Rachael Phillips


Frederick Douglass
F Douglass cover

Frederick Douglass: Abolitionist and Reformer

          A shriek tore the early morning quiet into fragments that lodged painfully in seven-year-old Frederick’s mind. He stirred uneasily in the rough closet that served as his bed.

            “Have mercy!” begged a young woman’s voice. “I won’t do so no more!”

            Sounds like Aunt Esther. What could be frightening her so?  Frederick wiggled out of his grain sack and peered through the cracks between the boards in the closet door.

            His tall, beautiful aunt stood on a bench, her hands bound tightly and fastened to one of the joists where hams were hung. A bloody welt spanned her smooth brown shoulders that had never known her master’s whip.

            Until now.

            Captain Aaron Anthony, known to his slaves as “Old Master,” deliberately adjusted his blue cowskin, a whip made of dried ox hide that curved in the air like a scorpion’s tail as he swung it again.

            And again.

            And again.

            Frederick hugged the grain bag, crushing his thumbs into his ears; the agony of his aunt’s screams and Old Master’s curses clawed at him like the black swamp panther in his nightmares.

            “I told you to leave that Roberts nigger alone. Didn’t I?”

            “I won’t never see him again!”

            Crack.

            “Master, please, please. . . .”

            Crack.

            Profanity streamed from the enraged old man’s mouth; the more poor Esther pleaded, the angrier he became. Frederick’s skinny limbs trembled.

            I’m next, he thought. Old Master knows where I sleep.

            Days seemed to pass before the hellish song of rage and pain finally ceased.  Frederick slowly raised his head. Old Master yanked Esther’s limp hands down from the meat hook; the girl’s slim body swayed. He shoved her out the door.

            “Go work in the field today, whore! I won’t have such in my kitchen!”

            The old man seemed as spent as his victim. Sweat dripped from his stringy hair and sparse gray beard. He wiped the blood from the gaily colored cowhide and limped back to his own bedroom.

            Frederick lay motionless in the closet long after Old Master left the room. Even when Aunt Katy, the slave who ran the kitchen, began to fry bacon for her master’s breakfast, the small, golden-skinned boy tried to stifle his shivering breaths. Aunt Katy would not miss him if he did not appear at the large trough of cornmeal porridge on the floor, where the slave children gathered like baby pigs. He would stay in his closet until Old Master, the plantation overseer, left to accompany Colonel Lloyd, the owner of the vast estate, on his morning rounds.

            God, who lived way up in the sky, was good, Frederick had been told.  He made everyone; He made white people to be masters and black people to be slaves. He knew what was best for everybody. 1

             “But it was not good!” Frederick cried. “It was not good that old Master whipped poor Esther and made her scream!” Beautiful Esther, with her ripe-blackberry eyes and musical laugh, who told Frederick and the other children stories when Aunt Katy was off cursing somebody—it was not good that the Old Master should hurt Esther!     

            Besides, thought Frederick, how did people know that God made black people to be slaves? Did they go up in the sky and learn it? Or did He come down and tell them so? 2

            “I never shall forget it [the whipping] whilst I remember anything....” Frederick later wrote in his first autobiography. “It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.” 3

 

   

 Condensed from Frederick Douglass:  Abolitionist and Reformer

 

by Rachael Phillips

 

Reprinted by permission of Barbour Publishing

 

 

1 Frederick Douglass. My Bondage and My Freedom. Autobiographies. Ed. by Literary Classics of the United States. (New York: Library of America, 1994 [1855]), 180.

 
2 Ibid., 178.

 
3 Frederick Douglass. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Autobiographies. Ed. by Literary Classics of the United States. (New York: Library of America, 1994 [1845]), 18.