Frederick Douglass's Haven-Finding Art

BARRY MAXWELL Frederick Douglass's Haven-Finding Art "Where do you suppose new Jerusalem is, Uncle Tom?" said Eva. "O, up in the clouds, Miss Eva." —Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life among the Lowly I walked for seven days before I found a place with a preacher's family. A nice place except they made me wear shoes. They sent me to school, though. A one-room place, where everybody sat. I was twelve, but since this was my first school I had to sit over there with the little bitty children . I didn't mind it too much; matter of fact, I liked a lot of it. I loved the geography part. Learning about that made me want to read. And the teacher was tickled at how much I liked geography. She let me have the book and I took it home with me to look at. But then the preacher started pattin on me. I was so dumb I didn't know enough to stop him. But his wife caught him at it, thumbin my breasts, and put me out. I took my geography book off with me. —Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon We had heard ofCanada, the real Canaan ofAmerican bondmen, simply as a country to which the wild goose and the swan repaired at the end of winter, to escape the heat of the summer, but not as the home of man. I knew something of theology, but nothing of geography. —Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom s a way into the issues of verbal art and ideological significa- . tion raised by M31 Bondage and M51 Freedom, the second ofFrederick Douglass's three versions of his autobiography, I would like to note a Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 4, Winter 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 16 10 48Barry Maxwell quick movement and an extended one in a slave narrative quite different from Douglass's in some crucial aspects. The Narrative ofHenry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Shvery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide was, as the title page tell us, "Written From a Statement of Facts Made by Him-self. With Remarks Upon the Remedy for Slavery. By Charles Stearns." Published in 1849, it is one among the many recitations by what John Hope Franklin has called "quasi-free Negroes" of life in and escape from bondage. Brown's first real predicament in his escape comes when, having been through an express office (the Adams Express Company) and a railroad baggage car, he rests in his box in agony, head downwards, on the deck of a steamship. Two passengers in need of a place to sit turn Brown's box on its side, thus unwittingly sparing him an exploded head. "One of these men inquired of the other, what he supposed that box contained, to which his comrade replied, that he guessed it was the mail. 'Yes,' thought I, 'it is a male, indeed, although not the t?a?? of the United States'" (61). Clearly, this is a moment of conscious punning, a light moment devised and sanctioned by either Brown or his white amanuensis, or both. There is, however, an ongoing three-way pun in Box Brown's Narrative that seems perceived only partially by the tellers of the tale. The key words are "deliver" and its derived forms. A pious reception of the narrative would limit the understanding of "delivery" to mean that which the Lord enacts as part of his divine plan, whether historically (Daniel delivered out of the lions' den, the Israelites delivered out of bondage in Egypt) or eschatologically (the children of Adam delivered out of the bonds of sin) . Box Brown's story, though, works against a single meaning for the cluster of words by "degrading" the terms, in Mikhail Bakhtin's sense of lowering and materializing them (1-58, 367 ff.). The second sense operating in the story is "delivery" as birth, a trope that makes a womb of the box, and a successfully delivered baby of Box. This sense needn't clash with a thoroughly elevated religious sense— it could work in more or...