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193 c h A P t E r f i v E The Story at the End of the Story African American Literature and the Civil War Apparent failure may hold in its rough shell the germs of a success that will blossom in time, and bear fruit throughout eternity.—frAncEs ELLEn wAtkins hArPEr, “the great Problem to be solved” When describing the conclusion of the Civil War in his last autobiography , and the apparent success of the cause, the “great labor of [his] life” with which he had been identified and that had provided him with a clearly defined public role, Frederick Douglass writes of his “strange and, perhaps, perverse” reaction, a “great and exceeding joy . . . slightly tinged with a feeling of sadness”: “I felt I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life; my school was broken up, my church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again. The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed. ‘Othello’s occupation was gone’” (Life and Times 811). No doubt, there was a certain cultural inevitability in Douglass’s identification with William Shakespeare’s Othello. Douglass’s marriage to a white woman, the story of which he presents briefly in the exhausted and defensive pages of the 1892 “Third Part” that supplemented the 1881 autobiography , could only have supported his self-assigned role as a U.S. Othello.1 Discussing this “shocking offence” to “popular prejudice,” Douglass deals briefly and bitterly with this time when “false friends of both colors were loading me with reproaches,” and during which President Grover Cleveland stood firm “in the face of all vulgar criticism” by paying Douglass “all the social consideration due to the office of Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia” (961).2 But although Othello remains a somewhat strange choice for his public role—certainly, Douglass does not want or mean to associate himself with the whole of Othello’s character or with t h e s t o r Y at t h e e n d o F t h e s t o r Y 194 his tragic end—Shakespeare’s tragedy still provides a sadly appropriate script for him to follow, speaking, as it does, of greatness that stands on tenuous cultural grounds. As Othello relies on war for his occupation, and the respect that he gains thereby, which would not otherwise be freely offered to a Moor in Shakespeare’s Venetian world, so Douglass relied on the war against slavery for his own occupation, from which he gained respect and a public role. If he had been criticized and accused, he also was able to respond as Othello responds to the accusations against him early in the play: “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul/Shall manifest me rightly” (I.ii: 31–32). The confidence in these lines extends from the sure correspondence of public and private identity, the secure union of ability, social position, and character.3 The second time Douglass’s role as Othello enters the narrative explicitly is in his account of his association with the Freedmen’s Bank, an association that cost him much in reputation—bringing upon his head, by his estimation, “an amount of abuse and detraction greater than any encountered in any other part of my life” (Life and Times 842). Here his identification with Othello is a strange mix of defensiveness and intriguing metaphorical transformations. William Andrews has argued that in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass appropriates the Prometheus metaphor to achieve a double identity by which he could alternately play devil and savior (To Tell a Free Story 231), and we might be justified in imagining an allusion to Prometheus in the same sentence from Life and Times in which Douglass quotes from Othello. Prometheus appears in the famous scene in Shakespeare’s play where Othello prepares to take Desdemona’s life and confronts the finality of his action: . . . but once put out thy light, Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy light relume. (5.2.10–13) Discussing his gradual realization that the Freedmen’s Bank was a lost cause even before he was recruited to serve as president, Douglass states that although the institutional edifice of the bank remained, “the life, which was the money, was gone, and I found that I had been placed there with...

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