possibility and group power. One hears a leader of a people, a voice that dares assimilate sincerely those deepest beliefs of a culture on behalf of all people for whom true application of those beliefs would bring equality and freedom. His martyrdom will someday help bring his words true. Perfect assimilation combined in faith with unarmed resistance, constitute a monumental challenge to a culture’s conscience that cannot go unanswered in justice, if that culture is to survive.

In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Macon Dead III is born free in 1935, in Michigan. He comes from a well-to-do family, but is a person in “slavery” to nothingness. He is not beaten, imprisoned, kidnapped, traded, or separated from his family physically. He can go on down any road with five hundred dollars in his pocket, without permission from anybody. His illusions of material freedom are so strong that he is miserable, unconnected, unloved, and unloving--living a life just barely worth the time.

Milkman (also known as Macon Dead III) has neither Douglass’s dignity, nor Jacobs’s endurance. He has neither Equiano’s optimistic heart, nor King’s sense of purpose and mission. He has neither reference from which to feel free, nor meaningful goals for which to strive during most of his life. He lives in the ghostly chains of slavery slung over him from the dead past, impalpable, hardest to break for the living, hardest to explain to the living. What he has assimilated is useless and there is nothing for him to resist. He is weak.

Milkman finally finds his epiphany, a sense of connectedness, something worth assimilating, in discovering his roots. He reaches back beyond his miserable family to a nobler past, ironically, to his grandfather’s life. That man had resisted and survived free, at least for a while. Nevertheless, Milkman’s first expression of his great joy in finding a worthy identity seems so childish in comparison to those others quoted here, but for him it is step one.

Returning from the Byrd residence, Milkman has heard his grandfather was a mythic figure who returned to Africa by flying. As it soaks into his consciousness that the people in this little town are his kin and living in a great story in which he can also live, he speaks, “Let’s go swimming! I feel so dirty and I want to get in the waaaaaater!” How can one explain this so that any vestige of greatness comparable to Douglass’s or King’s comes to rest on Macon Dead III or Milkman? Can the MLK in Milkman ever stand for Martin Luther King, in this seemingly useless, spoiled young man?

Dead’s words stand at a huge remove, obviously, from those great remarks of the others quoted. Difficult is the consideration of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in this line of heroic figures. Her characters are still regarded as parts of a minority, but an analysis of Milkman’s words in her psychological fiction is not appropriate to follow the stories of Equiano, Douglass, or Jacobs. Neither does Milkman’s quote at finding some connection to a meaningful life seem worthy to even near the grandeur of King’s rhetoric, not in the same breath.

Morrison did not receive the Nobel Prize without cause. Song of Solomon is far too deep and complex to leave Milkman’s quote as his last words, for they are not. Milkman is still ecstatic at finding assimilation into a richer cultural heritage than he had before. He returns with Pilate to the hilltop where she is to bury the bones of her father, the freed one, near a cave like Jacobs’s attic. Mr. Covey is not there, but Guitar is, with his gun. He is ready to put Milkman to the death Douglass and Jacobs escape. Guitar misfires and shoots Pilate to death, just as King is shot to death. Milkman, freshly free, finally with a sense of self from heroic figures long past, witnesses this murder from this new place in his life where dignity and freedom are precious. So spiritually armed, he leaps into space toward the shooter, from Morrison’s last paragraph, into eternity’s enigmatic embrace. He offers himself, if so it need be, for love of his aunt who dies as King does for freedom and for dignity, against fear with his newfound spiritual courage.

Milkman makes the grade in that moment, earns the MLK in his name--his words on finding purpose and freedom go hand in hand are not much, but his actions finally speak. They are as loud as words, written ones anyway. Perhaps that is the best fictional characters can do.

Equiano, Douglas, Jacobs, King, and Milkman represent the best of humanity in the endless struggles of personkind, each achieving freedom, whether in life or death, escaping, or rushing to meet the enemy. They all assimilate and resist enough to grow into voices for others, each in a way shaped by their times, each in a universal way shaped by the human spirit. They each resist, assimilate, and gain voices and choices similarly, across centuries. Yet, most importantly, they assimilate and earn voices and choices up to the point of losing personal dignity and freedom, for it is there that heroes and heroines stop.