Chapter 1tuckahoe

Foreword

The face looks straight out of the frame and it does not smile. That is the first thing, and for a long time it was the only thing I could not get past. More than a hundred and sixty of these portraits survive — more separate sittings than any other American of the nineteenth century left behind, more than Lincoln, more than Grant, more than any of the presidents I have spent years reading — and in almost none of them does the man permit himself the smallest softening of the mouth. He sat for the camera the way a candidate sits for a debate. He knew what the picture was for.

I write about men who come to power through instruments. Money moved through committees; votes counted in wards; offices held and traded; the whole patient apparatus by which one American acquires the ability to make another do something. That apparatus is my subject and has been for a long time, and I came to Frederick Douglass because he is the photographic negative of it. For most of his life he could not vote. He held no office worth the name until he was past sixty. He had no fortune, no party that would fully own him, no machinery of any kind. And he assembled, out of that nothing, an authority that presidents crossed rooms to shake his hand. I wanted to know how a man does that with the instruments taken away.

The photograph was the first clue, and it turned out to be the whole method in miniature. A man born property, born into a system whose entire business was to fix what he was and hold him there, understood before almost anyone that the new machine of the portrait could be turned the other way — that a Black man who sat, unsmiling and composed, before the same lens that made cartoons of his people was making an argument no speech could make as fast. He did not sit for the camera to be remembered. He sat to be seen correctly, now, by a country that had every incentive to see him wrong.

I expected, when I began, to be writing about the voice — the Fourth of July oration, the Nantucket evening, the platforms. I found the voice, and it is everything they say. But underneath it I kept finding the operator I had come to recognise from other lives entirely: the man managing his own image with a discipline I have otherwise seen only in people who had staffs and budgets. He wrote his life three times — in 1845, in 1855, in 1881 — and each version was longer and more exact and more in control of its own meaning than the last. The biographer's ordinary problem is a subject who left too little. My problem was the reverse. Douglass got there first. He wrote the authorised life himself, three times over, and did it well enough that a careless reader would simply take the last draft and file it.

The record I worked from is the public one, and it is enormous: the three autobiographies set against each other, the speeches as the press took them down, the newspapers he ran and the newspapers that ran him, the letters that have found their way into print. I did not need a private archive. This was a man who conducted his life in public on purpose, because public was the only ground on which a person the law had made into a thing could establish that he was not one.

That is why he is worth a book, and worth this one in particular. The men I have written about had the instruments and used them. Douglass is the argument that the instruments are not the only road — that a man with nothing but his own face, his own voice, and the refusal to be rendered as anything less than exact can build the one thing money most reliably fails to buy, which is to be believed. I did not think a life without the machinery could teach me anything about power. I was wrong, and the correction took three years.

The face still does not smile. I understand it now as an instruction. He is telling the camera, and through it the country, and through the country us, exactly how he intends to be looked at. This book is my attempt to look the way he asked.

— Theodore Pemberton, Boston

Chapter 1 · tuckahoe

Tuckahoe

The cabin stood on the bank of the Tuckahoe Creek, in the upland thickets above the Choptank River, twelve miles from the Wye plantation, and the woman who lived in it was named Betsey Bailey. She was past her field-working years when the boy was born, and older still when they took him from her. She had borne twelve children in that cabin and raised every one of them. The cabin had been built by her husband, Isaac Bailey, a free man with a sawpit, and the chimney was sticks daubed with clay and the floor was dirt that she swept every morning with a broom of sedge grass. She kept her seines in the rafters and her squash in the loft and her kettle on the hook over the fire. She kept also a row of clay pots along the south wall and a row of split-pole beds along the north and on the bed nearest the chimney she kept a coverlet of her own weaving and on the coverlet she kept a young child wrapped in a cotton shift, and that child, in February of 1818 — the month, as he later believed, of his coming into the world — was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.

He never knew the day. He chose 14 February later, because his mother had called him her little Valentine, and because a man without a birthday had to choose one. The year of 1818 he could pin down only because Aaron Anthony, the man who owned him, had written Frederick Augustus, son of Harriot, February 1818 in a ledger that survived to be read by the historian Dickson Preston a hundred and sixty years later. Anthony was the manager of overseers for Edward Lloyd V on the great Wye plantation and Anthony kept the kind of book a man keeps who counts livestock. The boy was an entry in that book.

His mother was Harriet Bailey. She was hired out on a farm some twelve miles away and she came to see him in the night when she could. She walked the twelve miles after her field-work was done and she walked the twelve miles back before sunup. She did this perhaps five times in seven years. He saw her for an hour at a time in the dark, lying beside her on the coverlet, and then she was gone and he could not call her back. He never knew his father. He knew only that the father was a white man and that the white man might have been Aaron Anthony himself. The grandmother said nothing, and the grandmother knew. He searched for the name the rest of his life.

The cabin was full of voices. Betsey had children and grandchildren in and out of it all day, cousins older than Frederick and cousins younger, sleeping four to a bed by the door. They sang. They told the stories of the woods and the river and the man who lived in the smoke-house and the bird that called at the bend in the creek. There were no books in the cabin. Betsey could not read. None of the children could read. The cabin was full of voices and the voices were the only schooling.

The Tuckahoe was a tidewater creek and the water rose and fell with the tide twice a day. Betsey set seine for shad in the spring and the shad ran for six weeks and the kettle on the hook smelled of fish and salt for those weeks and then the run was over and the cabin smelled again of green corn and woodsmoke. The grandmother knew the ground. She knew which cane could be split for sweetbread and which could not. She knew how to mend a net with a wooden needle and she knew how to set a quail-trap with a forked stick. She had been taken from the Choptank as a girl and she had been brought to the Tuckahoe in the second year of her marriage and she had not left it since.

Betsey was a slave still — Aaron Anthony's property, like the grandchildren she raised — but the custom of the place was that the slave-mothers' mothers — the grand-mothers in the literal blood-sense — were left in cabins like Betsey's at the edges of the holding to raise the small children. The grandmothers were free in the sense that they did not work the fields and were not whipped and were not sold. They were not free in the sense that the cabin was not theirs and the children were Anthony's property and the day would come when the property had to be moved.

That day came in August of 1824.

He was six. The corn was high in the fields beyond the cabin and the heat lay on the Tuckahoe like a wet cloth. Betsey woke him before dawn and washed his face and tied his shirt and gave him a piece of corn-bread from the kettle. She told him they were going for a walk. She had told him this before. She had walked him to the Lloyd quarter for errands two or three times a year all his life. He had no reason to think this walk was different. He took her hand and they set off down the lane.

They walked all morning. The sun came up and burned through the haze and the dust rose around their feet on the lane and Betsey said little. They came at midday to the gates of the home plantation and the children of the Lloyd quarter were playing in the dust by the slave-pen and Betsey called one of them by name and said, That's your brother Perry, that boy by the cookhouse, and that's your sister Sarah, and that's your sister Eliza. They had been sent ahead. They had been there a year. He had not known he had a brother and two sisters who lived twelve miles from him. He stood and looked at them and they looked at him and he did not move from his grandmother's leg.

She told him to go and play with them. He would not go. She told him again and he would not. She bent down and put her hand on his cheek. She told him she would be back. She told him to be a good boy. He did not understand the words because the words did not fit the day. She straightened up and walked back down the lane and did not look back. He watched her go. The dust rose around her legs and the sun was on her grey head-cloth and she did not turn. He stood by the cookhouse and he did not cry. He did not understand that she was not coming back. He understood it slowly that afternoon and into the evening and he understood it fully when the dark came and she was not there.

He wrote about this scene three times across his life. He wrote it in 1845 in the Narrative and he wrote it in 1855 in My Bondage and My Freedom and he wrote it in 1881 in Life and Times, three decades and four decades and almost half a century after, and the rendering grew longer and more exact. The last version contained details the first had not — Betsey's apron, the corn-bread, the way she tied the shirt — and the last version was the one that named what had happened: that the lane was the boundary between the world of the cabin and the world of the plantation and that he had crossed it that day and would not cross it back. He tells it as the founding wound. The book that survived him made the same claim.

He never saw his grandmother again as a child. The Narrative of 1845 set down his bitter belief that after Aaron Anthony's death she had been turned out — carried to the woods, given a little hut, and left to support herself in perfect loneliness — and he made of it a charge against the whole system of slavery. The fuller record is more complicated: about 1840 Thomas Auld learned of her condition and had her brought into his own household in Talbot County, where she was cared for until she died in 1849. Douglass himself acknowledged as much in an open letter to Auld written that year. By the time Betsey died, Frederick was a free man in Rochester, editing his own paper, The North Star; he learned of her death long after the fact, and he never saw the grave.

Of his mother he knew almost nothing. She came to him at Wye House a few times that he could remember, after a long day's field-work and a twelve-mile walk in the dark, and she lay beside him for an hour or so and was gone again before sunrise. She brought him once a large ginger cake, baked in the shape of a heart. He did not see her by daylight. He never had a daylight image of her face. He wrote, in 1845, Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger. He wrote that sentence at twenty-seven. By thirty-seven he had revised it. By sixty-three he had revised it again. The revision moved toward what he had felt at the time and away from what he had been told he should have felt. The mature paragraphs of Life and Times are paragraphs about a love he could not produce on demand and could not extinguish.

She was a tall woman. She could read. He learned this only after her death — how she had come by it he never learned — and the fact astonished him because he had not credited any of his blood with literacy until then. He took it as the first signal of what he himself would be. He took it also as a kind of inheritance — the only inheritance, he sometimes wrote, that any of his family would ever pass to him: the suspicion that words could be undertaken.

He did not know who his father was. The household held the suspicion that the father was Aaron Anthony, the manager of overseers, the man who had written Frederick Augustus son of Harriot in the ledger. The household held also the suspicion that the father might have been one of the Lloyd sons, or an overseer, or a passing white man on the road. He thought all his life about it. He stopped thinking about it only when he could not bear to think about it any longer. He wrote in the Narrative: My father was a white man. He wrote in Life and Times: Of my father I know nothing. The two sentences are the limits of what he could say.

The cabin on the Tuckahoe stood in the woods. Anthony's house at Wye stood at the edge of an orchard. Twelve miles between them. Twelve miles, walked, was the distance from a child's first life to his second.

He was six.

In August of 1824 he came, in fact if not yet in his understanding, into the keeping of Aaron Anthony's household — the property of the manager of overseers of the Lloyd plantation, which had been the Lloyd plantation for one hundred and sixty-eight years and would be the Lloyd plantation for forty years more, until Maryland abolished slavery in November of 1864. He was small for his age. He was thin. He had a broad forehead and grey-flecked eyes and a habit of standing very still when he was confused. He had been told that the world was the cabin and the creek and the grandmother. He learned that day that the world was something else.

He did not write to anyone for the next fifty-six years that what happened to him on that lane, in that dust, with that grey head-cloth disappearing, was the first lesson he had taken. He did not have to write it. He carried it in the marrow.

The boy who would, in the year 1841, stand on a stage in Nantucket and make William Lloyd Garrison rise to ask the room Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or a man; the boy who would, in 1845, publish a book that would sell five thousand copies in four months and end Henry Clay's argument that the slave was content; the boy who would, in 1852, deliver in Rochester an oration that would be called the greatest antislavery oration ever given by an American; the boy who would meet John Brown at Chambersburg and refuse him; who would meet Abraham Lincoln in the Executive Mansion three times and on the third occasion answer Lincoln's what did you think of my address with Mr Lincoln, that was a sacred effort; the boy who would marry one woman in New York in September of 1838 and another woman in Washington in January of 1884 and would come to rest between the two of them in the family plot at Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester; the boy who would die on the night of 20 February 1895 in the front hall of a twenty-one-room Victorian house above Anacostia, sinking to his knees as he told his second wife about the morning at Metzerott Hall — that boy stood by the cookhouse at Wye House at sunset on a day in August of 1824 and watched a grey head-cloth disappear at the bend of the lane and did not understand, for several hours, that he would not be going home.

He understood it that night. He understood it the next day. He understood it more fully every day for the rest of his life. He carried the lane and the dust and the grey head-cloth into Aliceanna Street and into the Bayside cow stable and into the Easton jail and onto the deck of the Cambria in 1845 and into the Conciliation Hall in Dublin and onto the Corinthian Hall stage in Rochester in July of 1852 and into the abandoned stone quarry at Chambersburg in August of 1859 and into the East Room at the Executive Mansion in March of 1865 and into the Growlery at Cedar Hill in 1880. He carried it with him as he wrote three autobiographies that named, each more fully than the last, what had been taken from him on that day. The lane, the dust, the grey head-cloth.

He never wrote the name of the road. He may not have known it. The road that ran from Tuckahoe Creek to Wye House was, in 1824, a Talbot County dust track that had been used by the Lloyds for a hundred and seventy years. It is paved now. It is signed. The Tuckahoe is a state park. Holme Hill Farm is a registered historical site. The cabin where Betsey Bailey lived is gone. The marker that names it stands in the woods near where it stood. Visitors come in summer to read the marker and to walk a portion of the lane. The Maryland Center for History and Culture issues a brochure. The Talbot County Tourism Office prints a map. The map carries the legend: Frederick Douglass Birthplace.

At the bend in the lane, where the grey head-cloth disappeared, the brochure does not mark anything. The bend is just a bend, in the woods, between the cabin site and the Wye gate. No-one stops there. The light at the end of an August afternoon falls through the loblolly pines and onto the dust as it has fallen on every August afternoon for two hundred years.

This is where the story begins.