The Black Vernacular

Paul Redfield

Professor Chris Wu

English 2202, Journal #1

Sep 5, 2012

The Black Vernacular Form in Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845)

Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is within the slave narrative tradition of the double-voice as Douglass simultaneously portrays the cruelty of human bondage and builds up him as a self-made man in his reshaping of his self-identity and pursuit of freedom. Douglass's pursuit for freedom and identity is firmly connected with his pursuit of literacy. However, black oral tradition is also very important in Douglass's struggle for freedom as he also applies the black vernacular, particularly black spirituals, in the literary form of Narrative.

Spirituals in the slavery era are an important black cultural form to convey the deep emotions of the slaves. Spirituals contain an encoded language to utter the craving for freedom and to provide the blacks with psychic freedom when they are in physical bondage. Douglass in Narrative also notifies an underlying double voice of black songs as the crucial factor to determine their meaning:

[The slaves] would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out--if not in the word, in the sound; --and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.... This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. (23-4, my ellipsis)

The ostensible "unmeaning jargon" esoteric to the Standard English speakers is an encoded and self-sufficient language that is "full of meaning" to black slaves "within the circle" like Douglass (24). Meaning, as Douglass states, lies not so much in the content as in the sound by which his fellow slaves express their feelings toward their suffering and the spiritual bankruptcy of the oppressors. The songs, for Douglass, tell "a tale of woe" and transmit a message of "prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish" (24). These emotional-stirring Sorrow Songs validate black people's profound and complex humanity in opposition to slave owners' loss of compassion.

Furthermore,