“Surround yourself with people who have
instilled hope in you.”
This was a piece of
advice I received early in my professional career.
Whether at home or
in my study, I was encouraged to place pictures of those I can turn to when I’m
in need of inspiration and courage.
On the wall in my
study hang photographs of three people who remind me that this vast work in
which I participate began long before I arrived, and will continue well after I’m
gone. Each hangs in its own frame, as a reminder that their stories are their
own. Even so, collectively, these stories intersect the hopeful vision of what
humanity can become.
In one of these
frames hangs the portrait of former slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass.
There is perhaps no greater story of overcoming oppression, injustice, and
imprisonment.
As a slave Douglass
was equated with ‘things,’ like
cows, pigs, or oxen. These ‘things’
were property, and so was Douglass.
Slaves resisted this categorization by appealing to their masters when
overseers were unnecessarily violent or abusive. If their masters responded
with compassion in one situation, the assumption was that similar treatment for
other slaves would follow. This compassion acknowledged and therefore humanized
slaves; this was something that the system of slavery could not afford in order
to remain effective.
Douglass’s
formative moment of self-discovery was his personal resistance to an overseer,
which Douglass describes as his last flogging.
This scuffle ended with Douglass drawing blood from his overseer, rather
than the other way around. Following this act of resistance, Douglass was never
flogged again.
Even more
importantly, this incident was the turning point in Douglass’ ‘life
as a slave.’
“It rekindled in my breast these moldering embers of liberty; it brought up my Baltimore dreams, and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW.”[1]
Through this
experience, Douglass experienced a selfhood resurrection ‘from
the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heave of comparative freedom.’ While
still physically a slave, Douglass recovered his personhood, and began to
experience his true identity as a ‘somebody.’
All of us are
somebody’s. Like Douglass, all of us have a
story to tell. While our struggles may not be as extreme or dramatic as
Douglass’s, we glean from his narrative that we
all posses the strength to somehow rise above those things, which keep our true
selves at bay.
Perhaps some of us
have already been liberated.
Others among us
stand on shaking legs, as we search for the courage to be somebody.
Frederick Douglass
hangs on my wall not just because of his role in shaping American history, but
also his journey engaging the necessary work of being emancipated from the
age-old lie that he could be only a slave and nothing else.
Douglass hangs on
my wall as a reminder that I can
that you can
that we can
together,
be liberated into the
freedom of our true identity.
Douglass hangs as a
reminder of the profound belief in human equality and the hope that everyone
may discover his/her true self.
So I ask, friends:
who reminds of you of this in your space?
[1] Douglass, Frederick. “Autobiographies: Narrative
of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave; My bondage and my
freedom; Life and times of Frederick Douglass.” Ed.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1994),
286.
