Beware, writes Douglass in Narratives , of the slaveholder whose raison d' È? tre is to serve a divine entity. "Where I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that of enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For all the slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst."
Mean, base, cruel, and cowardly!
Douglass never had a religious slaveholder. But, like us today, he lived and worked in a country proclaiming itself a "community of the religionists."
In his famous "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" address, Douglass calls attention to the nation's hypocrisy by pointing to the work of white abolitionists, risking their freedom to free enslaved people and the work of bounty hunters honoring a Christian belief in the superiority of whites, and therefore, entitling the hunters of human beings the right to capture and return African Americans to slavery.
Where is the logic in an idea that holds that freedom is divinely conferred by a godhead upon some but not others? Douglass doesn't see it! Those others , African Americans, are either enslaved beings or criminals, laborers by law or fugitives, by law. And yet, Douglass understands, the narrative of American innocence, saturated with religious rhetoric, condemns the runaway or the fugitive. In My Bondage and My Freedom , Douglass's second memoir, he argues against the idea that if an enslaved person desires freedom from the tyranny of plantation, then that individual is a "criminal." Truly innocent people who sacrifice their maintaining an idea of freedom, who are the brave for doing so, are, in the narrative of innocence, "criminal." This idea is logical?
But then, what is logic when this narrative of American innocence takes precedence over reality? But Douglass asks anyway: How is it possible to establish a law (The Fugitive Slave Act 1850) and a system for the return of human beings to a terrorizing situation in which they will be punished, if not murdered, and still proclaim America a nation of innocence?
But then Douglass hears and witnesses the "power" of "public opinion." A product of the narrative of innocence, public opinion helps maintain the racial hierarchical orderat ground level. Douglass listens to "the man on the street." Even the women attending abolitionist's meetings! T he fight for freedom, a true notion of freedom, entails the right of the enslaved to run from the "maledictions" of a narrative of enslavement, Douglass writes. To run from the plantation in the actual is to run from the narrative of innocence which fuels public opinion as to what is really happening in America in the darkness of its "underground railroad."
Over a hundred years later, Toni Morrison will recall how it must have been on the run as a fugitive. In Beloved, Sethe, an escapee from Sweet Home and Schoolteacher, "is tired, scared maybe, and maybe even lost. Most of all she is by herself and inside her is another baby she has to think about too. Behind her dogs, perhaps guns probably; and certainly mossy teeth. She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it, but in the day every sound is a shot or a tracker's quiet step."
And indeed Sethe recalls her "recklessness" when Amy Denver (the white girl who finds her in the woods) speaks to her. Amy's eyes were those of a "fugitive's." Her boldness, on the other hand, was borne of "desperation." As even family-less, runaway white girl knew, between the two of them, it was Sethe who was in real trouble. No one was after her, Amy, but the bounty hunters, she reminds Sethe, could "'cut your head off.'"
Up ahead, is freedom, nonetheless. Her children have headed this way already. Along side them, in Ohio, there is freedom.
In the north, Douglass looks around for a church to attend and settles, he writes in My Bondage, on the Elm Street Methodist Church. It appeared problematic from the beginning as Douglass recalls observing "the bearing of the colored members," a handful, forced to sit in the designated "gallery" of the church. For a people who suffered enslavement, to come north and now be required to oblige the segregation policieseven while partaking of "the blood of Christ"--with white Americans was "humiliating," Douglass declares.
Douglass records that he did rise up from his seatbut he walked right out of that church! "I honestly went there with a view to joining that body. I found it impossible to respect the religious profession of any who were under the dominion of this wicked prejudice."
Douglass hadn't been aware of the "powerful influence of that religious body in favor of the enslavement of my race." Nor had he known "that the northern churches could be responsible for the conduct of southern churches." He had yet to learn, he writes, that his "duty" was to steer clear of the churchnot just the slaveholding church but that of Christianity as a whole.
But Douglass attempts to join other churches only to experience "the same" results. "I attached myself to a small body of colored Methodists-- He remained for many a "seasons of peace and joy," but ultimately removed himself when he learned that the church "consented to the same spirit which held my brethren in chains."
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