“little conversations”: Child Communities and Political Agency in the Writing of Frederick Douglass

This first part of this chapter spotlights Frederick Douglass’s treatment of children as historical actors and groups of children as political communities. It begins with formative moments from Douglass’s own youth and from the childhood of his daughter Rosetta, as represented in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and an 1848 issue of the North Star respectively. In essence, I read these scenes “literally” as documentation of young historical actors exercising moral and political agency. This interpretative approach is not to minimise the literariness of Douglass’s writing or his power as a rhetorician, but rather takes its cues from Douglass’s engagements with ideas about how and when political subjectivity is authorised. I turn to the fiery democratic theory enumerated in his 1852 speech—“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”—to establish the critical grounds for reading these scenes. The second part focuses on how Douglass guides us to see Black children as children. Comparing parallel moments from his first autobiographical text, the 1848 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and from the later and lengthier My Bondage and My Freedom, I show how Douglass renarrativises his childhood introduction to racial violence as part of a broader politico-literary project of rearticulating the humanity of people surviving the dehumanising conditions of enslavement. His depictions of Black childhood embedded in the social realities of slavery reconfigure ideas about innocence and reclaim the status of “child,” for young people denied the conditions culturally equated with childhood.