Meeting Up with Frederick Lewis Douglass in the Library

The smell of the town library, light flowing in through stately windows, dust motes dancing in the beams, silvery twirls, the stacks, the ladders, the card catalogue, the stately librarian, the search afoot for books, guided by Dewey’s decimal system, the sitting down, the sinking in, the quiet…the total library phenomenon soothed the blonde boy. He fell in love with the public library in fourth grade, a brick and stone building standing stoically amid a scattering of lesser structures—a gas station, a grocery store, a bank—its entrance guarded by two classically stone lions, a monument to White privilege.

As he grew he graduated from books, encyclopedias, and periodicals to listening stations with vinyl records and microfiche readers in cubicles, as an adolescent for sheer pleasure, eventually for serious historical research and focused knowledge building. Later in life, the blonde boy would study literature and linguistics, research methods, composition theory, and assessment in higher education. At some point the child became the father of the man. He came to understand from whence the library, the bank, the grocery store, and the gas station came. These days people call it infrastructure.

Back in the day he would sit for extended periods like a kid nowadays with a device, reading books not so much for comprehension but for visioning, for visitation, for showing him how to make pictures from words, how to synthesize meaning through visual and auditory channels. Reading books like Charlotte’s Web and Little House in the Big Woods with their indescribable illustrations taught him to activate his graphic memory neurons and pull together a scene, a tableau, shimmering, glimmering, in the stillness. Scenes became episodes, episodes became stories, stories became poems, poems sometimes sticking in your throat.

He developed an interest in biographies and autobiographies as well, fueled by one particular book. The blonde boy was aware of the struggle for civil rights roiling the country from seeing black and white newsreels. The fire hoses and barking dogs horrified him; senseless and abusive practices at lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains shamed him. John Kennedy was elected President amid much sturm and drang in the small white town and then tragically assassinated, a bleak moment that stretched on for several days. He had read about the Civil War in school, especially the role of Abraham Lincoln. So with great interest as a fifth grade student he read Frederick Lewis Douglass’s autobiography published in 1845. There were virtually no African-Americans living in the town. It could be apocryphal, but he had heard tell of a city ordinance that forbade African-Americans to be out and about after dark. He knew Chicago had its south side, that some dangerous no man’s land stood between whites and the rest of the world. He had heard and been repulsed by the N word all of his life, especially coming from his father’s side of the clan, usually to cut or ridicule or demean, almost always in the mouths of white men.

As a boy, he relished Douglass’s book because he enjoyed tapping into Frederick’s energy bottled up in his words, his bravery to lay bare the injustices he had weathered and witnessed, his cunning, his savvy, his thirst for a life of freedom. This is what the American Revolution was about, he realized; he wrote a library paper on the War for Independence as practice with his typewriter. He thought about Frederick Douglass, about the law against teaching Frederick to read and write, on the Fourth of July. What is this celebration about, he mused, and years later when he read Frederick’s speech from 1855 dressing down the white man for expecting a former slave to share the meaning of Independence Day with his oppressor he cheered for Frederick and hoped Frederick could hear his cheers.

As an old man, son of the blonde boy, he would see strong connections between Charlotte’s Web and Douglass’s autobiography. Both express the life and times of a human consciousness and body condemned to an ugly world of bondage, wishing only to live free with dignity and justice for all, both lives subjugated to the needs of white men who feel authorized to spread agony and terror to satisfy their material needs. Wilbur the Pig is freed by the fancy footwork of a friendly spider, a stroke of genius on the author’s part (who, after all, conjured up Charlotte). Frederick, however, is freed on one level by a determined, persistent, courageous drive to escape from his cruel masters. On another level, his precious texts reveal the freedom achieved only by those who leave something for others along the banks of the river. It did not escape the boy’s notice that reading and writing loomed large in Wilbur’s story and in Frederick’s life. Charlotte’s spelling it out in her web saved Wilbur; Frederick’s writing in saved the blonde boy from seeing himself in the eyes of the oppressor and wanting to become that.

Douglass’s account of learning to read made a deep mark on the boy. Already hungry for everything his teachers taught him at school, he knew even at seven years old that public school was as close to a miracle as he was likely to get. He worked hard at everything he was assigned in the classroom. His teachers had all taught his pack of older brothers, who were less sanguine about following the rules than was the boy; his teachers delighted in this bright, shy, withdrawn blonde boy, a sentiment they expressed to his mother, who delighted in it along with the boy. Frederick was sent from the countryside to the city of Baltimore to live with a new master who might tame the willful child. Slaves were supposed to be seen, not heard. Young Frederick was delighted when he met the lady of the house, whose “…face was made of heavenly smiles and… voice of tranquil music,” a woman who saw that this child should learn to read and set about teaching him.

Frederick, however, was excluded from such experience. When his new master learned of the lady’s doings, he put the kabash on it. Master Auld very quickly set his wife straight, instructing her that it was illegal and unsafe to teach a slave to read. “‘If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read,’ the Master said, ‘there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.’ These words sank deep into my heart…,” wrote Frederick fifteen years before the Civil War. At the tail end of the white violent uprising staining the Civil Rights era in the Sixties, a young white child read those words. They sank deep into his heart.

This was Frederick’s first sighting of the dark and dirty sentiment at the core of a white supremacist ideology that is still gnawing at America from the inside out, building libraries in small white towns with schools and stores for home owners while renting apartments to African-Americans in urban zones with schools starved for light and hope. But it didn’t work in his case. The child slave discovered unstained young white children in Baltimore who could read, and they worked with him from where the lady left off. There was no Dick and Jane, no fat cat sitting on a tan mat, no green eggs, no ham. They helped Frederick learn to improve as a reader—peer tutoring—much like spoiled baby Bobby helped the blonde boy to improve his guitar playing. What goes around comes around. Frederick kept his development as a reader and writer a closely guarded secret.

The blonde boy began to try his hand at writing stories. In his classroom he had access to paper and pencils; his teachers provided him with writing utensils, with which he pinned fanciful stories, captured butterflies, that no eyes would ever read. As he started fifth grade, he had a sizable stack of manuscripts, all in pencil, all smudged, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Around that time he stumbled upon an advertisement in the library for a typewriter. His birthday was just around the corner.

The story of the life and fate of this typewriter, purchased after a hell of a drunken uproar in the kitchen one night, is well beyond the scope of this post. But the meeting up with Frederick Douglass in the library inspired the boy. He’d experienced an oscillation between hostility and tearful drunken embraces with his father, a man born in Kentucky, barely schooled, barely literate, hard drinking, and imbued with a deep mistrust of schools, teachers, smart guys, and book learning. What the hell does that boy need with a typewriter? On one hand, his father, Shep, gave him a strong taste for music—it was his father who got drunk on the weekends and played Kentucky music when the stars came out at night on rough and tumble stringed instruments (Rattler was a blind old dog, blind as he could be… every night ‘bout supper time you’d swear that dog could see… Here Rattler here, here Rattler here… Called Rattler from the barn, here Rattler here…). Long before he started school, the boy could pick out a mean C and D pattern and run it on back to G quick enough for any banjo picker.

On the other, his mother stood up for him when he reached pivot points, made sure he had a practice pad and a pair of drum sticks, got him an electric guitar when Dick sat on his plastic carnival uke, smashed it to smithereens, bought him a typewriter and a dictionary to boot, Shep. The anti intellectual, anti education, anti enlightenment, anti humanist ideology that steeled Master Auld in his cruel denial of literacy to a child and co-opted his wife, another victim of white male supremacy, who became a demon after her chastisement when she caught Frederick with a page of forbidden print, had taken up root in the soul of his father coming from somewhere in the hills of Kentucky. Schooling spoils a child. Nixon, Nixon, he’s our man. Let’s throw Kennedy in the garbage can.