Colloquy with Frederick Douglass


MR. DOUGLASS AND I HAD A COLLOQUY



 We agreed we had no quarrel with American  patriotism, but we felt some urgency in the need to interrogate it.  Its origins in loving a land are noble, and its origins in genocide and theft are not.  Time and again women and men who bray each July 4th that they are willing to sacrifice their lives for the land of the brave and the home of the free must be reminded of those facts.  And we asked those men and women  this year why they are not yet dead.  And they were paralyzed for an answer.



As Mr. Douglass and I re-read "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?," the address he delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852, we complimented his wisdom in not imitating Caliban, his directness in calling reason and rule of law into question, and his charity in acknowledging that people in his audience were his fellow citizens.  After all, as Mr. Douglass put it, Mr. David Walker did know what he was talking about.



We did not quibble about how  the concept of "sovereign people" becomes more abstract  as our nation ascends  into fascism.  We resorted to the consolation of philosophy to blunt the pain.  Mr. Douglass proposed that we dwell on the love and logic of Robert Hayden's sonnet "Frederick Douglass," because in that excellent poem I might discover once more why my life had not yet succeeded in "fleshing" the dream he and Hayden had in common of "the  beautiful, needful thing."  I was much humbled as Mr. Douglass sympathized with my plight in "degenerate time."



At the end of our colloquy, Mr. Douglass demanded that I remember and never forget that terrorism domestic and global does not kill hope.  It afflicts hope like a cancer for which we might find a cure.  He demanded also that I should never forget  



"Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago.  No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference.  The time was when such could be done.  Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity.  Knowledge was than confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked in darkness.  But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind."



Screwing up courage to the breaking point, I asked Mr. Douglass if the change included justice for indigenous peoples and reparations for kidnapped ones.  He glared at me most severely, saying

"No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light."  I dared not ask him why the sun refused to shine this year.





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.   July 4, 2019

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