The Heroic Slave (1853)

AUTHOR: Douglass, Frederick

SUMMARY (Aïcha Bouchelaghem, edited Deborah Madsen)

The Heroic Slave is Frederick Douglass’s only work of fiction, a retelling of the slave mutiny led by Madison Washington onboard the Creole in 1841. In this novella Douglass makes parallels between nonhuman (especially domesticated) animals and enslaved African Americans, relying on the implied reader’s sympathy with animals to make his Abolitionist point. The narrative voice blends Listwell’s perception with that of his horse, who is his means of transportation across Virginia:

In the spring of 1835, on a Sabbath morning, within hearing of the solemn peals of the church bells at a distant village, a Northern traveler [Listwell] through the State of Virginia drew up his horse to drink at a sparkling brook, near the edge of a dark pine forest. While his weary and thirsty steed drew in the grateful water, the rider caught the sound of a human voice, apparently engaged in earnest conversation (5).

The “human voice” is that of Madison Washington, an enslaved man hiding in the nearby forest. The text thus aligns awareness of the horse’s needs with awareness of the enslaved man’s complaint.

The motif of empathy with animals recurs in Part II, which takes place five years later, in the domestic context of Listwell’s home in Ohio. Douglass’s Abolitionist argument – that Northerners need not fear but should care for enslaved fugitives – relies on intimate proximity to pets. Washington has fled his owner in Virginia in the hope of reaching Canada. By chance, he appears at Listwell’s house in need of shelter. The Listwells’ watchdog, Monte, welcomes Washington: “Monte quickly discovered that a friend, not an enemy of the family, was coming to the house, and instead of rushing to repel the supposed intruder, he was now at the door, whimpering and dancing for the admission of himself and his newly made friend” (15).

In tagged speech, Washington recounts a forest fire in a way that aligns his experience as an escaped slave with the animals who live in these woods and he expresses empathy for their suffering. He underlines the shared horror of the forest animals, adopting their mental perspective: “Bears and wolves, scorched from their mysterious hiding-places in the earth, and all the wild inhabitants of the untrodden forest, filled with a common dismay, ran forth, yelling, howling, bewildered amidst the smoke and flame” (25). Through the reference to hiding-places, Washington likens the circumstances of the nonhuman animals in the woods and his own loss of a safe place away from bondage. Washington emphasizes the scale of animal destruction caused by the fire, and anthropomorphic descriptions suggest Washington’s empathy for the deceased birds: “huge night-birds, bats, and owls, that had retired to their homes in lofty tree-tops to rest, perished in that fiery storm” (26). The humanization of undomesticated animals underlines the idea that slavery produces despicable humans, thereby upsetting the idea of human superiority.

In Part III, the final chapter in which Listwell appears, care for his horse recurs as an element of moral characterization. The narrator represents Listwell in stark contrast to rural (presumably white) Virginians, suggesting that the welfare of Listwell’s horse is a priority as urgent as his own: “The most I want is a good bed for myself, and a full manger for my horse. If I get these, I shall be quite satisfied” (43). Wilkes, a local who mistakes Listwell for a wealthy slave trader, flatters him in an attempt to obtain financial favor from him: “Well, I alloys like to hear a gentleman talk for his horse; and just becase the horse can’t talk for itself. A man that don’t care about his beast, and don’t look arter it when he’s travelling, aint much in my eye anyhow” (43-44). Wilkes gestures to the rhetoric of nineteenth-century philanthropy that was central to animal welfare movements after the Civil War: that nonhuman animals are “dumb” – in the sense of “mute” or lacking speech – and thus require representatives to speak on their behalf. This trope appears in the title of Our Dumb Animals, the magazine of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. However, Wilkes’s declaration of concern for the welfare of horses appears hypocritical when, in the next sentence, he veers into a candid discussion of horse-racing, by comparing Listwell’s horse to a high-performing horse who was once hosted in the tavern’s stables:

Now, sir, I likes a horse, and I’ll guarantee your horse will be taken good care on here. That old stable, for all you see it looks so shabby now, once sheltered the great Eclipse, when he run here agin Batchelor and Jumping Jemmy. Them was fast horses, but he beat ‘em both… Mister, that beast of yours is a singed cat, I warrant you. I never see’d a creature like that that was’nt good on the road (44).

The contradiction between caring for the welfare of horses used for transportation and exploiting the physical power of horses for entertainment is consistent with the function of horse-racing, as well as the consumption of tobacco and hard liquor, as a signifier of immorality in Abolitionist texts.