“This is the life story of Cudjo Lewis, as told by himself.” Zora Neale Hurston similarly begins her preface to Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Barracoon is not a slave narrative in the traditional sense, and its subject, Cudjo Lewis, never mastered the written word. Douglass’s books, along with photographs of the author, portrayed a man who was fully self-composed. “Written by himself” is Douglass’s subtitle, a phrase that resounds throughout early African American autobiographical writing. More remarkable than Douglass’s physical prowess was the fact that he lived to write about this at all: In addition to the beatings and other miseries, Douglass endured severe cold that left gashes in his feet pronounced enough to cradle his pen. “You shall see how a slave was made a man.” These words herald the moment when Douglass masters his master, the sadistic overseer and “negro-breaker,” Edward Covey, seizing him by the throat. “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
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