THE STREET WHERE I FIND MYSELF - AND SO MANY OTHERS - THIS FOURTH OF JULY IN 2023
FREDERICK DOUGLASS IS MORE THAN JUST A BOULEVARD IN HARLEM
I have written a lot recently here and on social media about my fall in Paris and breaking my shoulder and the surgery and healing and recovery that has followed back in America that alas feels more and more less and less like home. But I have also been aware of living in comparative gratitude that the pain, though great, hasn’t been as bad as some suffer having undergone even more complicated surgeries after more severe accidents. Though slightly, frustratingly crippled so far regarding the movement of my right arm - I have only recently been able to type now using my right hand once I place it upon this keyboard - I live in the blessing of my injured knee being spared of anything other than sutures and my head, after being bloodied and bruised, having remained otherwise unscathed internally so there is an intact thus as I continue daily to do the physical and emotional work to arrive back at intact myself. The thus? I can walk and contemplate it all, the trauma and the subsequent fear that still festers within me along with the pain. It is has been bad, all of this, but it could have been so much worse.
As I put my own pain and experience with it in context, it has helped me put my pain in being a gay American this Fourth of July in context as well as this illegitimate, corrupt, bigoted political entity known as the Supreme Court followed its ruling last term asserting the government’s right to have dominion over the bodies of women as if they were nothing but childbearing chattel with rulings at the end of this term negatively gutting Affirmative Action and then in a case wholly invented to get to the result it wanted enshrined as law - i.e. the right to discriminate against LGBTQ citizens if one’s interpretation of one’s God demands one deem others less equal as if we lived in a theocracy instead of a constitutional republic that separated church and state with their edicts existing in different spheres of the personal and the public. A person’s right to discriminate against me, according to six bigoted “justices” on this corrupt unethical Court, outweighs my right to exist equally within the civic sphere of society. A few days before this latest Fourth, I was not made to feel 3/5 of a person but it was legally clear to me that I am not a citizen fully whole in my equality with others, especially those who are rabidly, evangelically right-wing with a crimped view of their “Christianity,” which mirrors that of the “justices” who accepted this ginned-up dishonest case, a view that cripples them more profoundly and societally in their un-self-acknowledged fall from grace - again like the Court’s (should one even continue to capitalize it?) - than my own graceless fall down a flight of Metro stairs in Paris.
And yet even as a white gay man, I still live in a kind of privilege - personally and historically - compared to the experiences of African Americans in this country. (America is a country founded on the evil genocide of Native Americans and built on the violent evil of the enslavement of African Americans.) I am quite aware of the deep and vast difference of the gay experience of ostracism and discrimination and inequality and the African American one; they are parallel but distinct. Indeed, my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy, is about balancing that parallelism. After Oprah Winfrey read it, she telephoned me and in our conversation she admitted she had put off reading it because she assumed it was a book about the coming of age of a little gay southern boy. “But this is a book more deeply about race,” she said. I think any memoir, if successful, is as much about the reader’s life as the author’s. But that conversation that day with Oprah was more than just about her and me; it proved to me that what I had set out to do - write a story about this country’s coming-of-age (or lack of it) though the eyes of two of its outcast classes, gays and Blacks - had reverberated with the country’s ur-reader.
(Above: In Harlem’s Frederick Douglass Community Garden. The quote: “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”)
I am staying in Harlem this month around the corner from Frederick Douglass Boulevard on the pilgrimage about which I have previously written. This morning as I walked past the Frederick Douglass Community Garden and settled in for my first cup of coffee at Common Good on the boulevard named for this great man, I pulled up his speech “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”. I only knew a few of the quotes from this oration he delivered in 1852 in Rochester, New York, at Corinthian Hall. But this morning I read the entire speech filled with erudition and eloquence and anger and both a grudging respect for history and a deeper now historical grace for which he is still known borne of ancestral grit and a kind of ecclesiastic summoning of a sense of ceremony. I have thought about it all day - especially the section in which he takes on the courts and religion and their corruptions and how white America only wants to see itself in a certain historical light, gladdened by its own false glow. Some things never change in this country.
How I longed to hear Douglass’s words from that speech spoken in his voice as he, in turn, gave voice to the multitudes who resided within him as if his oratory skills were a choral calling forth coming to rest in what I imagine to be his rousing roar, his plaintive pause, his argumentative growl, and even in the dramatically targeted I-can’t-believe-I’m-telling-you-this of his quietude, a performative thrust of trust, that could make his rapt listeners lean in and long to hear for themselves that voice that beckoned them in his presence just as it beckons still from the past on the page. There was a glamour to that presence - at one point it is said he was the most photographed man in America - and he used his star quality for the greater good. When people ask me to name the person from the past I wish I could have interviewed and about whom written a profile, I always say Frederick Douglass. All of America’s roads - race, celebrity, division, politics, culture, anger, hope, past, future - converged in him. The geography of this country still resides in the gravitational pull of his visage and his vision. He even named his newspaper he founded and edited The North Star, this man who gave voice to the nation’s need to be better. His silence in the silencing of him by those who still want to be gladdened by the false white glow of America’s past in a carefully edited, uncritical version of history now falls over its festering need not to be. And that is why I read him this morning. I needed to believe in our need to be better in the wake of these rulings by the Supreme Court that rouses the worst in us as it robes us - like it does itself - in our own ruin. I needed to turn to his voice in defiance of his silenced silence.
Within Douglass’s 1852 Fourth of July oration is this section about the ruination of his nation that he kept referring pointedly as “yours” for his audience. It is more than speechifying. It is a bit of literature - he wrote three memoirs himself - alighting like lightening in the middle of it all, scorching, electrifyingly dangerous, coming as it does between the thunderousness of the other sections. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?,” he asked. “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
…
“Behold the practical operation of … the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.
“I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming hand-bills headed ‘Cash for Negroes.’ These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.
“The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.
“In the deep, still darkness of midnight I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror. Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, today, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight.
“Is this the land your Fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win? Is this the earth whereon they moved? Are these the graves they slumber in?”
Walt Whitman, Douglass’s literary and political contemporary who poetically boasted of his own multitudes he housed inside his homosexual self, heard Douglass speak at the 1848 Free Soil party convention in Buffalo. Whitman, there as a delegate from Brooklyn, later praised Douglass’s voice in a dispatch to the borough’s Daily Times as "loud, clear and sonorous.” Whitman also famously wrote that he heard America singing just as Douglass dared to tell us of its wails. A gay man and a Black man heard parallel sounds seeking to be recognized, a cacophony that still calls out to us echoing in the 21st century from the 19th. Does hope reside in its arrival at harmonization? Or is an atonal truce what it truly seeks? All the blasted white noise of fireworks frames the day but deafens us to the need to listen more subtly to a country in the throes of lamentation.
One of your best, Kevin. Sobering. Truth.
Wow. So brilliant. So beautiful and so true. Thank you.