Frederick Douglass was a Complicated Human Being: A Conversation with Sidney Morrison

Frederick Douglass, one of the most prominent African American leaders of the nineteenth century, known as “the great orator,” has been well documented. With writing published in the abolitionist newspaper The North Star, his speeches archived and collected, and three best-selling autobiographies, Douglass had yet to be the subject of a novel, until Sidney Morrison’s Frederick Douglass: A Novel (Hawthorn Books, 2024).

Douglass’s life is richly detailed, including his pivotal role in ending the institution of slavery in the United States. Morrison’s Douglass comes alive on the page, escaping slavery to become a fierce abolitionist, gifted orator, and publisher of The North Star. The novel details Douglass’s collaboration with William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Underground Railroad, as well as presidents Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland. Morrison’s Douglass gives readers a view beyond the public persona, providing otherwise missing details of the women in his life, central to understanding the great man as a fully complex human.

Based in Los Angeles, Sidney Morrison, a retired teacher and school principal, now works as an educational consultant and leadership coach in Southern California. He has won two major awards from the Association of California School Administrations and is a proud recipient of a Bronze Star, earned as a medical corpsman during the Vietnam War.

Morrison and I had a phone conversation about researching and writing the complex characters that filled Frederick Douglass’s life, why research can be both an inspiration and a trap, and why Frederick Douglass is an example of what it means to be an American in resilience and character.

***

The Rumpus: When someone asks you why you wrote your novel, what do you say?

Sydney Morrison: I became interested in Frederick Douglass as a young teacher. I taught U.S. history in high school. In my course development, I discovered Douglass, and ever since, I’ve always wanted to write about him. I’ve read a great deal of all his biographies, most of his speeches and letters. Eventually, I decided I wanted to write a novel about him and introduce him to a greater reading public. I know scholarship sometimes intimidates people. I thought if I could write a novel to introduce Douglass, more people would know about him. It is a lifetime project. I’m so excited that Hawthorne Books decided to publish this! [The book] was longer than what it is currently, because his life was so rich. He lived [the] full span of the nineteenth century, so he experienced a great deal. I wanted to convey that dramatic story of self-creation: the story of a genius born in enslavement, who became himself by his own ambition, his influence on people, both white and Black.

Rumpus: Was there a defining moment that you decided you were going to write about this?

Morrison: I was a student of American history at UCLA. History was my major, and the Antebellum Civil War period was one of my favorite subjects. In discovering Frederick Douglass, and through his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, he talks about the moment when he decided to fight back after months and months of physical and emotional abuse. . . . It really struck me as a teenager.

He said in his first book that he was willing to die for his own sense of self rather than continue to be enslaved—especially spiritually, because he was verbally, physically, and psychologically attacked by a man who was hired to break his spirit and almost succeeded. Douglass, in fact, contemplated suicide because the abuse was so unrelenting.

Then one August in the summer of that year, he had a series of beatings, described in my novel as a pivotal point in his life when he was going to stand up for himself and never back down. That was very inspiring to me as a young person. He stood his ground again and again throughout the course of his life and got in a lot of trouble for it. That incident inspired me to read more about him. He wrote three autobiographies—I’ve read all three and used them in the source of my novel writing—and, for me as a young person, he was an example of a man who was willing to stand up for what he believed. This was during my time as a student in the 1960s, when a lot was going on in terms of civil rights and war protests.

Rumpus: What do you recommend to other writers and researchers when they’re doing something as intensive as someone’s biography?

Morrison: Research, which I enjoy very much, is both an inspiration and a trap. You can find yourself going down many, many paths of interest. And once you decide to write either a biography or a novel based on a life that’s documented as extensively as Douglass’s was, you have to make some decisions about what to include and what to leave out. I despaired of this sometimes because Douglass was a prolific producer of words. He wrote millions of words, and he gave thousands of speeches. In my novel, I wanted to include Douglass’s most famous speech, where he says, “There is no struggle if there is no progress.” It was a speech he gave in 1857 about the emancipation of the British West Indies. It’s a long speech—as all of his were—about this passage and the need for struggle in the world for progress to occur. At the time, I was focusing on his growing relationship with a German journalist. It was in the summer of 1857 when she came to live with him, so the story in the novel is told from her perspective. I had to not include that because it didn’t fit in the story at the time. That happens a lot. As a novelist, you have to decide, what doesn’t serve the drama at that particular point. Even biographers have had to make serious decisions about what to include.

Rumpus: How did you whittle down the information to what is crucial for the story? How did you ultimately decide what should be included?

Morrison: You have to make a variety of decisions in the rewriting of a novel, many times. People don’t realize that writing is essentially rewriting, cutting, and editing. I didn’t do it alone. I did it with the help of my agent and a friend who was a journalist. [They provided] feedback on what worked, what didn’t work, and made decisions about the story. Ultimately, I was writing a story, not a history.

I tend to, as a novelist, think in terms of scene. When you’re talking about scenes and conveying a complex human being, as Frederick Douglass was, you have to make decisions about the point of that scene. There are many things that happened in his life that were just not told, which is why I’m hoping the novel will be an invitation for people to explore his life further. I’m hoping that more books will be written about Frederick Douglass, more television show programs [will be made], because his was a great life. I think he was one of the greatest Americans of the nineteenth century.

I wanted to get into that interior space: what he felt, what he thought, and especially what the other people in his life thought. He said very little [about] his first wife, of forty-four years, his grandmother, who raised him when he was six years old, and his daughter. I wanted to explore their feelings. Those are the people I was very interested in because they were silent, even in his story.

Rumpus: Douglass didn’t talk a lot about the women in his life, like journalist Ottilie Assing, Julia Griffiths (who worked with Douglass on the North Star publication), and Anna, his first wife. Did these women lack the agency to tell their own story?

Morrison: When I wrote my first version [of this book], it was in the first person. Rereading it, I decided that I wanted to give voice to those who [Douglass] didn’t give voice to. For example, his first wife Anna. Because of the lack of documentation, there was not much that could be said about his grandmother, whom he adored. I really wanted to add the women in his life who made quite an impression on him—strong women like Anna; his grandmother; his first mistress [Sophia Auld], who taught him how to read; some of the leaders of the abolitionist movement, like Maria Chapman, Ottilie, Julia, and his second wife. All these women played an important part in his life.

I wanted to show how they influenced his development. I wanted to make a case that complex human beings are the result not only of individual drive but also of the influence of other people—especially in Douglass’s case. It’s not surprising to me that he became an advocate of equal rights for women and, in voting for women, and that he attended the first National Women’s Rights Convention in 1848.

I think there was an element of embarrassment or shame about his first wife, [Anna] who was illiterate, but I wanted to create a character who seemed to be very strong and influential in his life. Given the lack of documentation, I’m very proud of the creation of Anna Douglass in the novel. . . . I read Douglass’s daughter’s short pamphlet about her mother, whom she feared would be forgotten because of her father’s prominence. She wrote this short pamphlet and gave a brief description of her mother’s background. From that I had to create an interior life, otherwise, I wouldn’t have had [information] because she wrote no letters and left no diaries. For me, the novel was an act of liberation, which is why I chose not to write a biography. Biographies require documentation. If you don’t have documentation, you have speculation. I wanted to go deeper and tell the truth of a relationship as a writer could: a novel.

Rumpus: There is great dialogue in the novel that highlights conflict—even people on the same side, regarding how to go about liberation, freedom, and abolition. How did you imagine those conversations?

Morrison: I immersed myself in the speeches and letters of not only Douglass but of many other people who are in the abolitionist movement and the politics of that period. I usually start with a line, either written by Douglass or said in a speech, and start that as the beginning of a conflict of some kind. Dialogue, I think, is a place where you can reveal passionate disagreement, especially in a time of the 1840s and ’50s, when there was considerable passionate disagreement about the nature of reform. I put two or three people in a room and start with a line or word or phrase, just to see how it develops. If the characters have lived, sometimes they surprise you with what they end up saying. I put characters in the room and just let them go at it and see how it flies. That comes if you have a deep immersion in the documented evidence, like the conflicts between Garrison and Douglass [that resulted in a] public falling out. I was able to extract a lot of those lines, phrases, and words, then put them into dialogue.

Rumpus: How do you convey emotions in a way that feels accurate?

Morrison: Conveying the emotion of the characters, through trauma in particular, is the challenge. I think writers have to be careful not to tell but to show emotion. One of the best ways to do that is through dialogue. All the words have to be in the dialogue to convey the emotion of the characters.

There’s also the challenge of giving the interior life of a character. Frederick Douglass was a complicated human being, as I think all these people were. You have to allow for the complexity, the contradictions, the inconsistencies. As a writer, you’re showing how human beings interact in sometimes very inconsistent, confusing ways. We are not stock characters. I think we look for complexity, rather than reductionism. If you immerse yourself in the words and the lives of the historical characters, and if you’re committed to giving them life, other people can feel them on the page. Then you say to yourself, “How can I show this person as I think they truly were?” Stepping out of ourselves and imagining. That requires an act of empathy, then you will allow them to be themselves on the page. And that’s what I tried to do.

Rumpus: I appreciate how an eight-year-old could read this book and understand Douglass’s complex life, as well as an eighty-year-old. Was this intentional?

Morrison: This simplicity of language makes the book accessible. It’s readable, and that’s what I wanted. It was a deliberate, conscious effort to simplify, simplify, and shorten, shorten, shorten. Douglass, himself used language that was very rich, elaborate. His speeches were sometimes ten to fifteen pages long. In the nineteenth century, lectures were a source of popular entertainment, but rich language can be an impediment to accessing or understanding the character’s feelings.

With the help of editors, whose work is to help build clarity, I learned to become clearer and more direct. My style has improved as a result. It’s an effort to simplify without patronizing the reader, but I didn’t want the language of the nineteenth century to be an impediment to understanding human beings and the conflicts they lived in. I felt I had to support the reader into that time period, where [elaborate] language was very much loved and appreciated, but I didn’t want people to be running to the dictionary. I wanted to make [Douglass] accessible. This was a remarkable life in the American story of triumph, but it’s not quick because he was not simple.

Rumpus: Despite being nearly seven hundred pages, the narrative moved quickly. How did you decide to approach the pacing?

Morrison: If you’ve noticed, the book is dedicated to Robert Ballenger, a dear friend who read every page of this novel. In the process, he would say things like, “This [part] is well written, but it has to go.” I’d ask, “Why?” He’d respond, “Because it stops the movement of the story. Anything that stops the movement of the story is expendable.” That process added to the pacing of the story—the sense of a forward movement. Writers call it “killing your darlings.” It can be anguishing, but the hard decisions pay off. Pacing is important with seven hundred pages. You don’t want people exhausted by the end—you want them to feel exhilarated.

Rumpus: There are some sociopolitical similarities going on, between then and now. Is there anything that made you think things haven’t changed much?

Morrison: Yes. One of the fascinating things I discovered was the parallels between the conflicts that [Douglass] had in his time and the conflicts in my time, as a student, a teacher and now. The American Dream is yet unfulfilled, but [Douglass] believed deeply in it. He felt the American Dream could only be realized if people were willing to commit to the struggle, and there was struggle between the reformers and people who opposed change. This is the common cycle of change in American political and cultural life.

It may seem depressing that we’re still struggling with [the same issues] of the American people ceasing to make color, rather than character, the criteria of respectability. The example of Frederick Douglass is to never give up on the struggle. He never gave up on the country. He believed in the idea of America, he believed in E pluribus unum—as I do: we can be a united nation, respecting differences. He devoted his life to that idea, and he never gave up. Sometimes he got angry and enraged, but he never gave up. So he’s an inspiration. That’s why I want to write about Douglass because he was an inspiration to me. I hope he is an inspiration to readers.

***

Author photograph by Todd Garlington