"Eye-Witness to the Cruelty": Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

[O]ne of their number gave me, with his heavy boot, a powerful kick in the left eye. My eyeball seemed to have burst.—Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)

During the antebellum period, the enslaved African American body as the site of authorized violence became, for Northern audiences, a powerful emblem of the South. Some of the most vivid and enduring images of Southern violence appear in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative: Aunt Hester’s whipping by Colonel Lloyd, the slave Demby’s shooting by Mr. Gore, and Frederick Bailey’s own beating by white shipyard workers. Like the naked, scarred backs his fellow fugitives exposed to horrified, fascinated gatherings of white Northerners, Douglass’s Narrative marshals the visual power of the injured black body to convey the brutality of the South’s peculiar institution.

As my juxtaposition of epigraphs from Douglass’s Narrative and Emerson’s Nature indicates, however, the burst eyeball of the young Baltimore slave symbolizes more than the violence inherent in Southern slavery; it also represents the incompatibility of the transcendental or universal subjectivity figured by Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” and the embodied subjectivity of Douglass’s “American Slave.” Both Nature and Narrative of Frederick Douglass associate authorship with the visual, but Emerson’s “poetry of . . . insight” arises from transcendent poetic vision,¹ whereas Douglass’s authorial identity emerges from his status as an “eye-witness to the cruelty” of slavery.² If in Nature the organ of sight is inviolate to the point of oxymoronic incorporeality, in the Narrative it is as vulnerable as the rest of the slave’s brutalized body.³ For this reason, I suggest, Douglass, in a series of witnessing scenes, gradually shifts the metonym of authorship from the vulnerable, corporeal eyeball to the unassailable, immaterial voice, a shift that corresponds with the text’s overall progression from slavery to freedom and from South to North: Frederick Bailey, the brutalized Southern slave, is all eyes; Frederick Douglass, the liberated Northern abolitionist, is pure voice.

The implications of this shift from the visual to the verbal extend well beyond the Narrative to the racial politics of the antislavery movement. By locating his identity as eyewitness in the South, Douglass implicitly questions the appropriateness of abolitionist attempts to press him into that role—and the embodied subjectivity that attended it—in the North. We thus find Douglass, at the conclusion of the Narrative, vacating the role of slave witness at the precise moment of its fulfillment. When the fugitive rises to address the Nantucket antislavery meeting, he completes his transformation from slave to freeman: no longer forced to witness violence in the South, he is now free to testify against that violence in the North. At this very moment in the Narrative, however, Douglass abruptly steps out of the role of slave witness and into that of abolitionist advocate; in the process, he not only claims a role usually reserved for white antislavery activists but also seeks to exchange the embodied subjectivity of the slave for the universal subjectivity of the (white) freeman and thus to complete his escape from the South and the physical violence it represents.

Seeks to. For to represent the liberation of the self from the body—or, for that matter, the liberation of the African American author from the role of slave witness—is not necessarily to effect this liberation in the world beyond the literary text. If in the Narrative, as Houston Baker has suggested, Douglass “seems to have suppressed the fact that one cannot transcend existence in a universe where there is only existence,” his white abolitionist...