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A review by colin_cox
The Heroic Slave (an African American Heritage Book) by Frederick Douglass
4.0
Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave is a fine entry in a genre of literature from the 19th century that dramatizes a then real-life slave rebellion aboard The Creole, a slave ship that, post rebellion, docked in England, freeing nearly 20 slaves. I much prefer "A Dash for Liberty" by Pauline E. Hopkins, but this is not to suggest that The Heroic Slave is without merit. What Douglass offers that Hopkins, by contrast, does not, is a clear and compelling articulation of freedom.
Douglass's hero, Madison Washington, casts freedom as inherently collective. Madison successfully flees to Canada but returns to the deep South to liberate his enslaved wife. In attempting to secure her freedom, she dies, and Madison's former master returns him to slavery. Regarding his motivations, he says, "I could not be free with the galling thought that my poor wife was still a slave. With her in slavery, my body, not my spirit, was free" (38). Here, Madison articulates how any single individual's freedom is contingent on collective freedom. That is to say, I am as free as my neighbor, and if my neighbor is not free, then neither am I. This may strike many as incorrect since we live in a moment that overemphasizes the importance of the individual relative to the collective. This is where, for example, the lesson of COVID-19 is so important. I have the freedom to leave my home, dine in restaurants, and purchase consumer goods, but there is nothing I as an individual can do to protect myself against contracting COVID-19 because that power lies with everyone else. In the same way that I am only free from the prospect of poverty when poverty as a possibility is eradicated, so too goes COVID-19. This is precisely Douglass's point: Madison is free not when he flees slavery for a place like Canada where slavery does not exist, but when slavery itself, when slavery as an idea and ontological possibility, ceases to exist.
Douglass's hero, Madison Washington, casts freedom as inherently collective. Madison successfully flees to Canada but returns to the deep South to liberate his enslaved wife. In attempting to secure her freedom, she dies, and Madison's former master returns him to slavery. Regarding his motivations, he says, "I could not be free with the galling thought that my poor wife was still a slave. With her in slavery, my body, not my spirit, was free" (38). Here, Madison articulates how any single individual's freedom is contingent on collective freedom. That is to say, I am as free as my neighbor, and if my neighbor is not free, then neither am I. This may strike many as incorrect since we live in a moment that overemphasizes the importance of the individual relative to the collective. This is where, for example, the lesson of COVID-19 is so important. I have the freedom to leave my home, dine in restaurants, and purchase consumer goods, but there is nothing I as an individual can do to protect myself against contracting COVID-19 because that power lies with everyone else. In the same way that I am only free from the prospect of poverty when poverty as a possibility is eradicated, so too goes COVID-19. This is precisely Douglass's point: Madison is free not when he flees slavery for a place like Canada where slavery does not exist, but when slavery itself, when slavery as an idea and ontological possibility, ceases to exist.