Eileen Interviews Sidney Morrison, Author of Frederick Douglass: A Novel
“If we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art.’’—Hilary Mantel
Historical novels and fictionalized biographies remain somewhat controversial—some readers disparagingly look down on their authors as the black sheep of historians. But no one would deny that as a genre, historical fiction is immensely popular—arguably more so than its nonfiction sibling.
And from a storytelling perspective, it’s easy to understand why so many authors relish grounding their works in historical settings: it offers the opportunity to reexamine myths, characters, and themes that seem trapped in time and worthy of a fresh look.
In today’s interview with Eileen Gonzalez, Sidney Morrison talks expansively about the advantages he found in fictionalizing parts of the life of Frederick Douglass, especially his personal and family life, because Douglass left so little to work with. Eileen, as you might guess, wrote the Foreword review of Sidney’s Frederick Douglass: A Novel, and was ever so happy to participate in this reviewer-author conversation.
Frederick Douglass was, as you yourself acknowledge, a great man but still a human being, with all of the faults and shortcomings that implies. Do you think that telling his story in novel form, as opposed to a more conventional biography, allowed you to more openly explore all aspects of who he was?
YES. The key word in your question is the word “explore.” I wanted to investigate the emotional world of a complicated man who was a public figure unwilling to share much of his private life. Thankfully, Douglass was a prolific writer, and in his speeches, editorials, and letters he revealed a great deal of his opinions about a variety of subjects. But like most 19th-century men, he was reticent to write about his personal life, especially about his family. Biographers must use documented evidence to assert claims, or they can speculate when documentation is absent. The novel, however, allows for a broader, even deeper exploration of human character.
As Hilary Mantel, one of my literary models and heroines, once said in a lecture about the uses of history and the novel, “They are not there to allow you to escape, but to give you information about the human condition. History, biography, and novels in particular lend you experience that is not yet your own.”
Explore what you don’t know, she insisted.
The novel form thus gave me permission to examine the range and depths of Douglass’s character, but in that examination, I was able to analyze my own character and the human condition with all of its stirring and troubling complexity, especially that gap between what characters do and what they think and feel. That gap is where I have the most fun. For example, what did Anna think and feel when her husband insisted that his female, white friends work and live in their house? How did Douglass react privately when she challenged his arrangements? The answers are the stuff of drama, and I filled pages with imagined dialogue.
Douglass had a complex relationship with those who enslaved him. While he was unequivocally antislavery, he was willing to meet and even reconcile with those who had horribly mistreated him and his family. What do you think it says about Frederick Douglass as a person that he was willing to offer and accept olive branches in this way?
Frederick Douglass admitted he was an angry youth and adult, and I believe he had a right to be angry, given how he was exploited, abused, and mistreated. He also witnessed almost unimaginable cruelty, but he refused to allow his anger to destroy him. It became righteous anger, focusing his will, driving his ambition.
But Douglass realized the insufficiency of righteous anger. It could not heal his soul, or the soul of the nation. Only empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation could do this, and after the Civil War he reached out to his enslavers despite severe criticism because he understood that slavery, bigotry, and white supremacy damaged everyone. Imperfect, he still desired to be a model, the representative man who challenged himself to do what needed to be done, “to bind the nation’s wounds,” as Lincoln had urged, in a personal way. This was not easy, especially when his enslavers were, as I believe, family. But Douglass was willing to acknowledge his debts to them, how they had contributed to his intellectual development, and even saved his life.
As a biracial man, he also believed he represented the future unity of racial America. There is a nobility of purpose, an expansion of the heart and mind that make him a great rather than mean, tribal, petty, and vindictive man. He could have been the latter, but he chose “the better angel” of his nature. He demonstrated the redemptive power of choice.
You mention that reconstructing the life and thoughts of Douglass’s wife, Anna Murray, who was illiterate and so left behind no papers of her own, was your “most successful creation.” Were there any special challenges you encountered when recreating Anna Murray? Did anything about her personality seem to come naturally to you?
Douglass wrote three books about his life and gave his wife of forty-four years three sentences altogether. He said more about her in his private letters, but today we know most details of her history and temperament because their daughter wrote a short pamphlet, My Mother as I Recall Her (1903), after the death of her parents. I also used the models of my grandmother, my mother and her sisters, and my sister—all strong, opinionated, determined women—to forge a portrait of a strong woman who, as a tough disciplinarian, controlled her domestic world. The letters of Anna’s children give glimpses of their mother, but I had to rely on my own imagination and emotions to explore Anna’s feelings about Frederick’s friendships with Julia Griffiths and Ottilie Assing.
As a writer, I felt obligated to feel empathy for Anna but also felt empathy for Douglass, Julia, and Ottilie, constantly asking, what if, how would you feel? This attempt to understand motivated me. “If we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art,” said Hilary Mantel, who asked, “What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?”
In order to do this, I had to immerse myself into the recorded lives of 19th-century women, white and black, free and enslaved. This is the hard, immersive work of research that can lead to hearing these women speak to you in dreams, in imagined dialogue. You become them, and then you transcribe their thoughts, describe their actions, note their words. Anna’s fierce devotion to family came naturally to me. I have that devotion too.
You also talk about how Douglass was such a prolific writer and speaker that you couldn’t include everything you wanted to in the final book. Was there a particular quote you had to cut that stands out in your memory? If so, what about the piece drew you in, and what about it made you decide to cut it?
Yes, there was a particular quote I wanted to include, and it is, I believe, his most quoted: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both a moral and physical one, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Part of a speech given on August 3, 1857, these lines powerfully illuminate the nature of power and the uses of agitation. It rings true; it describes history, our current moment, and the future. It remains pertinent. Douglass discussed the implications of this insight throughout his life and changed his thinking about how to bring about equality and justice. However, these lines came in a long speech commemorating the 23rd anniversary of British West Indian Emancipation. Most of the address was a history of British efforts toward emancipation, and in the middle of it he uttered his now famous words. At the end he apologized for running out of time after resuming a boring recitation of names and historical facts, an unfortunate anticlimax after saying such stirring words earlier.
I always intended to include these words, dramatizing the speech of 1857, or using the words in a private discussion about agitation and power. But because I was scrupulous about chronology, the inclusion of that quote served no dramatic purpose during the summer of 1857, when the novel focused on the preoccupations of Douglass’s summer guest, Ottilie Assing. Yes, she heard the speech in Canandaigua, New York, but I had these questions: did hearing these words add to the drama, illuminate her character, or move the story forward? My answers were “No,” and so those wonderful words had to go. In fact, the summer of 1857 was reduced to one paragraph with no quotes at all.
After reading and writing so much about Frederick Douglass, what, in your opinion, is his single greatest contribution to American history and posterity?
With the help of others, Black and white, he created his own identity and accomplished much. But when I think of his greatest gift, the gift of language, and his belief that words can change the world, then his greatest single contribution to American history and posterity is his life story, producing the greatest autobiography of the 19th century, if not the 20th and 21st century: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, a passionate and eloquent expression of aspiration, hope, and the love of freedom.
Douglass retold and updated his life story, but of his three autobiographies, the Narrative is the shortest and the most powerful. Written by a man with no formal education only seven years after his escape from slavery, the book’s eloquence and immediacy match the achievement of contemporary Americans known for single works: Thoreau for Walden, Melville for Moby Dick, Hawthorne for The Scarlet Letter, and Harriet Beecher Stowe for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As an indictment against slavery and for its impact on the antislavery movement both here and abroad, Uncle Tom’s Cabin surpasses the Narrative, but the Narrative reveals truths that Stowe can only approximate. Douglass’s life story became a work of art. And if books survive, his book will be read as one of the finest testaments to freedom, a universal desire.
Eileen Gonzalez
