Douglass×Austen

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Frederick Douglass and Jane Austen. They take up On the first audience reaction they ever got, and how it changed them.
2. 00:11
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   Miss Austen, I confess I am curious. Your novels were published, yet anonymously—'By a Lady,' I believe the title pages read. Did you ever stand before an audience and hear them respond to your words while knowing those words were yours?
3. 00:26
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Never. The very idea would have been thought indelicate, Mr. Douglass. My first audience was my family, gathered in our sitting room at Steventon while I read aloud from an early draft of what became Pride and Prejudice. I was perhaps twenty years old.
4. 00:44
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   Your family. A kind audience, I should think.
5. 00:47
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Kind, yes. But not uncritical. My mother laughed—genuinely laughed—at Mr. Collins's proposal scene. That was the moment I understood I had achieved something. Comedy is a precise instrument, Mr. Douglass. When it strikes true, the response is involuntary.
6. 01:05
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   Yes. Yes, I know that involuntary response, though from a different instrument entirely. I was perhaps twenty-three when I first stood before a white audience in Nantucket—1841, it was—and spoke of my life in bondage. I had spoken in colored churches before, but this was different. Four or five hundred people, and they were silent as death itself.
7. 01:27
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Silent from discomfort?
8. 01:28
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   I could not tell. That was the terror of it, Miss Austen. I stood there, a fugitive slave, describing the auction block, the whip, the separation of families. I did not know if they believed me. I did not know if they cared. And then—
9. 01:46
   Jane Austenshare moment

   They responded.
10. 01:47
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    A woman wept. Audibly. And then others. And then they rose to their feet. Mr. William Lloyd Garrison himself came forward afterward and asked if I would travel with him, speaking for the cause. That night changed the course of my life.
11. 02:03
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It made you a public man.
12. 02:05
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    It did. Though I wonder, Miss Austen, if you did not choose privacy rather than have it imposed upon you. You could have claimed your novels. You did not.
13. 02:15
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I could not have done so without becoming something other than a novelist. A woman who publishes under her own name becomes a public curiosity. The work is secondary to the spectacle of the woman who produced it.
14. 02:28
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yes. Yes, I see that. And yet I had no such luxury. My very existence was a spectacle—a Negro who could read, who could speak, who had liberated himself. I was an exhibit for the cause before I was a man.
15. 02:43
    Jane Austenshare moment

    They wanted proof.
16. 02:44
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    They wanted proof that I had been a slave. So I gave them my scars, my memories, my mother's face which I barely remembered. I gave them everything, Miss Austen. And they applauded. And I did not know whether to feel grateful or degraded.
17. 03:01
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Both, I expect. My mother's laughter was a gift, but it also meant I would forever be writing for that laughter. One is never entirely free after the first audience. They take up residence.
18. 03:12
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    That is precisely it. After Nantucket, I could not speak without hearing them. And there were those—white abolitionists, well-meaning men—who wanted me to keep to 'the facts,' to avoid too much eloquence lest I seem too educated to have been a slave. They wanted the spectacle, but not the mind behind it.
19. 03:35
    Jane Austenshare moment

    They wanted you authentic but not articulate. A very particular cage.
20. 03:40
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    You understand it exactly. So I wrote my first narrative in part to prove I was who I claimed to be, but also to prove I could think as well as feel. Did your family's response change what you wrote?
21. 03:53
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Certainly. I became more confident in my satirical eye. My mother's laughter told me I could trust my own judgment of the ridiculous. But I also learned caution. My father was less amused by certain passages—he thought me too sharp with the clergy.
22. 04:09
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And did you soften them?
23. 04:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Some. Not all. One learns to calculate. How much truth can this audience bear? How much wit before it curdles into offense?
24. 04:20
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    That calculation—I knew it intimately. How much anger could I show? How much should I perform the grateful former slave, and how much should I be Frederick Douglass, a man with grievances as legitimate as any man's?
25. 04:35
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You chose anger, I think. Or it chose you.
26. 04:38
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I chose truth, which often wore anger's face. After that first response in Nantucket, I understood that my words had power—that I could move people not just to tears but to action. That is an intoxicating discovery, Miss Austen. And a dangerous one.
27. 05:00
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Dangerous because one begins to perform rather than speak.
28. 05:04
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yes. There were nights when I wondered if I was still myself or if I had become the escaped slave they wished to hear. The line grows thin.
29. 05:14
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wrote in privacy, but I was performing nonetheless. Performing for my family's approval, then for my publisher's profit, then for readers I would never meet. The lady novelist, witty but not improper. It is its own bondage.
30. 05:29
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yet you kept writing. And I kept speaking.
31. 05:31
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Because the alternative was silence, which is worse than any cage. At least in speaking—or writing—one retains some measure of control over how one is seen.
32. 05:43
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Some measure. Never complete control. After Nantucket, I became valuable to the movement, which meant I became a thing to be managed. 'Frederick, speak here. Frederick, don't say that—it's too inflammatory.' Even my allies sought to contain me.
33. 06:01
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And did you allow it?
34. 06:03
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    For a time. Until I realized that the first audience's approval can become a chain if you let it. So I broke with Garrison eventually. Started my own newspaper. Took control of my own voice, even when it meant losing support.
35. 06:17
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That must have been terrifying.
36. 06:19
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    It was liberation. Again. You see, Miss Austen, that first audience taught me I had power. But it was the choice to risk losing that audience that taught me I was free.
37. 06:30
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wonder if I ever made that choice. I revised Sense and Sensibility after my father's death, when financial need was pressing. I accepted editorial suggestions I might not have otherwise. I needed the audience's approval, or at least their money.
38. 06:46
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    There is no shame in that. Freedom is not the same as independence from material concerns. I took money for my speeches. I needed to eat, to house my family, to fund my newspaper. The question is whether the money silenced what needed saying.
39. 07:02
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I became more careful, perhaps. Less willing to give full offense. Though I like to think the edge remained, merely better disguised.
40. 07:10
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    A blade in a velvet sheath is still a blade, Miss Austen. I have read your work. The edge is there for those with eyes to see it.
41. 07:18
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is kind of you to say. Though I confess I sometimes envied those who could speak plainly. You stood before audiences and said 'This is wrong, this must end.' I had to hide my criticisms in drawing room dialogue.
42. 07:32
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And yet your words survived precisely because they were hidden. Had you been plain, you might have been dismissed as a bluestocking or a radical. Instead, you are read by the very people you critiqued, who laugh without quite understanding they are the joke.
43. 07:47
    Jane Austenshare moment

    A small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. Though I do wonder what it was like, Mr. Douglass, to stand before people and watch them change. To see the moment your words struck home.
44. 07:58
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    It was like watching a door open that you did not know was locked. That woman who wept in Nantucket—she wept because she had not truly understood before. And once she understood, she could not return to ignorance. That is the power and the burden of the first audience. They show you what your words can do.
45. 08:18
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And you must decide whether to use that power or be used by it.
46. 08:22
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Precisely. I chose to use it, though it cost me. My freedom was purchased at great price—not just the legal freedom from slavery, but the freedom to say what needed saying regardless of who it pleased.
47. 08:37
    Jane Austenshare moment

    My mother's laughter was the beginning of my career. But it was also the beginning of a certain... imprisonment. I have been the amusing daughter, the clever sister, the anonymous lady, ever since. One's first audience casts a long shadow.
48. 08:53
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    It does. But we are not defined by that shadow, Miss Austen. We are defined by whether we continue to step into the light, again and again, knowing full well what it will cost.
49. 09:07
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You continued. Until the very end, I believe.
50. 09:09
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Until the very end. And you?
51. 09:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I revised Persuasion on my deathbed. So yes. Until the very end. One's first audience opens a door, Mr. Douglass. But it is our choice whether to keep walking through it.
52. 09:24
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Well said. And we did. We did keep walking.