Frederick Douglass Ten Thousand Recollection

Notes of comparison: Jefferson and Douglass
“Ten Thousand Recollections”
In Query XIV from the “Notes on the State of Virginia”, which was part of our reading from an earlier lecture, Thomas Jefferson engages the question of “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state” once they are freed. Put another way, the question becomes” why ex-slaves once freed must be colonized (e.g. kicked out of the country). The first reason he gives is: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites;” in other words, plain old racism. A second answer is more relevant to our reading of Frederick Douglass. Jefferson writes ominously about the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained.” The unstated suggestion is that “the blacks” once freed will exact a heavy (one might add, just) revenge

if they remain on the North American continent in proximity to whites.
Earning One’s Stripes
The “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” serves not just as a telling of his own escape to freedom but as a compendium of the “recollections” that Jefferson feared and the injuries that blacks sustain.

The sanguinary and horrifying whipping with the “cowskin” particularly -- are so commonplace that the phrase “earning one’s stripes” takes on a bloody and rueful meaning in slave culture.
Incidentally, the use by Jefferson of the indefinite article when discussing “the” blacks is an instance of linguistic racism and alienation that persists to this day.
“My father was a white man” versus “Real distinctions which nature has made”
In Notes, Jefferson’s ever-observing and pseudo-scientific eye is fond of making unfavorable comparison between Blacks and the Whites (unfavorable to Blacks, of course). Yet the fact that children were often born the product of a black women and a white man (primarily through rape) belies the notion that Jefferson’s “real distinctions” were valid. That Jefferson’s household was literarily “littered” with mixed-race children in his own image makes this fact particularly

poignant
The Narrative and Eco-criticism (Misc Notes)
1) PLANT-ation
I like Cheryll Glotfelty's simple definition of “ecocriticism” as quoted on the Purdue OWL site – that ecocriticism is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment”. Using this rubric, events in the Narrative offers some interesting illuminations. First most of the narrative concerns a Plant-tation, the root of which we typically forget: the object of the plantation (as a center of profit) is to grow plants and animals (and humans) then exploit and eventually discard them.
2) Forbidden Fruit and Tar Baby

Douglass recounts that “Scarcely a day passed, during the summer, but that some slave had to take the lash for stealing fruit from Colonel Lloyd’s “large and finely cultivated garden”. To keep the “swarms of hungry boys” away, tar was applied to the fence surrounding the garden. “This plan worked well; the slaves became as fearful of tar as of the lash. They seemed to realize the impossibility of touching tar without being defiled.” Perhaps, this is one of the origins of Tar-Baby?

3) “Indelicate Inspection” and LIVE-stock
Part of the degradation of slavery was to be treated as property, no better (and sometimes) less than livestock. In Chapter VIII of the narrative discuss, when his master dies, Douglass recounts that, as property, slaves were subjected to “indelicate inspections” where “Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine.” In terms of eco-criticism, this stands out as an instance of human degradation of course but also as an example of what one might call animal-racism: degrading the natural world to prove a political point.
In sum, as Douglass narrative makes clear, the worse horror of slavery was it “dehumanizing character” and “soul-killing effects”. As Douglass lays bare this was accomplished through the destruction of the family unit -- one of the basic aspects of the human nature and society; also, the destruction of the human spirit through psychological terror and the perpetuation of ignorance and despair.