The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845) for Pre- AP Humanities and AP III

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1 Highland Park High School English Department Text Rationale for The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845) for Pre- AP Humanities and AP III Rationale (including age/ability appropriateness and how text fits into the course s philosophy and enduring understanding): Receiving careful study alongside other major historical works on The Core Curriculum list for The University of Dallas, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass already proves itself to be a work of not only national but human importance. Simply, it is one of the most powerful and important pieces of extended rhetoric, American or otherwise. Lexically, the text is rather easy upon a superficial reading; however, knowing the rhetorical crafts of argument, schemes (syntax structure), and tropes (figurative devices) offers a much richer reading that proves Douglass as a master of rhetoric, language, grammar, and style. It would be appropriate lexically for virtually any high school course, but the themes, moments of violence, and culturally accurate dialogue may make this best suited for a Pre- AP or AP course. Pre- AP and AP students alike would benefit from closely studying the organizational and syntactical craft, and Douglass s conveyed personal experience is good for any high school student. Specifically for the Pre- AP Humanities and AP English III courses, The Narrative, again, offers teachers and students multiple opportunities to gain historical awareness, social experience, syntactical strength, and argumentative prowess. In the short text, Douglass uses no unnecessary words to make his rhetoric as authentic and meaningful as possible. In Humanities, the book certainly allows for study of cultural experience and argument; in AP III, the biography gives juniors ample time to study syntax, modes of organization, and historical data. The work fits into both curriculums as a master- text that provides lexical appropriateness and analytical sophistication. Even more specifically, The Narrative falls within AP English III s focus on issues of not only international importance but ongoing oppression and controversy. Summary: The following summary is from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ( Like many slave narratives, Douglass' Narrative is prefaced with endorsements by white abolitionists. In his preface, William Lloyd Garrison pledges that Douglass's Narrative is "essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated" (p. viii). Likewise, Wendell Phillips pledges "the most entire confidence in [Douglass'] truth, candor, and sincerity" (p. xiv). Though Douglass counted Garrison and Phillips as friends, scholars such as Beth A. McCoy have argued that their letters serve as subtle reminders of white power over the black author and his text. Indeed, in all of his subsequent autobiographies, Douglass replaced Garrison and Phillips' endorsements with introductions by prominent black abolitionists and legal scholars. Douglass begins his Narrative with what he knows about his birth in Tuckahoe, Maryland or more precisely, what he does not know. "I have no accurate knowledge of my age," Douglass states; nor can he positively identify his father (p. 1). Douglass notes that it was "whispered that my master was my father... [but] the means of knowing was withheld from me" (p. 2). He recalls that he was

2 separated from his mother "before I knew her as my mother," and that he saw her only "four or five times in my life" (p. 2). This separation of mothers from children, and lack of knowledge about age and paternity, Douglass explains, was common among slaves: "it is the wish of most masters... to keep their slaves thus ignorant" (p. 1). As a child on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, Douglass witnesses brutal whippings of various slaves male and female, old and young. But for the most part, he describes his childhood as a typical or representative story, rather than a unique or individual narrative. "[M]y own treatment... was very similar to that of the other slave children," he writes (p. 26). The early chapters of his Narrative emphasize the status of slaves and the nature of slavery over his individual experience. "I had no bed," he writes. "[I would] sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in [a sack for carrying corn] and feet out" (p. 27). This description explicitly links Douglass' experience back to that of the other slaves: "old and young, male and female, married and single, drop down side by side, on one common bed, the cold, damp floor, each covering himself or herself with their miserable blankets" (p ). At age seven, Douglass is sent to work for Hugh Auld, a ship carpenter in Baltimore. "A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation," he remarks, and the progression of Douglass' Narrative illustrates his increased liberty in the city (p. 34). The young Douglass' growing sense of freedom is due in part to his new master's wife, Sophia Auld, who "very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C" (p. 33). However, Hugh soon puts a stop to these reading lessons, warning his wife that learning to read "would forever unfit him to be a slave" (p. 33). Douglass takes this lesson to heart, noting that this incident "only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn" (p. 34). Over the next seven years, Douglass recalls, "I succeeded in learning to read and write... [through] various stratagems," including offering bread to hungry white children in exchange for reading lessons. At age fifteen, Douglass is sent back to Colonel Lloyd's plantation to work for Hugh's brother, Thomas Auld, a ship captain. Here he is once again "made to feel the painful gnawings of hunger," and he begins to resist the tyranny of slavery more forcefully (p.56). A few months later, Auld hires Douglass out to Edward Covey, a Methodist with a reputation for "breaking" recalcitrant slaves (p. 57). After a difficult year in which he is beaten, runs away, is recaptured, and finally battles Covey in a lengthy fistfight, Douglass is hired out to another landowner, William Freeland, to work as a field hand. Surviving his servitude under Mr. Covey seems to steel Douglass' desire for freedom, as his description of their fistfight reveals: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man" (p ). Douglass does not provide the full details of his escape in his 1845 Narrative, for he fears that this information will prove useful to slave owners seeking to thwart or recapture future runaways. (He later provides an explanation of his escape in both versions oflife and Times of Frederick Douglass.) However, in his first autobiography Douglass does reveal that he is able to plan his escape when Hugh Auld allows him to work for wages at a Baltimore shipyard. Upon reaching the North, Douglass describes his sensations as "a moment of the highest excitement I have ever experienced... I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions" (p. 107). By the end of his Narrative, Douglass has resettled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, changed his name (which, until this time, was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey), and married Anna Murray, a free black woman to whom he became engaged while still enslaved in Baltimore. In New Bedford,

3 he is introduced to the members of William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti- Slavery Society. Douglass ends his narrative with a beginning, as he recalls his first public address before an audience of abolitionists. "From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren," Douglass writes, leaving the future open for hopeful possibilities (p. 117). Benefit to Students: Douglass s nuanced and balanced approach to analyzing slavery in the context of his own harrowing personal experience indeed has sharp moments of violence punctuated throughout, but Douglass never moves into the realm of bathos to persuade his reader. Rather, Douglass reports early eighteenth- century slavery in a lucid fashion that gives focus to the beauty, terror, horror, and perseverance in a slave s life. His ingenious approach to learning reading and writing exemplifies to students of all abilities, ethnicities, and creeds the value and human worth in knowledge. His thoughtful articulation of his own Christian faith against the hypocrisy of slave- owners offers a multitude of opportunities to study personal bias, comparison, and narrative craft. His beauty of syntactical art guides students to not only careful analysis of sentence structure, but it also allows a teacher to help students use antithesis, chiasmus, antimetabole, epanelepsis, and anadiplosis in their own written responses. Simply, The Narrative is a masterwork of style, content, theme, and biography, offering teachers and students nearly endless learning opportunities. Brief description of proposed classroom activities generated by text: Analysis of rhetorical schemes including antithesis, chiasmus, antimetabole, epanelepsis, and anadiplosis Douglass employs before students implement the schemes in their own writing; historical knowledge; analysis of symbolism; study of organizational structure, both specific to passages and as a whole work; argumentative structure. List of the TEKS/STAAR/HPISD curricular objectives the proposed text supports: (2) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Theme and Genre. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about theme and genre in different cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to: (A) analyze the way in which the theme or meaning of a selection represents a view or comment on the human condition; (B) relate the characters and text structures of mythic, traditional, and classical literature to 20th and 21st century American novels, plays, or films; and (C) relate the main ideas found in a literary work to primary source documents from its historical and cultural setting. 6) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Literary Nonfiction. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the varied structural patterns and features of literary nonfiction and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze how rhetorical techniques (e.g., repetition, parallel structure, understatement,

4 overstatement) in literary essays, true life adventures, and historically important speeches influence the reader, evoke emotions, and create meaning. (7) Reading/Comprehension of Literary Text/Sensory Language. Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about how an author's sensory language creates imagery in literary text and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze the meaning of classical, mythological, and biblical allusions in words, phrases, passages, and literary works. (8) Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Culture and History. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about the author's purpose in cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze how the style, tone, and diction of a text advance the author's purpose and perspective or stance. (10) Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Persuasive Text. Students analyze, make inferences and draw conclusions about persuasive text and provide evidence from text to support their analysis. Students are expected to: (A) evaluate how the author's purpose and stated or perceived audience affect the tone of persuasive texts; and (B) analyze historical and contemporary political debates for such logical fallacies as non- sequiturs, circular logic, and hasty generalizations. Clarification of any potentially controversial segments* (issues related to language often deemed vulgar, nudity, sexuality, violence) and why the text remains a suitable choice, despite being potentially controversial *NOTE Any objectionable language or scenes should be highlighted in the text for Committee consideration and indicated by page number below: The entire autobiography does not present, obviously, a wholly positive view of white culture in the early and mid- nineteenth century. Part of Douglass s craft is to define the dehumanization that happens to both slave and slaveowner. o Douglass classifies and illustrates this in a variety of ways, including: The ending of chapter 1 contains a particularly harrowing account of Douglass witnessing his aunt receive a brutal beating from a slave- master. Chapter 2 focuses on the abhorrent treatment of slave- children (346). The n- word shows itself in multiplicity, and it would be tedious to go over its usage throughout the work; of course, Douglass uses the term (1) to maintain the historical and culture milieu of eighteenth century America and (2) to emphasize the dehumanizing efforts of slave- owners and racists at large. Chapter 4 discusses a particularly violent slave- owner and his practices. On a superficial and cursory reading, Douglass appears to endow heavy criticism on Christianity in chapters 9 and 10 particularly. However, this reading would fail to take Douglass s own Christian faith out of consideration with which he died to which he gives great detail (388, 395, 429, and 430 in particular).

5 Chapter 10 focuses on one slave- owner s efforts to make breeder[s] (387) out of particular slaves. Similar Works: Narrative of Soujourner Truth by Soujourner Truth; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs; Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup; The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois; Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin Submit this Text Rationale with an annotated copy of the text for Committee Consideration. The annotated text is Mr. Nelson s personal copy; all MLA citations relate to his copy.