david blight being horny on main

For reasons both paraprofessional and neurotic I have set my sights on reading the 764-page (excluding acknowledgements, notes, and index) biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight, or, as I blithely yet also lovingly refer to it on the bird site, "the david blight douglass biography." My progress is slim so far, but there's a lot that could be said about this capital-s Sterling Yale historian's trade press approach to doing history: stuff about diction, tone, sources, method. But all that's rather secondary, nay, tertiary to the crucial interpretative matter at hand and that is the positively unbridled lust touring through this thiccly-built biography of an American icon.



I am not at all "into biographies" like I know some people are very much into biographies. The closest I've read that comes to mind in recent memory is The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed (clocking in at a smooth 817, btw) and even that called in a cast of characters in what might be considered a roundabout biography of Tommy J. I've enjoyed listening to the press surrounding Alexis Coe's recent biography of George Washington, particularly Coe's description of whom she calls the "Thigh Men," generations of Washington biographers obsessed with his thighs.

(Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington, xxxii.)

Biographies are labors of love, among other things, surely; interest, redemption, inter-departmental strife can only take you so far. At some point it will be just the author (or their [hopefully] well-paid research assistant), elbow deep in some archive somewhere, desperately discerning a 'r' from an 'e' in some dead gal's hasty script. But maybe biographies are labors of lust, too: how else to describe the singleminded obsession required to excavate every pore in the pockmarked dermis of a life? (Bad metaphor.)

Anyway, I feel like David is trying to tell us something, if not about himself than the nature of homosocial relations among abolitionists in the antebellum period. (This is where a university press would come in handy. A UP book would let suggestion spill over into outright reckless speculation, entertaining the notion that who knows maybe Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison fucked??? But the Pulitzer committee probably frowns upon that sort of thing.) Alas, we intrepid readers (me) must run this thing the rest of the way, with subtle prompting, of course.

Some choice bits (excluding all the reminders that Douglass was almost NEVER home, along with the briefest of clauses pondering what his wife did with so much time raising those kids and oh by the way did you know Douglass was incredibly virile?),

“Above all, Douglass must have fingered the words of Garrison himself” (95) 

“The abolition movement had never seen anything quite like him. Tall, six feet one, brown skinned, careful of his physical appearance and the growth and part in his hair, handsome, with a sonorous voice he could modulate up or down but generally settled into a pleasing baritone” (102) 

“a youthful, beautiful brown man who made people think” (104) 

"Even one among his own flock declared that it was all but impossible 'to swallow Garrison whole.' ¶ In the early 1840s, Douglass did swallow whole the cluster of ideas and strategies the prophetic Garrison had honed into rigid orthodoxy" (104) 

(some quote around here I think emphasizing their age difference in a strange Daddy kind of way that I can't find but yeah whatever it doesn't matter.)

"Chapter 8: Garrisonian in Mind and Body" (in which Douglass is filled with Garrisonian fortitude) 

"his Garrisonian body...” (116) 

"One cannot help wondering, in these years when the two men became close associates, and with Garrison so often referring to Douglass's physical scars, whether the young star orator ever actually showed his naked back to his mentor" (118) 

"In other words, Garrison got everything he wanted from his star pupil" (119)

Call it a reach, but that's quarantine literary criticism, baby. 

What to the quarantined is the Fourth of July?