American History through American Lives

II: Rationale

Truth’s voice lends corroboration and counterpoint to Douglass’s witness.  One experience is not enough; Douglass and Truth’s lives “bang against and reveal”.² Douglass and Truth were both Christian practitioners, Douglass first by way of preaching’s performative possibilities and Truth by way of a vision of God everywhere.³ They were both formerly enslaved people who traveled widely, using public speaking to communicate their messages.  They both changed their names; Truth chose both of hers, perhaps to reflect the itinerant preaching lifestyle change she was making, and a fugitive Douglass’s last name was suggested after a character in the Sir Walter Scott poem, “The Lady of the Lake”, forecasting nicely his literary-ness.  He added that extra ‘s’ for distinction.⁴ Douglass was from Maryland, half white, was more political, actively seeking public office later in life, and he is remembered most for his autobiographies, the first of which is the most famous slave narrative of all time.  Truth entered the public sphere later in her life than Douglass, was from New York and illiterate, preferred to live communally (once in a cult), and is remembered mostly for things she didn’t actually say because Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frances Dana Gage, a radical feminist, imaginatively borrowed from the witty and powerful person she actually was.⁵ So whereas white women’s versions of Truth obscure her, Douglass’s own authorial voice and churning revisions to his own life often makes him inscrutable.⁶

These two leaders demand attention and have achieved the status of American icon.  In addition to the language they bequeathed us through a paper trail only attributable to historical foresight (FD) or by convoluted, appropriated pathways (ST), they curated their image obsessively, a side of their persuasive self-presentation also worth studying.  They both dressed in a middle class style.  Truth sold photographs of herself on trading card sized cartes-de-visite with the byline, “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”⁷  She was always worried about money, but she knew her worth.  Douglass, perhaps the most photographed person of the 19th century, stormily furrowed his brow, looking beyond the camera in the fashion of the day and looking ready to roar beneath his mane. He has often been compared to a lion.⁸  There is only one picture of him smiling.  So it’s decided:  a study of these two requires pictures and word pictures. 

Biography brings up questions about who has the right to tell a story and who speaks for whom and what’s at stake and who gets to be the judge.⁹  Again, these questions help us think historically and rhetorically.  Lives emphasize the “intrinsically human character of history”.¹⁰  Lives give us a reference point for how world events are also personal events, helping us “avoid [a] monolithic reading of the past”.¹¹  Education has long played a role in what lives will be protected and valued and whose lives will be sacrificed.¹²  Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth deserve more than a passing glance, and I hope that a rhetorical inquiry into their lives could serve as a model for comparing black leaders in the 20th century like W.E.B. DuBois alongside Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. alongside Malcolm X.  I also think that, though not contemporaries of each other, James Baldwin and Ta Nahesi Coates would work, and Coates even asks for it. 

A life is a good teacher because its consistencies give us a model to emulate, and its nuances, choices and flaws, give us inspiration, igniting what Lerner in “Why teach biography?” calls the “moral imagination”.¹³ It became clear while reading biographies of prominent black leaders that they all make creative conflict.¹⁴ Douglass and Truth, by necessity, frequently had to define themselves by opposition.  The key seems to be that they insisted on discourse, sometimes politically hopeful, sometimes actually hopeful, sometimes courting public scorn, sometimes coding insult, sometimes not, and sometimes arguing for a body count.  Joan Scott, in “The Evidence of Experience” calls for the importance of the literary to the historical project, and this perked the English teacher in me right up.¹⁵ History is the study of change, so “the meanings of categories of identity change and with them the possibilities for thinking the self...That locus, that margin, the split first allows, then demands the appropriate language--now spoken, now written, in both directions over the gap”.¹⁶ Scott’s language even begins to hover as she makes this point, and the personal and spiritual journeys of Douglass and Truth locate their thoughts as they stalk the systemic incoherencies of their time and space.¹⁷

In seeking new meanings, we need stories.  Douglass and Truth were fluent in biblical metaphor, doling out pointed and subtle Bible justice, using old roots to make new shoots.  Douglass and Truth needed their stories to be believed because they were proof of slavery’s inherent brutality.  Douglass told his own self made man story across three lengthening autobiographies, always catching himself up to the present, perhaps proving himself to himself.¹⁸ He published the first time to silence doubters and to regain some agency in the Garrisonian abolitionist camp.¹⁹ When accused of telling lies by someone who remembered him as Fred Bailey, he thanked the man publicly for proving his identity.²⁰ Truth sent six copies of her autobiography along with a letter to the newspaper correcting Stowe’s story about her, saying I’m not from Africa, I don’t say “honey,” and here’s where to look to learn about me.²¹ She insisted on her version of events as she could.  Our stories light up in the presence of other stories, and a biography is a structured collection of them.  We will see “how individuals use the space between normative systems and freedom of action which always exist”.²²

From history education guru Sam Wineburg: “If history is to be anything, it must be an education in thinking, not merely remembering”.²³ I chose rhetoric because language and other modes of self-presentation can be traced throughout the black freedom struggle in America and also because teachers must spotlight and pursue meaningful discourse.  Students need us to be explicit, so they can learn to spot echo chambers and bias that the internet spits out relentlessly.  Rhetorical analysis is a chance to slow down, and students will gain an opportunity to question and observe how masters of persuasion communicate their ideas “within the boundaries prescribed by language available”.²⁴ While my goal is to assemble a more rigorous and living process for internalizing and using rhetoric, these practices need a substrate in which to flourish.  We need models and not just at the moment of a famous speech act or lauded composition, but stories from across a richly complicated life. Douglass and Truth model a dogged willingness to engage with the circumstances of their creation and to recreate themselves.  Self-creation is a political act.²⁵