FRED ERI C K DO U G LAS S, the great nineteenth-century writer and orator, was widely advertised during his lifetime as" the representative colored man of the United States." It was a designation that Douglass liked; indeed, he seems to have encouraged its use. What a curious manner by which to be known, or by which to be recalled: the representative colored man of these United States. But in what sense could Frederick Douglass be" representative"? In the sense of mode, or mean, or median? Certainly not Frederick Douglass, a man of parts and learning, author of three masterful autobiographies, and hundreds of speeches and essays. No, Douglass could not be mistaken for the mean, the mode, or the median of the Afro-American community of the nineteenth century. Clearly another sense of representation obtains here, a sense that we tend to forget. Douglass was the representative colored man in the United States because he was the most presentable. And he was most presentable because of the presence he had established as a master of voice. When Douglass spoke, when Douglass wrote, he did so" for" the Negro, in a relation of part for whole. He spoke to recreate the face of the race, its public face. Douglass, then, was the most representative colored man both because he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race's great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion. Black Americans sought to re-present their public selves in order to reconstruct their public, reproducible images. It is this sense of (re) presentation as reconstruction which is my topic in this essay. The word reconstruction and the concepts that it connotes are so familiar to