from 'The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass'

from 'The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass'

Standards

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• 9.1(A), 9.1(D), 9.2(B), 9.3, 9.4(B), 9.4(C), 9.4(E), 9.4(F), 9.4(G), 9.4(H), 9.4(I), 9.5(A), 9.5(C), 9.5(D), 9.5(E), 9.5(G), 9.5(H), 9.5(I), 9.6(A), 9.6(B), 9.8(D), 9.9(B)(i), 9.9(C), 9.10(C)

Language Objective

I will engage in a collaborative discussion using academic vocabulary to analyze primary sources

Learning Intention

Today, we will explore the powerful letters of Frederick Douglass that were recently discovered, discussing their historical importance and exploring the themes they address.

Success Criteria

By the end of this lesson, students should be able to:

• Analyze primary sources (letters) to gain a deeper understanding of Frederick Douglass's life and work.
• Make inferences about the historical context in which Douglass wrote these letters.
• Identify the author's purpose and message in the selected letters.
• Participate in a discussion using academic vocabulary.

Do Now:

What can you infer about Frederick Douglass and the historical context from this quote?

Frederick Douglass

Douglass escaped slavery under the slaveholder Thomas Auld and became an abolitionist, writer, speaker, and statesman. His first wife was African American businesswoman, Anna Murray; his German translator was Ottilie Assing; his second wife was his young white secretary, Helen Pitts.

Biography

• Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818. Often hungry as a child, he was brutally beaten and starved as a teenager. Sent to Baltimore at age eight, he learned to read and discovered the abolitionist movement, a cause that fueled his escape to the North in 1838.
• Douglass became an influential abolitionist writer and speaker. Early on, his first wife, Anna Murray, raised and supported their children during his frequent absences. Later, she hosted Douglass’s colleagues in the antislavery movement as well as runaways on the Underground Railroad.
• Douglass had a close, long-term relationship with Ottilie Assing, the German translator of his monumental autobiographical works who was a frequent house guest. Like others in Douglass’s inner circle, Assing was uncharitable towards Murray’s illiteracy.
• After Murray died in 1882, Douglass somewhat controversially married his white clerk, Helen Pitts. Pitts was an active participant in the women’s rights movement, as was Douglass himself.

Introduction

Poet Evie Shockley (b. 1965) is from Nashville, Tennessee, the recipient of the Holmes National Poetry Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. She has released several collections, including 2006’s a half-red sea and 2011’s the new black, as well as the critical volume Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. In “from ‘The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass’” Shockley imagines a letter from Frederick Douglass to his daughter Rosetta, taking account of portions of Douglass’s life.*Watch StudySync Video

Vocabulary

• circumstance-a condition that influences some event or activity

• command-to give an authoritative order requiring obedience

• ignorance-lack of knowledge about something

• mutual- common to or shared by two or more parties

• retain-to keep in one’s mind

June 5, 1892 Dear Daughter, Can you be fifty-three this month? I still look for you to peek around my door as if you’d discovered a toy you thought gone for good, ready at my smile to run up and press your fist into my broken palm. But your own girls have outgrown such games, and I cannot pilfer back time I spent pursuing Freedom. Fair to you, to your brothers, your mother? Hardly. But what other choice did I have? What sham, what shabby love could I offer you, so long as Thomas Auld held the law over my head? And when the personal threat was ended, whose eyes could mine enter without shame, if turning toward my wife and children meant turning my back?

Your mother’s eyes stare out at me through yours, of late. You think I didn’t love her, that my quick remarriage makes a Gertrude of me, a corseted Hamlet of you. You’re as wrong as you are lucky. Had Anna Murray had your education as a girl, my love for her would have been as passionate as it was grateful. But she died illiterate, when I had risked my life to master language. The pleasures of book and pen retain the thrill of danger even now, and you may understand why Ottilie Assing, come into our house to translate me into German, could command so many hours, years, of my time—or, as you would likely say, of your mother’s time.

Forgive me, Rosetta, for broaching such indelicate subjects, but as my eldest child and only living daughter, I want you to feel certain that Helen became the new Mrs. Douglass because of what we shared in sheaves of my papers: let no one persuade you I coveted her skin. I am not proud of how I husbanded your mother all those years, but marriage, too, is a peculiar institution. I could not have stayed so unequally yoked so long, without a kind of Freedom in it. Anna accepted this, and I don’t have to tell you that her lot was better and she, happier, than if she’d squatted with some other man in a mutual ignorance.

Perhaps I will post, rather than burn, this letter, this time. I’ve written it so often, right down to these closing lines, in which I beg you to be kinder, much kinder, to your step-mother. You two are of an age to be sisters, and of like temperament—under other circumstances, you might have found Friendship in each other. With regards to your husband—I am, as ever, your loving father— Frederick Douglass

Summary

The speaker in this poem, Frederick Douglass, writes to his daughter Rosetta, asking forgiveness for his shortcomings as a father. Although his daughter is a grown woman, he still imagines her as a girl, ready to run into his arms. He regrets that he didn’t spend more time with his children when they were younger, but asks what choice he had when the law was at his back. He also acknowledges that Rosetta thinks he didn’t love her mother, which is why he remarried so quickly. He did love her, but he loved his second wife more, since they both shared a love of language and writing, while his first wife was illiterate. Still, he is not proud of how he behaved as a husband and a father and asks forgiveness. In the end, he decides that he will finally send this letter instead of burning it.

Assignment

You will complete the flow chart Use the chart to describe the author’s presentation of Frederick Douglass, based on the language she uses to characterize his attitude toward relationships, literacy/intelligence, and priorities in life. Then use the information you gather, as well as outside research, to state and support a claim about whether this presentation is fair.

THANK YOU!