I have been working with one of my students on African American poetry. Interesting facts I’ve learned about Frederick Douglass:
1) He was considered one of the most highly regarded African Americans in the 19th century.
2) He was a brilliant writer, speaker, social reformer, and statesman.
3) He was 1/2 white. His father was a slave owner and his mother was a slave.
4) He was born a slave and gained his freedom with the help of his first wife, Anna Murray, who was born a freedwoman.
5) He had several sons and 2 daughters with Anna. One of his daughters died at age 10. His other daughter was Rosetta, whom the poem below is addressed to.
6) Douglass was the first African American to be on a ticket as Vice President of the United States. His running mate was a woman, Victoria Woodhull, who ran for President on the Equal Rights Party ticket.
7) After Frederick Douglass’s wife died, he married a white woman, Helen Pitts, who was the editor of a radical feminist newspaper. They remained married until his death 11 years later.
8) Douglass’s children were upset by his marriage to Helen.
African American poet Evie Shockley wrote the persona poem below. Shockley is a contemporary poet who also teaches at Rutgers University.
from The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass BY EVIE SHOCKLEY June 5, 1892
Dear Daughter, Can you be fifty-three this month? I still look for you to peek around my door as if you’d discovered a toy you thought gone for good, ready at my smile to run up and press your fist into my broken palm. But your own girls have outgrown such games, and I cannot pilfer back time I spent pursuing Freedom. Fair to you, to your brothers, your mother? Hardly.
But what other choice did I have? What sham, what shabby love could I offer you, so long as Thomas Auld held the law over my head? And when the personal threat was ended, whose eyes could mine enter without shame, if turning toward my wife and children meant turning my back?
Your mother’s eyes stare out at me through yours, of late. You think I didn’t love her, that my quick remarriage makes a Gertrude of me, a corseted Hamlet of you. You’re as wrong as you are lucky. Had Anna Murray had your education as a girl, my love for her would have been as passionate as it was grateful. But she died illiterate, when I had risked my life to master language. The pleasures of book and pen retain the thrill of danger even now, and you may understand why Ottilie Assing, come into our house to translate me into German, could command so many hours, years, of my time—or, as you would likely say, of your mother’s time.
Forgive me, Rosetta, for broaching such indelicate subjects, but as my eldest child and only living daughter, I want you to feel certain that Helen became the new Mrs. Douglass because of what we shared in sheaves of my papers: let no one persuade you I coveted her skin. I am not proud of how I husbanded your mother all those years, but marriage, too, is a peculiar institution. I could not have stayed so unequally yoked so long, without a kind of Freedom in it. Anna accepted this, and I don’t have to tell you that her lot was better and she, happier, than if she’d squatted with some other man in a mutual ignorance.
Perhaps I will post, rather that burn, this letter, this time. I’ve written it so often, right down to these closing lines, in which I beg you to be kinder, much kinder, to your step-mother. You two are of an age to be sisters, and of like temperament—under other circumstances, you might have found Friendship in each other.
With regards to your husband—I am, as ever, your loving father—
Frederick Douglass Evie Shockley, “from The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglas” from the new black. Copyright © 2011 by Evie Shockley. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011)
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