The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine (review)

From Joseph Hanno, a “Miserable African Just Going to Be Executed” in 1721 (Mather), through the first-person poetry of Phillis Wheatley, all the way up to Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995), life writing has been integral to the African American literary tradition and to American culture more broadly. From the colonial period onward, narrated Black lives have mattered tremendously to American audiences. In early America, first-person Black subjects often stood as cautionary or inspiring exempla in narratives that joined the overlapping traditions of spiritual autobiography, criminal confession, and the picaresque. As the late Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., observed, these often ventriloquized accounts asserted “black authority . . . an authoritative literary persona and a distinctive black perspective” that may or may not have been inscribed by a Black “hand” or, indeed, uttered by an African American tongue (xi, 32).

Authenticity became a paramount concern with the rise of the abolitionist slave narrative. In 1789, Olaudah Equiano offered his “genuine Narrative” to Parliament in an effort “to excite . . . a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave Trade has entailed upon my unfortunate countrymen” (7). But it would only be a few years before Equiano was modifying successive editions of his Interesting Narrative (he published nine in his lifetime) to address charges of literary fraud. Instead of being “kidnapped in Africa,” the London Oracle insisted in 1792, Equiano “never was upon that Continent, but born and bred up in the Danish Island of Santa Cruz, in the West Indies” (237n2). Rejecting such attempts “to discredit and prevent the sale of my Narrative,” Equiano inserted increasingly elaborate prefatory materials to confirm that, in the words of one reprinted review, “The Narrative wears an honest face” (5, 13).

Nearly fifty years later, similar charges of inauthenticity would stymie the first narrative published by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), the Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (1838). In the 1840s and 1850s, firsthand accounts of slavery would become a formidable form of abolitionist propaganda, but Williams’s Narrative proved a public relations disaster for the nascent movement. Soon after publication, the Alabama Beacon newspaper printed irrefutable proof that Williams (or his amanuensis and editor, Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier) had fabricated the names of key people and places in his story. With Williams himself out of reach, the AASS formally withdrew the Narrative—although, with as many as forty-six thousand copies printed, it continued to circulate (Goddu 157–58). It was not until 1845, with the unimpeachable Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, that the AASS would again sponsor a slave narrative (Goddu 159).

As generations of readers have come to learn, the Narrative is a study in performative facticity from its opening sentence: “I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland,” the man born as Frederick Bailey announces with GPS-like precision, before calling attention to his lack of information regarding that birth (1). “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it,” he continues (1). This was a precarious foundation upon which to construct a textual life: his paternity was a matter of rumor, and his mother and siblings survived primarily as dim, flitting memories. Yet the self-styled Frederick Douglass went on to write two more lengthy autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Not only did each narrative revise and expand its predecessor(s), but two of Douglass’s three personal narratives were subject to revision and republication. Moreover, as Robert S. Levine reminds us in his intrepid inquiry into The Lives of Frederick Douglass, Douglass’s relentlessly autobiographical oratory further complicated the seemingly endless process of fashioning, reassessing, revising, and re-presenting his textualized self. Nor, Levine insists, should we leave out Douglass...