Frederick Douglass On How Slave Owners Used Food As A Weapon Of Control
American writer, abolitionist and orator Frederick
Douglass edits a journal at his desk, late 1870s. Douglass was acutely
conscious of being a literary witness to the inhumane institution of
slavery he had escaped as a young man. He made sure to document his life
in not one but three autobiographies.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
President Trump recently described Frederick Douglass as "an example
of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and
more, I notice." The president's muddled tense – it came out sounding as
if the 19th-century abolitionist were alive with a galloping Twitter
following – provoked some mirth on social media. But the spotlight on
one of America's great moral heroes is a welcome one.
Douglass
was born on a plantation in Eastern Maryland in 1817 or 1818 – he did
not know his birthday, much less have a long-form birth certificate – to
a black mother (from whom he was separated as a boy) and a white father
(whom he never knew and who was likely the "master" of the house). He
was parceled out to serve different members of the family. His childhood
was marked by hunger and cold, and his teen years passed in one long
stretch of hard labor, coma-like fatigue, routine floggings, hunger, and
other commonplace tortures from the slavery handbook.
At 20, he ran away to New York and started his new life as an
anti-slavery orator and activist. Acutely conscious of being a literary
witness to the inhumane institution he had escaped, he made sure to
document his life in not one but three autobiographies. His memoirs
bring alive the immoral mechanics of slavery and its weapons of control.
Chief among them: food.
Hunger was the young Fred's faithful
boyhood companion. "I have often been so pinched with hunger, that I
have fought with the dog – 'Old Nep' – for the smallest crumbs that fell
from the kitchen table, and have been glad when I won a single crumb in
the combat," he wrote in
My Bondage and My Freedom. "Many
times have I followed, with eager step, the waiting-girl when she went
out to shake the table cloth, to get the crumbs and small bones flung
out for the cats."
As a young enslaved boy in Baltimore, Frederick Douglass
bartered pieces of bread for lessons in literacy. His teachers were
white neighborhood kids, who could read and write but had no food. At
20, he ran away to New York and started his new life as an anti-slavery
orator and activist.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
"Never mind, honey—better day comin,' " the elders would say to
solace the orphaned boy. It was not just the family pets the child had
to compete with. One of the most debasing scenes in Douglass' first
memoir,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes the way he ate:
"Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush.
It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the
ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so
many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells,
others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with
spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the
best place; and few left the trough satisfied."
Douglass
makes it a point to nail the boastful lie put out by slaveholders – one
that persists to this day – that "their slaves enjoy more of the
physical comforts of life than the peasantry of any country in the
world."
In truth, rations consisted of a monthly allowance of a
bushel of third-rate corn, pickled pork (which was "often tainted") and
"poorest quality herrings" – barely enough to sustain grown men and
women through their backbreaking labors in the field. Not all the
enslaved, however, were so ill-fed. Waiting at the "glittering table of
the great house" – a table loaded with the choicest meats, the bounty of
the Chesapeake Bay, platters of fruit, asparagus, celery and
cauliflower, cheese, butter, cream and the finest wines and brandies
from France – was a group of black servants chosen for their loyalty and
comely looks. These glossy servants constituted "a sort of black
aristocracy," wrote Douglass. By elevating them, the slave owner was
playing the old divide-and-rule trick, and it worked. The difference,
Douglass wrote, "between these favored few, and the sorrow and
hunger-smitten multitudes of the quarter and the field, was immense."
The
"hunger-smitten multitudes" did what they could to supplement their
scanty diets. "They did this by hunting, fishing, growing their own
vegetables – or stealing," says
Frederick Douglass Opie,
professor of history and foodways at Babson College, who, of course, is
named after the activist. "In their moral universe, they felt, 'You
stole me, you mistreated me, therefore to steal from you is quite
normal.' " If caught, say, eating an orange from the owner's abundant
fruit garden, the punishment was flogging. When even this proved futile,
a tar fence was erected around the forbidden fruit. Anyone whose body
bore the merest trace of tar was brutally whipped by the chief gardener.
But
if deprivation was one form of control, a far more insidious and
malicious one was the annual Christmas holidays, where gluttony and
binge drinking was almost mandatory. During those six days, the enslaved
could do what they chose, and while a few spent time with distant
family or hunting or working on their homes, most were happy to engage
in playing sports, "fiddling, dancing, and drinking whiskey; and this
latter mode of spending the time was by far the most agreeable to the
feelings of our masters. ... It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk
at Christmas." To encourage whiskey benders, the "masters" took bets to
see who could drink the most whiskey, thus "getting whole multitudes to
drink to excess."
Frederick Douglass, circa 1879.
George Warren/National Archives
The nefarious aim of these revels was to equate dissipation with
liberty. At the end of the holidays, sickened by the excessive alcohol,
the hungover men felt "that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to
rum." And so, Douglass wrote, "we staggered up from the filth of our
wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field – feeling, upon
the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a
belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery."
Douglass
sounds even angrier at these obligatory orgies – he calls them "part and
parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery" – than at
other, more direct forms of cruelty.
"It was a form of bread
and circus," says Opie. "Slaves were also given intoxicated drinks, so
they would have little time to think of escaping. If you didn't take it,
you were considered ungrateful. It was a form of social control."
When
he was about 8 years old, Douglass was sent to Baltimore, which proved
to be a turning point. The mistress of the house gave him the most
precious gift in his life – she taught him the alphabet. But when her
husband forbade her to continue – teaching slaves to read and write was a
crime – she immediately stopped his lessons.
It was too late.
The little boy had been given a peek into the transformative world of
words and was desperate to learn. He did so by bartering pieces of bread
– he had free access to it; in Baltimore, the urban codes of slavery
were less harsh than in rural Maryland – for lessons in literacy. His
teachers were white neighborhood kids, who could read and write but had
no food. "This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins,
who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge,"
Douglass wrote in one of the most moving lines in
Narrative.
"This
also shows the ingenuity of enslaved people," says Opie, "and how they
tricked and leveraged whatever little they had to get ahead."
Today,
when one thinks of Frederick Douglass, the image that springs to mind
is of a distinguished, gray-haired man in a double-breasted suit. It is
difficult to imagine him as a half-starved boy garbed in nothing but a
coarse, knee-length shirt, sleeping on the floor in a corn sack he had
stolen. As he wrote in
Narrative, "My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes."
It
is a heartbreaking image – redeemed by one little word, "pen." A pen
that he wielded with passion, clarity and irony to gash the life out of
slavery.
Nina Martyris is a journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.
