Poetry Between the Wars: Gwendolyn Brooks

 

                                                                            Photo Credit

The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for the poetry collection, Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917, in Topeka, Kansas to David Anderson Brooks, a janitor, and Kezia Brooks, a school teacher and classically trained pianist. Her mother taught at the very school in Topeka for which the court case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas is named. Though she was born in Kansas, Brooks referred to herself as a Chicagoan, and it was there her education began on Chicago's South Side. She attended both integrated and segregated schools, completing her secondary education at Englewood High School in 1935 (1). By age fourteen, she was receiving praise for her poetry from none other than James Weldon Johnson (Gates, et al. 324).

According to our editor, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Brooks held fast to the belief that poetry "was not the sole province of the privileged, educated few," and made her volumes of poetry available to general audiences for a small sum of less than five dollars (Gates, et al 324). Perhaps complicating the existing notions about the role of the black artist, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote for the everyman. Our text shares Brooks' philosophy:

"My aim, in my next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully 'call'...all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones, not always to 'teach'--I shall wish often to entertain, to illumine. My newish voice will not be an imitation of the contemporary young black voice, which I so admire, but an adaptation of today's Gwendolyn Brooks' voice" (qtd. in Gates, et al. 324).

Brooks' early poetry, as reflected in the collections Annie Allen (1949), Maud Martha (1953), and The Bean Eaters (1960), featured vignettes of everyday life. The commonplace was where Brooks found her inspiration, again emphasizing the lives and concerns of ordinary people. By 1967, black intellectuals and writers were experiencing a shift toward a defined sense of identity and the rise of a New Black Cultural Nationalism. At the Second Black Writer's Conference in that year, Brooks became acquainted with some of the key poets and thinkers of this movement, including Larry Neal and the poet and playwright Imamu Amiri Baraka (325).

In the video below, Brooks recites the poem for which she is most known, "We Real Cool."

Olaudah Equiano and the Middle Passage

"This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, which now became insupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs [toilets] into which the children often fell and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable."--Olaudah Equiano, from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African (London, 1789; Cited by American Abolitionist). 

One of the earliest first-hand accounts of slavery and the Middle Passage, Olaudah Equiano's Narrative has been credited by Dr. Gates, et al. with forming the 'prototype' of the traditional slave narrative. Equiano's project was intrepid and groundbreaking not simply because it was one of the earliest records of chattle slavery in the New World, but because it is among the first to counter the popular concept that the Bible justified of slavery. Instead, Equiano's account promotes Abolition as part of the true and genuine Christian mission.

The accuracy of Equiano's account of his earliest years in Africa among the Ibo people is presently the debate among scholars. However, as Gates points out, Equiano presents his recollections (however fictional or true), as an allegory that exacts a 'moral judgment' against the cruelty, barbarism, and blind ethnocentrism of the European. "Africa for Equiano," our editors explain, "was neither spiritually benighted nor socially backward; in his portrayal, the African world exists as a moral judgment against the 'polished and haughty European' who becomes the chief target for the author's criticism in the first few chapters of the Narrative (188). What emerges in the first few pages of Narrative is not simply the author's call to be recognized as a human being worthy of social enfranchisement; nor is it simply an assertion of the author's ability to articulate himself to the world. It is an historical record of the Triangle Trade and Middle Passage; it is an autobiographical account of one man's assertion of his own dignity; and it is an indictment of one of the world's most enduring blights against humankind, penned in the King's own English.

The Middle Passage

The term "Middle Passage" describes the capture, forcible removal, and transport by the thousands of African slaves across the Atlantic to the New World. During the infamous "Triangle Trade" which persisted from the sixteenth until the middle-nineteenth centuries, ships traveled from Europe bearing raw materials, such as "rum, brandy, cloths, beads and guns" to trade along the West African coast for Africans who were forced to work on plantations. Competition among Europeans for production of these goods raised the demand for labor. From there, traders herded slaves into tightly-packed barracks, where they were denied nourishment, treated with despicable brutality, and conditions were so deplorable that pestilence was rampant. These ships sailed forth to ports where were their human cargo was forced to labor on the sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations of the Caribbean and coastal U.S.

By the time Olaudah Equiano penned his memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, "the English slave trade had a figure of 53,000 slaves a year being shipped to the North American continent"(Credit is due this site). The Triangle Trade continued, albeit illegally, until after the outbreak of the Civil War.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself

Equiano's Narrative, for some scholars, has been the product of both the author's memory and his imagination. Some scholars argue that his memories of childhood among the Ibo people are far too vivid for a young child of six to have retained. Whatever the case may be, Equiano's Narrative serves as one of the earliest documents of life before, during, and after captivity. His depictions of the early slave-traders who kidnapped him are vital to understanding the psychological and emotional trauma of the captive, along with the author's vivid descriptions of the slave ship. 

Equiano spent only a portion of his life in captivity, however. He became a free adult, and he enjoyed a long and happy marriage. Unlike his literary progeny, Equiano whole-heartedly embraced European culture and dress, the Queen's English, and a decidedly western lifestyle. However, his adoption of all things western does not remove him from the roster of protest writers. 

His Narrative reads much like a Travelogue--those volumes published by wealthy landowners and dignitaries who traveled abroad and documented what they witnessed taking place in new bustling American colonies or of so-called "primitive" societies in the islands or in Africa. Equiano's delivery in his Narrative allows some distance between the author and what he describes and further allows the reader to critically and objectively observe the experiences he includes. 

To appreciate more fully the document he provides, one must consider the political, literary, and historical movements that were taking place at the time of Equiano's publication. In literature, the Romantic poet, William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience--an illustrated collection of poems was published by its author in 1789. In this volume, the poet explores the "two contrary states of the human soul" (1). Blake's volumes, too, emerged from a period of national fervor: the spirit of independence--with an emphasis on human freedom--hung heavily in the air.

On a national scale, the U.S. had just emerged from a war against England for its independence. Slave narrativists began to speak out for their own humanity in view of whites who had just recently asserted their own autonomy. The Age of Enlightenment--a philosophical movement influenced the thinking of the day, and dictated the centrality of human beings and the potential of human endeavor. 

Still, the Bible and religion were important influences. While defenders of the institution of slavery would vehemently use the bible to justify slavery (myth of Ham/Cain), Equiano paints us a portrait of his life that can be read as a biblical allegory that traces an idyllic Eden to a harrowing Fall from Grace. Adam and Eve had tasted the fruit of knowledge and as a consequence bore the cruelties of the world; though young Olaudah Equiano had no knowledge of sin, his sin seems to have been his complexion, according to his captors. As a result, his existence swiftly changes from the relatively palatable life he spent in Africa to the hell of slavery in the Americas. 

However one wishes to gauge Equiano's accuracy, his Narrative remains one of the few surviving impressions of humanity's cruelty in the slave trade. He was among the first to publish an account that emphasized the humanity of the African, and to counter contemporary assumptions that those of darker ethnicities were by default, inferior in all ways. Most of all, his memoirs demonstrate the endurance and resilience of one who was forced to accept the King's English, and, without blinking, donned those western accoutrements to undermine those who would attempt to render him voiceless. 


To get a better understanding of the historical events that led up to slavery in the Americas, follow the link provided here.

W.E.B. Dubois: Criteria of Negro Art

One of the most prominent of all African American leaders of the 20th century, William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963), a self-proclaimed "race man" was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. DuBois was educated primarily in the North at Harvard and in Germany where he prepared for his Ph.D. However, it was when attended school at Fisk    that he was confronted the appalling racism prevalent in the South: an experience that helped to shape his political philosophy and life's work. By the time he became a professor at Wilberforce University in Ohio, DuBois was a published author. DuBois had made it his mission to seek out "forums beyond academe from which he could address fundamental problems of race and justice in the United States" and one of those forums was the written page. 

He was published in such prestigious literary journals as The Atlantic Monthly and The Dial, and his essays focused on sociological aspects of the black experience that pertained to experiential and socio-economic issues affecting blacks such as land ownership, family, the church, urbanization, and mortality. Dubois conducted extensive research concerning criminality among the newly-freed African American population following Reconstruction. In a theory similar to that of Emile Durkheim, DuBois concluded that criminal behavior escalated among African Americans due to the socio-economic marginalization of blacks following the war as Reconstruction had been a colossal failure. Further, Du Bois contended that criminality among newly freed blacks would decrease as blacks were enabled to enjoy rights on par with whites. Finally, in order to uplift the circumstances of freed blacks in the South, a select group of gifted intellects--the Talented Tenth--would emerge to lead African Americans to a secure footing in American culture.

By the turn of the last century, DuBois outlined his philosophies on race and distilled his ideas concerning the cultures, traditions, values, and experience that went to construct the 'soul' of African Americans. In 1903, he published the text for which he is most readily known, The Souls of Black Folk.

In Souls of Black Folk, DuBois explored the experience of "Double Consciousness": a term he used to describe the peculiar experience of African Americans in seeking out a means of self-definition in the face of a white power structure. To be able to forge an identity that coupled one's African origins with a New World experience was chief among DuBois's concerns. Further, DuBois articulated the struggles of post-Reconstruction African Americans initiated by the color line that separated whites from blacks in the U.S. This color line he articulated throughout Souls of Black Folk through the metaphor of the "veil."

By 1910, Dubois was rising in rank as a key civil rights leader: he founded and served as editor of the magazine, The Crisis, the principle publication for the NAACP. Though he frequently used the magazine as a forum in which he outlined American racial politics, his focus was broadening to encompass questions concerning Pan-African issues. Envisioning a "Great Council of Darker People, Dubois arranged international Pan-African conferences in the United States and in Europe, hoping to forge a greater sense of global community bound by historical and cultural memory. DuBois's actions during this time set the precedent for the waves of Black National thinking that would later be embraced and expanded upon by thinkers such as the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary, Franz Fanon, and African-Martinican poet and educator, Aimie Cesaire. 

His essay, "Criteria of Negro Art" outlines his conviction that all art is propaganda, and as such, is created for the purpose of racial uplift. In the late 1920s and 1930s during the Harlem Renaissance, Dubois would find his views in contest with many of his contemporaries. According to our text, his comparatively radical views rankled fellow leaders and the artists of the time, who resisted his adherence to art-as-propaganda. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston criticized his staunch politicization of creative output; his resistance to an incorporation of folk tradition as a primary motif of African American literary expression, and many writers of the time scoffed at his comparatively pretentious, "priggish" literary style (Gates). 

Despite his lack of popularity among some writers of his day, Dubois's name still resonates, as he was the father of Black Studies, and his contribution to African American Academics is immeasurable. Dubois remained active politically well into his life: in 1961, he and his wife accepted an invitation from President Kwame Nkrumah to visit Ghana and commence work on the Encyclopedia Africana. When he was refused a return passport, Dr. Dubois renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a Ghanan citizen. He died in Accra, Ghana in 1962, just one day before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech (1). 

above photo: wikipedia.org

Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed" (BTW 586). The "Sage of Tuskegee," Booker T. Washington was born in slavery in 1856 in what is now West Virginia. He had reached the age of seven by the time of Emancipation (1863), and recalls in his autobiography Up From Slavery with characteristic lucidity and plaintive effect the joy that he witnessed among the adult slaves when word came that they were free. Booker T. Washington came of age during the period known as Reconstruction. This period immediately following the Civil War (1861-1864) in which the South slowly rebuilt its financial losses from the war, and African American slaves, free from the constraints of chattel slavery, were fleeing the North to find enfranchisement and escape the racial tension of the South. Aided by the Army and the Freedman's Bureau, a Republican coalition, attempted to rehabilitate the South, and negotiations began concerning how to incorporate the seceding southern states back into the Union.
 
However, tensions grew as southerners resisted the South resented northern intervention into the affairs of what they envisioned as a "Solid (Democratic) South;" and raised arguments concerning the Constitutional and voting rights of freedmen. The Freedman's Bureau, an agency that assisted freed slaves, founded schools funded by missionaries and aid societies, to educate and edify freed slaves who were desirous of an education. By 1866, a Congressional Act enabled Freedman's Schools to be funded through the confiscation of Confederate property toward educational purposes (1). 

However, despite meagerly hopeful beginnings, the Freedman schools suffered from lack of funding. The increasing incidences of violence in the South and growing white Democratic power led to the dissolution of the Bureau and its projects. In light of the struggle of the Freedman schools, the accomplishments of Booker T. Washington stand as a major triumph against the white oppression of blacks in the U.S. following the Civil War. Practicing and advocating a credo of self-respect, hard work, and unwavering ethics, Washington extolled blacks of the South to "cast down your bucket where you are;" in other words, to make use of the soil where you stand by building an institution of learning, by pursuing self-education and improvement. Washington, who at fourteen made the journey to Hampton, Virginia to work for his tuition to attend the Hampton Institute. There he dusted and cleaned the libraries and offices of the Institute until he graduated with honors three years later. After serving on the faculty at Hampton, Washington was granted authorization from the Virginia legislature to found the Tuskegee Institute where all potential students worked the land, tilled the soil, assisted in the building of each structure in order to pay his or her tuition. Washington advocated self-improvement among blacks take place on the very soil where their ancestors had toiled; and to build this great school, Washington developed and utilized the multiple connections he had among white entrepreneurs, businessmen, and politicians.

americaslibrary.gov

"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board of Directors and Citizens: One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success. I but convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent Exposition at every stage of its progress. It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom. Not only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden. A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal,Water, water; we die of thirst! The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, Cast down your bucket where you are.

A second time the signal, Water, water; send us water! ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, Cast down your bucket where you are. And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, Cast down your bucket where you are. The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: Cast down your bucket where you are— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race,Cast down your bucket where you are. Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South."

February is African American History Month

Q: Who was responsible for initiating African American History Month? 

A: Carter G. Woodson

Born in 1875 in Canton, Virginia, Woodson worked as a sharecropper to help support his family. He began his high school education in "his late teens," but proved to be a quick study: he completed a four-year course of study in half the time. Later he would complete his education at Berea College and earn his bachelor's and master's degrees at Harvard University, and ultimately earned his doctorate from Harvard. Later on he would become a co-founder of the Associate of Negro Life and History. 

During this period of the early 20th century, the consensus among most white scholars was that the African American 'had no history': that his cultural background had been utterly stripped of him and long forgotten. However, thanks to intrepid scholars like Woodson, Arthur Schomburg, E. Franklin Frazier, and others, the rich history of African Americans became a serious study in colleges and universities by the 1960s. But it was well before then that Woodson and his colleagues began publishing. Author of many books, his volume The Mis-Education of the Negro, (1933) was perhaps the most celebrated. In it, Woodson countered the assumption of a vanished cultural past for the African American, and called for self-empowerment for African Americans. He was responsible for founding "Negro History Week," in 1926 which would evolve to become African American History Month by the latter part of the century. Now considered the Father of Black History, Woodson contributed mightily to education and academe, serving as dean of Howard University and West Virginia Collegiate Institute. 

Southwest Tennessee Community College celebrates African American History Month each year, and this year, we have a number of events going on that you can participate in. This year, the African American Read-In is taking place at the Benjamin Hooks Library on February 20th:

Carter G. Woodson Award of Merit Ceremony: Taking place Thursday, February 13th at the Verties Sales Gym, the Honors Academy will be honoring Veda Ajamu at 11:00 a.m. Please come if you can and help make this celebration a success!

Also, on the next day, February 14th-16th, SWTCC Department of Communication and Fine Arts is staging a production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun at the Union Campus Theater. Admission is free to all students, and the performance schedule is below. 

Harriet Jacobs, aka, Linda Brent: A Woman's Story of Slavery

from docsouth.unc.edu

"...I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of the two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations. May the blessing of God rest upon this imperfect effort in behalf of my persecuted people" (Jacobs 281).

Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813 to Elijah Knox and Delilah Horniblow, both slaves. In accordance with the edict of the time, Harriet and her brother, John "followed the condition of their mother" in slavery. After Delilah died when Harriet was a mere six years old, the little girl went to live with her mother's mistress, Margaret Horniblow. The white mistress taught Harriet to read, and to perform domestic duties such as cooking and sewing. Margaret died in 1825 and in the codicil to her will, bequeathed her slaves to her five-year-old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, daughter of Dr. James Norcom.

It was Norcom who Jacobs refers to as "Dr. Flint," in her autobiographical narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as the cruel and draconian master who repeatedly molested her for nearly ten years. To escape Norcom's advances, Harriet took a consensual lover, the white attorney and later, congressman, Samuel Sawyer. Sawyer would father her two children, Joseph and Louisa. As the children were considered property of Dr. Norcom, as Harriet remained his slave, Norcom repeatedly threatened to sell Joseph and Louisa if their mother continued to refuse his advances. Harriet Jacobs escaped the homestead of Norcom in 1835, hiding out in swamps and later, in an attic on her grandmother Molly's property where she spent seven years in its cramped, inhospitable quarters.

In 1842 Jacobs escaped to Philadelphia with the help of the antislavery organization the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee; and in 1845, she went from there to New York. In the interim, Sawyer purchased her children and gave them their freedom. He funded their trip north to find work. Harriet worked as a nursemaid in the home of Nathaniel Parker Willis, and her brother aided her by keeping watch in case Norcom should attempt to track her in New York.

By 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law placed Harriet in even greater peril. Her brother, John, fled to California where the law was not in force. Cornelia Grinnell Willis offered to send Harriet to Massachusetts to hide with the Willis baby. In the meantime and without Harriet's knowledge, Willis paid three hundred dollars to Daniel Messmore, the husband of Harriet's legal mistress, thereby making her a free woman.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl changed hands several times before it actually came to print. Initially the narrative was published in serial form by abolitionist newspaper mogul Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, but the details of Harriet's experience with Dr. Norcum proved excessive for the delicate puritanical sensibilities of her audience. Jacobs' next step was to take her manuscript to a publishing house, Phillips and Samson. The firm offered to publish the manuscript provided that Jacobs could secure a foreword from Cornelia Willis or Harriet Beecher Stowe. Jacobs refused to impose on Willis, and Stowe flatly refused her. The manuscript was eventually published by Thayer and Eldridge with a preface by reformer and activist, Lydia Marie Child.

Jacobs' targeted reading audience was middle-class, white, Christian women. She emphasized the horrors exacted upon female virtue, the institution as evidence of the South's avarice; and underscored the manipulation of Christian ethics in the so-called "patriarchal institution." However, what is central to Jacobs' narrative are the trials and obstacles she faced in freeing her children. After her former owner put a price on her head, Jacobs went into hiding. For seven years she inhabited a small, cramped garrett in her grandmother's home, watching over her children through a tiny opening: an experience she relates in painstaking detail in her narrative.

What is distinct about the female slave's narrative is that, along with the numerous dehumanizing and appalling indignities male slaves had to face, female slaves faced the added torment of becoming the victims of miscegenation: a forced sexual liaison with her master. The children that were products of these unions were, more often than not, sold into slavery. Jacob's narrative informs her contemporary audience of the indignities she endured as a woman generally, but more specifically, as a mother.

Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895

thefederalistpapers.org

According to our text, the early twentieth century saw a momentary enthusiasm for remembering Douglass as one of the most memorable and formidable anti-slavery speakers, lecturers, and intellects. However, it was not until the 1960s, in which the nation saw a cry for Black Studies programs in colleges and universities, that the life and work of Frederick Douglass was reconsidered. In a rare instance, the African American publication, Ebony magazine published an article on Douglass. The post-modern era of Civil Rights Activism caused black intellectuals to cast a backward glance at the endeavors of their forebears. The article began:

"Born a slave, he escaped to freedom while still young and devoted a long and fruitful life to the winning of freedom for all Negroes. A fervent integrationist, he was the first of the 'freedom riders' and 'sit iners.' He felt that true freedom could not com for him until all Negroes were free and equal" (Ebony Magazine, 1963).

Born in Talbot County in about 1818 to Harriet Bailey and an "unknown white man," Frederick Douglass emerged from the brutality and subjugation of slavery to become one of this nation's most revered activists, reformers, abolitionists, and statesmen (Gates 385). Our text points out that James McHune Smith, a physician and contemporary of Douglass's in the Abolitionist movement, described Douglass as a "'noble example'" of American perseverance and self-actualization. Douglass moved audiences with his eloquence and oratory, which he delivered while still under the threat of recapture. The speaker casts an ironic figure against the spectre of the stated goals of American independence: Douglass was the very epitome of the self-made individual who elevated himself from the depths of bondage, to freedom.

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself was the author's first autobiography published in 1845; the subtitle assuming even greater significance as its author battled against assumptions that a black man was incapable of intellectual thought or reflection. Ten years later, following a disagreement with abolitionist journalist William Lloyd Garrison, he would republish his biography under the title My Bondage and My Freedom. The second narrative, which includes the addendum of his life as an orator for human rights, is comparatively a more trenchant, reflective, and philosophical review of Douglass's life in slavery. In it, he recounts numerous remembrances of the horrors of physical abuse which he himself bore; and the abuse he witnessed of others, particularly women.

Notably, Douglass is credited with introducing the "I-Narrative" of slave autobiography: one that features the first-person account of slavery from one who experienced--and witnessed its horrors firsthand. Also of note, Douglass's second biography explores not simply the physical horrors of slavery, but the moral, psychological, and emotional abuses incurred from the institution. Determined to defend the personhood and humanity of the slave subject, Douglass's project was an examination of the individual's evolution as he journeyed from bondage to freedom.

Each edition of Douglass's story includes what are now considered the conventions of the slave narrative. Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom are episodic in structure, featuring his recollections of an idyllic childhood in his grandmother's cottage before coming to an awareness of his condition as a slave. He came of age as a house servant to Thomas Auld and his benevolent wife, Lucretia, before going to Baltimore to serve at the household of Hugh and Sophia Auld. In the Auld household, Douglass would learn to read from Scripture until Mr. Auld demanded his wife to stop instructing him, insisting that if one were "to give (a slave) and inch, he will take the entire ell." It was at this point that Douglass realized that the key to freedom was literacy.

Following an altercation between Hugh Auld and his brother, Thomas (Douglass's legal owner) Douglass was sent to work as a farmhand at St. Michaels, where he was turned over to the notorious slave-breaker, Edward Covey. Our text relates that "after six months of unstinting labor, merciless whippings, and repeated humiliations, the desperate sixteen-year-old slave fought back, resisting one of Covey's attempted beatings and intimidating his tormentor sufficiently to prevent future attacks. Douglass's account of his struggle with Covey would become the heroic turning point of his future autobiographies and one of the most celebrated scenes in all of antebellum African American literature" (385). Douglass's triumph over the monstrous Covey may have served as a significant turning point in Douglass's emergence as the formidable and undaunted figure for which he is renowned.

One of the most striking aspects of Douglass's second autobiography is that, despite the eloquent language of the text, Douglass portrays his life in and after slavery with rare directness and explicit honesty. Douglass is brutally direct and incisive, naming precise dates, places, and names associated with the events that took place. His intrepid honesty never wavered despite the fact that he was a fugitive slave. In an excerpt from My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass explains that he often tired from recounting his life in slavery to Northern audiences; however, he took great pains to write the history of his plight not once, but three times. Douglass's autobiographies gave form to the so-called 'slave narrative,' endowing the form with its recognizable conventions, and paving the way for the evolution of black autobiography and 'writing the self into existence.'