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>> 95 3 A Tale of Hunger Retold Ravishment and Hunger in F. Douglass’s Life and Writing Frederick Douglass described slavery, more eloquently than anyone else has, as a cannibalistic institution. In images striking and poetically resonant , he depicted slavery in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave as a personified “stern reality, glaring frightfully upon us,—its robes already crimsoned with the blood of millions, and even now feasting itself greedily upon our own flesh.”1 Slave traders he thought of as “human flesh-mongers.”2 In the context Douglass described, slave owners cultivated consumption, hunger, and starvation at all levels of social interaction. If it was not Aunt Katy, the cook on one plantation, who was literally starving Douglass, then it was a master punishing a hungry slave for stealing molasses by making him drink gallons of it until he sickened, engorged on the sweetness. Such examples proliferate in all of Douglass’s works, including Narrative (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). To my knowledge, little scholarly analysis exists of the culture of consumption depicted in Douglass ’s narratives. This is striking, considering that in Douglass’s narratives and in the slave narratives I discussed in previous chapters, such references abound—not to mention those slaves who were literally consumed and the catalogue of flesh-cooking, consumption rituals, and habitual flesh-taking that formed a part of the larger archive of consumption. Building on the findings of earlier chapters, I want to move beyond acknowledging and arguing for cannibalism as a social reality for the 96 > 97 that highlights “the horrors of cannibalism, dismemberment, and execution .” In his cursory treatment of cannibalism in Douglass’s Narrative , Van Leer describes such occurrences as “imaginative” acts and as part of a “fictionalizing moment” in Douglass’s text.3 Importantly, rather than treating Douglass’s claims as real, Van Leer metaphorizes and fictionalizes the race leader’s observations. Van Leer analyzes textual and literary conventions such as the Gothic and sentimental traditions informing Douglass’s style and choice of images. The deeper presumption underlying Van Leer’s observations and I believe fueling the inattention to this topic in Douglass’s writing is the notion that cannibalism has nothing to do with Enlightenment, with myths of American progress, and with nation-making in the nineteenth century. It is, to put it bluntly, inconceivable to most that cannibalism was an implicit aspect of slave culture and, more broadly, of American race/caste systems based in the sycophancy of slavery. Still, Douglass depicts the slave institution as cannibalistic and he gives us also a telling glimpse into the manner in which he internally resisted and wrestled with the reality of his social consumption. Describing the slave condition as one of consumption and self-consumption , Douglass describes slavery in the Narrative as a condition of “starvation, causing us to eat our own flesh.”4 In The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, he describes himself as enmeshed in webs of “soul devouring thought” that reinforce the fact that he is a slave.5 Douglass parallels the material reality of cannibalism with interlocking ideologies of cannibalism that allow the master to consume the slave in body as well as in spirit and thought. Douglass’s observations affirm Carl O. Williams’s understanding of slavery as a highly stylized, institutionalized form of cannibalism. Williams describes thralldom (slavery) as a degree of cannibalism, wherein the master is a human parasite who, by the right of might, has secured his fellow man in the bonds of thralldom in order to feed upon him for the satisfaction of his appetite.6 Further elaborating on the erotics of this libidinal hunger, Orlando Patterson notes that “what the slave mainly fed was the master’s sense of honor and his sexual appetite, for the economic role of the slave was quite marginal among most of the continental Germanic tribes.”7 Germanic slavery, differing from U.S. chattel slavery, was less economically driven and more of a domestic variety, which served to highlight the 98 > 99 tasting, and ingesting allude to the social consumption of the black female caregiver. Issues of sexual access, physical exposure, and rape also informed Douglass’s presentation, but he deflected “audience attention from the ‘feminine’ exposure of his body (taking off his shirt to reveal his scars)” by drawing their attention to “the ‘masculine’ display of his face,” voice, and intellectual prowess.14 Navigating...

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