Of the introductory letters that begin on this page, Robert Stepto writes “In theory, each of these introductory documents should be classic guarantees written almost exclusively for a white reading public, concerned primarily and ritualistically with the white validation of a newfound black voice, and removed from the tale in such ways that the guarantee and tale vie silently and surreptitiously for control of the narrative as a whole.” (17) Even though these letters are contained within the same book, there is potential for them to compete with Douglass’s text for authorial control.
Of Garrison, Stepto writes, “His ‘Preface’ ends, not with a reference to Douglass or his tale, but with an apostrophe very much like one he would use to exhort and arouse an antislavery assembly. With the following cry Garrison hardly guarantees Douglass’s tale, but enters and reenacts his own abolitionist career instead.” (18)
Stepto notes that in light of the tension that developed between Douglass and Garrison in later years, one might be inclined to perceive a battle for authorial control between Douglass’s narrative and this prefatory letter. Yet, with reference to the passage that begins “This Narrative contains many affecting incidents,” Stepto asserts that Garrison “acknowledges the tale’s singular rhetorical power” and “remains a member of Douglass’s audience far more than he assumes the posture of a competing or superior voice” (19).
Robert Stepto maintains that because Wendell Phillips writes to Douglass as a friend, his act “implies a moral and linguistic parity between a white guarantor and black author which we haven’t seen before” (19).
Of the sentence that begins “My feet have been so cracked,” Robert Stepto writes “The pen, symbolizing the quest for literacy fulfilled, actually measures the wounds of the past, and this measuring process becomes a metaphor in and of itself for the artful composition of travail transcended” (20).
With regard to this homophones “Freeland” and “free land,” Robert Stepto says “Douglass seems to fashion these passages for both his readership and himself” (20). This suggests that if the original purpose for black writers was to prove their humanity to white people, Douglass transcends this goal, writing for his own purposes instead of just to confront the preconceptions of a skeptical white audience.
Robert Stepto writes that the internal rhyming of “‘saddened’ and ‘gladdened'” “is persuasive because it is pleasant, and because it offers the illusion of a reasoned conclusion” (21).
In response to the sentence that begins “My long-crushed spirit rose,” Stepto writes that effusive writing linked “certain slave narratives with the popular sentimental literary forms of the nineteenth century,” but that “Douglass’s passages of introspective analysis create fresh space for themselves in the American literary canon” (22).
Robert Stepto contrasts Douglass’s discussion of the sorrow songs with that of Solomon Northup. Stepto writes that while the “demands of audience and authentication” meant that Northup expressed little camaraderie with other enslaved people, Douglass’s initial characterization of the songs as “unmeaning jargon” gives way to his eventual ability to hear them differently. (22-23) Hence, Stepto suggests that Northup’s desire to make a particular impression on his white audience resulted in his characterization of himself as alienated from the people who sang black spirituals. Furthermore, Stepto’s reference to “authentication” suggests that he believed Northup thought any expression of kinship with the singers would make it harder for white readers to believe that he wrote his own tale, as if no one who was capable of writing could find anything of value in the sorrow songs.
Stepto writes about how impressive it is that Douglass apparently reproduces this pass from memory and calls it “a veritable roadsign on his path to freedom and liberty” (23-24). The pass is also a rather literal example of the idea that black people had to master written language in order to be acknowledged as people. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about the narrative of a formerly-enslaved man named James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw who watches a white man who is reading and believes the book talks to the man, telling him secrets that he then speaks aloud. Yet, when Gronnosaw stands before the book, it “says” nothing to him. In summary of the idea that the book responds to Gronniosaw’s black face with silence, Gates writes “The silent book did not reflect or acknowledge the black presence before it” (149). Because of this snub, Gates indicates that “some forty-five years later Gronniosaw writes a text that speaks his face into existence among the authors and texts of the Western tradition” (150). In light of the trope of the Talking Book and the fact that white acceptance of the idea of black peoples’ humanity was contingent upon evidence of black literacy, Douglass’s writing of a pass that could make him free is a symbolic example of a black person writing himself into human existence.
About this final passage, Stepto writes, “having traveled with Douglass through his account of his life, we arrive in Nantucket in 1841 to hear him speak. We become, along with Mr. Garrison, his audience” (25). Stepto asserts that this last rhetorical move supplants Garrison, reasserting Douglass’s control of his own story.
In light of the fact that Douglass ends his narrative by introducing a poem written by a white minister, Stepto writes, “The tables are clearly reversed: Douglass has not only controlled his personal history, but also” provided authentication for “what is conventionally a white Northerner’s validating text” (26). Lucinda H. MacKethan offers support for Stepto’s point with her own characterization, writing “Here the American slave appropriates the function and strategies of his white guarantor, authenticating the truth and the tone of a poem written by a “northern Methodist preacher” which he then inserts into the text.” Douglass supplants the white people who vouched for him before the start of his narrative by vouching for a white person at the end of his narrative. In both form and content, this literary reversal is a good example of the chiasmus that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about, the “reversal of the master’s attempt to transform a human being into a commodity” (140).
Commenting on Robert Stepto’s opinion that Douglass’s omission of the details surrounding his escape serves to authenticate his tale, Lucinda MacKethan asserts that this omission also gives the narrative greater religious significance. (As MacKethan notes, Stepto’s comments to this effect appear on p. 25 of From Behind the Veil). MacKethan writes “Although this is a perceptive interpretation of Douglass’s intentions, we might also infer that, in terms of the organizing principles of the conversion narrative paradigm, the actual physical removal would not have the inner spiritual significance of certain other events” (66).