Frederick Douglass speaks

Jan 17, 2022

''I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear."

Douglass recalls the profound impression of the songs he heard his fellow slaves singing in his youth, growing up on plantations in the South.

Now read on:

[The songs] told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.”

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

What's interesting about this passage...

This is an extraordinarily eloquent tribute to the power of music to express emotion, in this case the most profound sorrow and despair. For Douglass, the songs sung by his fellow slaves conveyed their experience in ways that transcended spoken language, and he describes the impact of these songs from two perspectives: that of the small child trapped in the 'inner circle' of slavery, and that of a grown, free man recalling his earlier self. The sense of transcendence is there, too, in this dual perspective, highlighting how much hardship he himself has overcome. His description of the impact that the songs had on him is made even more powerful by the sense of self-command and emotional restraint that characterizes not just this moment but Douglass's entire narrative--an approach that was essential so that anti-abolitionists could not dismiss his testimony as the product of an unbalanced, vengeful mind but a thoroughly sober, reliable, and rational eye-witness to the atrocities he describes.

About the author

Frederick Douglass (1817?-1895) was born into slavery, and suffered extreme violence and brutality at the hands of several masters. He escaped to New York in 1838, and in 1841 began lecturing on the horrors and cruelty of slavery in order to raise awareness and further the abolitionist cause. He spoke so eloquently that some people doubted that he had really been enslaved, so he published his first autobiographical account, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845, and further accounts his life in 1855 and 1881. Douglass is one of the most famous writers of slave narratives; others include Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, John Brown, and Elizabeth Keckly.

To read alongside...

W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), one of the most influential books on race ever published. Du Bois too foregrounds the significance of songs for enslaved peoples, but he does so very differently from Douglass, placing brief images of the musical notation of selected songs at the heading of each section of his work and letting these images speak for themselves.

Toni Morrison's Beloved (1984) creates an unforgettable story about former slaves trying to live new lives while traumatized by their past. Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) reads as a vividly imaginative counterpart to slave narratives like Douglass's.

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