Frederick Douglass and "The Bagpipe Lesson"

I will come to The Bagpipe Lesson eventually, but will start of by examining a different instrument-inspired painting.

It is one of those iconic works of art whose very familiarity contributes to under-appreciation: The Banjo Lesson, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, in which a young boy sits in an old man's lap and plays a banjo, which the old man supports up at the nut end while the boy frets and strums. Both the figures are of African descent, as was Tanner himself.

There are several reasons why I have tended to under-value the work. Probably the chief one was the faded, poor print that I used to see on a daily basis in a dispiriting location in a library, rather than a vivid original exhibited with positive optimality at a museum.

Also -- to me, anyway -- its subject matter and treatment wafted a hint of that cloying air that has spoiled Norman Rockwell for me. Perhaps it is unfair to Rockwell that his work has come to personify -- quite literally -- the happy-face superficiality of the commercial American soul, when in fact he was capable of capturing, incisively and glaringly, such challenging subjects as the racial millstone hung around the necks of American children. 

Thanks to an informative appreciation by Farisa Khalid, however, I can not only give The Banjo Lesson its due, but can also see that there is a more complex, almost ironic connection with Rockwell than the one I had always felt. Besides providing the nice archival service of showing Tanner's photographs of his original subjects, more importantly Khalid's article situates the work in two cultural contexts: an endlessly suggestive (because of the subsequent history of the banjo) Appalachian one as well as the more general one of blackface minstrelsy, by which it becomes clear that Tanner -- painting in the 1890's -- sought through the medium of high dignity to rescue his subject matter from Ol' Zip Coon.

But the rescue went unappreciated by the clueless master class, which continued to pay commercial illustrators like Rockwell to show African-Americans only in servile roles (as Rockwell himself has attested). Thus, following a tip from Khalid, we can see Rockwell -- in a print that appeared in an advertisement in a 1926 Saturday Evening Post -- at once borrowing from and violating the original by placing the old man in tattered pants and work boots performing to the delight of a well-dressed little white boy, plaid tie flung over one shoulder and beating a gleaming living room floor with a couple of sticks. 

This is not to demean the journeyman Rockwell, who increasingly chafed against the prevailing caste rules and to some extent broke loose of them later in life, so much as to provide a stark example of the conceptual prison of color racism into which America seems to be locked. Tanner himself said it well: residing in Paris, where he did not experience discrimination due to the color of his skin, he said, "In America, I'm Henry Tanner, Negro artist, but in France, I'm 'Monsieur Tanner, l'artiste américaine.'"

In today's America it has become politically incorrect, even in the Republican Party, to utter -- or appear to utter -- white supremacist notions, as Iowa's Steve King recently found out. Yet if we parse King's words as he wants us to, we uncover a notion that I bet the vast majority of Americans agree with: Western civilization is white.

I'm going to let that statement sit and stew for a moment. My hope is that the longer it sits, the more ridiculous it begins to seem. I do not begin to know what images and notions will come to mind with "Western civilization," but if we assume it to mean the ascent of certain aspirational and idealistic concepts, "white" is nowhere among them.

By coincidence I'm writing this on the eve of the celebration of the day given over to a different King -- Martin Luther King Day -- when it would be reasonable to expect Americans of visible African descent to look for some evidence that their fellows of visible non-African descent have at long last gathered them in the embrace of citizenship, social equality, and cultural affirmation. The last is perhaps not hard to find, but as is demonstrated by the history of jazz, r&b, rap -- not to mention the vast domain of professional sports -- the benefits of the cultural marketplace don't automatically trickle down or radiate out any better than the economic ones. Jackie Robinson desegregating professional baseball can happily coexist -- as a phenomenon -- with lynching and restrictive housing covenants.

I have long believed that the essential ingredient of understanding American culture -- politics included -- is the study of its long and torturous struggle to live up to the promise of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as personified, if you will, by the Statue of Liberty. That means coming to terms with Indian removal; with slavery and the dismal, continuing record of racial discrimination; and with gender-based discrimination; all of them noxious to the self-professed notions of "liberty" and "justice" pledged by the mass Americans from youth.

And yet this belief of mine runs counter to the notions of patriotism at large today in which the flag is associated primarily with a standing army! Of all things to make a true Spirit of '76er roll in his grave! Aaargh! A standing army is one thing they fought to get rid of! Did we learn nothing in school?

Perhaps less than nothing. Perhaps detrimental habits of thinking, like believing Western civilization is white. Happily there is a cure. If only I could prescribe it. I can at least recommend, though. As good a place to start as any is David Blight's recent, landmark biography -- subtitled "American Prophet" -- of Frederick Douglass, the escaped-slave abolitionist and autobiographer who achieved celebrity status as a writer and lecturer both before and after the American Civil War. The book is long and to me was bogged down by the minutiae of family "warts and all," -- as landmark biographies require -- but forewarned is forearmed: the informed reader should persevere. It is worth it.

It is worth it because Douglass and the manner in which he shared the lived experience of slavery and racism are exactly the kind of lens by which to view American reality. It very much matters how we view our past: Douglass himself was indefatigably motivated by this idea. As Blight writes, "he knew that peoples and nations, like individuals, are shaped and defined by their pasts. Douglass was acutely aware that history was both burden and inspiration, something to be cherished and overcome. He also understood that although all people crave stories, some narratives are more honest than others."

Thus it was that Douglass -- who soared to prominence with his riveting accounts of life as a slave and his searing indictment of the institution and its evil effects -- faced the rapid washing away of civil rights gained during the Radical phase of Reconstruction, due in part to the rise of a Lost Cause narrative that portrayed the Confederates as noble warriors whose bravery was due the respect of their Northern, white "brethren." Douglass would have none of it. Slavery was the essential foundation of the Confederacy, and he unrepentantly "waved the bloody shirt" after the Civil War to remind his fellow Americans of that fact.

When Robert E. Lee died, for example, Douglass was appalled at the national veneration for the Confederate leader. "It would seem," he wrote, "that the soldier who kills the most soldiers in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven."  Douglass boiled it all down to "he was a traitor and can be made nothing else."

It is interesting to read this in the context of today's sanctimonious reverence for "heritage," especially in the South, where the word seems inevitably to accompany the display of Lee's anti-USA battle flag. Here again, Douglass had his finger on the pulse of the "wickedly selfish" American character: "Whoever levies a tax upon our Bohea or Young Hyson [types of tea] will find the whole land blazing with patriotism and bristling with bayonets," but "millions of a foreign race may be stolen from their homes, and reduced to hopeless and inhuman bondage among us, and we either approve the deed, or protest as gently as 'sucking doves.'" The very Americans celebrating their "own heritage" are "content to see others crushed in our midst."

Any real understanding of Southern "heritage" has to include the history of Ku-Klux-style repression and lynching. Of this latter Douglass said in a letter promoting a pamphlet by anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells, "If American conscience were only half alive, if the church and clergy were only half Christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened … a scream of horror, shame, and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read." One has to wonder how many Southern heritage websites include a link to Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative museum in Montgomery, AL?

It is also suggestive and saddening to "read forward" African-American despair -- from expat Henry Ossawa Tanner to W.E.B. DuBois to the Southern leavers of the Great Migration to Ta-Nehisi Coates -- from Douglass's insistence that anything other than blacks staying in the South, no matter how deep the nadir of race relations, how bitter the exploitation, or how strangling the rule of the lynch mob, meant "a premature, disheartening surrender" of emancipation and the civil rights gained by the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution. These seem in some ways like the glib words of someone ensconced in the relative security of a federal job in Washington, D.C., but Douglass was if nothing else unmoving in his constancy to the need for struggle despite the odds. He had seen miracles accomplished before, and they might be again. As biographer Blight says, this prefigures the reality of the modern civil rights struggle, in which people "have to fight to protect political and constitutional triumphs, as well as a new national historical memory, while they also face a deepening crisis of structural repression and inequality." 

Blight's prophetic Douglass trumpeted the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence. These, it must be remembered, are universal ideals, applicable to all humanity. They are meant to be effected by the U.S. Constitution, as Lincoln reminds us in his Gettysburg Address, as an example available to the world to follow. Douglass's voice -- steeped, as was Lincoln's, in an autodidact's immersion in the Bible -- serves as the prophet returned from Babylon saying "it is up to us to build it here." And who is "us"? It is nothing less than the entire mongrel segment of humanity resident in the United States, acting on behalf of the world.

Douglass insisted on the universality of his humanity. An enduring part of his message had to do with his bi-racial status: he was the son of a slave mother and a slave-owning father. He would use this to taunt his hearers in lectures that sometimes spilled over into a seething fracas of brickbats and fisticuffs as a result. In some instances, though, his racist challengers seem to have been charmed by his courage and forthrightness, as happened in 1850 in New York City, when a speech to the American anti-Slavery Society was interrupted by a "mob" led by German-Irish ward boss Isaiah Rynders, "the nation's foremost political thug," whose gangs--Plug Uglies and Dead Rabbits--rioted to attain their ends and were able to face down the police. Invited to have their say by Garrison (Blight calls it "theater of the absurd") a Rynders-surrogate discoursed on the inhumanity of blacks and said they were a species of monkey. Douglass--standing right next to Rynders--appealed to the audience to look at him and his "wooly" head and asked "Am I not a man?" Rynders, interrupting, said he was only half a Negro; Douglass drew laughter when he said that yes, as son of a slaveholder, he was "a half brother to Mr. Rynders." Douglass argued on behalf of the community of all immigrants; blacks had after all produced the cotton and sugar that they all enjoyed. "We only want our rights. … I have a head to think, and I know God meant I should exercise the right to think … I have a heart to feel, and a tongue to think … and God meant that I should use that tongue in behalf of humanity and justice for every man." On this occasion the rioters left peacefully, having apparently vented their bile to their own satisfaction.

(By "man," Douglass meant women as well. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of equal rights for women.)

The identification of Douglass with universality is perhaps best captured by his connection to Scotland. This might come as a surprise to those who display the twin x'es of the Confederate battle flag and the Scottish cross of St. Andrew on their bumper and think that is all there is to be said on the subject. But consider the following:

• Douglass's last name was his "freedom" name (his birth name was Bailey) first suggested by his rescuer Nathan Johnson, who according to Blight took the name from Sir Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake. The recently-escaped Bailey liked the Highland clan name's "strength" as a word, stamped it with an extra "s," and entered into his new and ultimately historic identity. Later on, after he himself had read the novel, Douglass found pride that he shared his name with "the great Scottish chief."
• Douglass freely imbibed Robert Burns and found inspiration in the way Burns opposed the "bigotry" of the clergy and the "shallow-brained aristocracy." Douglass used not only Burns's poetry but also his example as a writer whose (in Blight's words) "performative intensity" provided Douglass with a "model in life and on the page." 
• Steeped in Scott and Burns, and unafraid to anathematize the Free Kirk for "blood money" -- income from slaveholders -- Douglass was a huge hit in Scotland in 1846. This was a critical time for Douglass, as part of the reason of the tour was to get him beyond the reaches of his former owner. He had already tasted freedom elsewhere in the British Isles, but as he wrote from Edinburgh, it was there that he experienced equality: "I enjoy every thing here which may be enjoyed by those of a paler hue -- no distinction here."

Douglass took his inspiration from anything, regardless of its source, that promoted the ideal of one, single, universal human race. Thus was there a connection between the poetry of Burns and the music of his own "brethren in bonds":  it was the sound of pride and dignity butting up against prejudice and oppression. Douglass used the poems of Burns to get his listeners to feel that "A man's a man for a' that," despite color. And of the songs of slaves, Douglass understood their visceral purpose by hard experience: "To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. … If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul."

The ensuing, sorry record of master-race misapprehension of the cultural products of the enslaved and of those forcibly, violently separated from civil society begins with Douglass' bald statement that "I have been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by tears."

One wonders, with this mournful cast shaping his taste in music and with his affinity to Scotland, what Frederick Douglass might have thought of that most evocative of sorrowful instruments, the bagpipe? This isn't just a random thought that comes out of the wild blue from someone devoted to folly who himself plays the bagpipe. It is more an effort to fill by surmise a blank left by biographer Blight, who notes in his book that, late in life, Douglass dabbled in art patronage; among other things he, along with some others, donated to the library of Hampton Institute a painting by none other than Henry Ossawa Tanner, discussed above. The painting was called The Bagpipe Lesson.

Douglass was solicited by Tanner himself, by letter, and did not see the painting before it was bought. One wonders what came to mind when he read the letter, which included the painting's title? Who would not assume a Highland bagpipe, that noble stereotype of bagpipes everywhere? Only a member of that minority of cosmopolitan bagpipe nerds might imagine an Italian zampogna or a Breton biniou -- which is in fact the instrument depicted in the painting, all bag and no pipe, an appearance both more rotund and jovial than the Highland pipes, with their elongated drones, the howitzers of a perennial Om.

As it happens Tanner, studying in Paris at the time, toured the countryside in search of genre settings to paint and lighted upon an educative scene paralleling the one in The Banjo Lesson, which he had painted in Paris less than a year before. Both paintings now reside in the Hampton University Museum, the bagpipe one due in part to the largesse of a Frederick Douglass to whom music was the mournful means of living through pain, whether it be felt on a plantation in the American South or a pasture in Scotland. 

At last, then, we come to the question -- or rather the challenge -- posed by the paintings: how do we teach the children? And what? Is it only fact and technique? Or can it contain meaning? Here again we can turn to Douglass for an answer.

A close associate of John Brown, Douglass was widely deemed guilty by this association after Harpers Ferry and had to flee into temporary exile to escape the consequences of this alliance (despite the fact that he'd counseled the raider against striking the Federal arsenal). Afterwards, Douglass helped construct the martyrdom of Brown, but the "detailed historical and mythic image" (Blight's words) that he imparted was "not a story to please but to pain" (Douglass's words). Blight again: "Brown was a martyr and a victor, but also a classically tragic hero never to be forgotten, a symbol always to trouble and spur the American conscience."

America suffers from a whitewashed conscience, a whitewashed culture, a whitewashed memory, and a debased level of civic participation because it fails to confront the extent to which the majority culture is built on blindness to the fact that the roots of its heritage are deeply sunk into oppression and facile, superficial, criminal expropriation -- to me a necessarily stronger and more appropriate term than "appropriation." That long musical history mentioned above -- minstrelsy, jazz, blues-and-r&b-inflected rock, rap -- can be understood as not so much a borrowing as a stealing with an intent to ignore when it does not demean. Commercialism, like drumming, covers a multitude of sins. It is part and parcel with Woodrow Wilson introducing progressive government along with federalized Jim Crow segregation. It is part and parcel with insisting on a bleached national anthem that exists only for "the troops" -- a concept alien to the 1776 founding spirit if there ever was one -- and cannot comprehend the continuing inability of "the brave" to provide a home for freedom.

We cannot teach what we do not know. And if we do not teach the true and ongoing pain of the nation, we cannot teach its aspiration to glory. If all we teach amounts to "tech," we miss the whole point of America.

To me one of the greatest musical discoveries of all time is the "blues" harmonica. This does not mean the technical artifact itself, the row of brass tongues inside a shiny metal housing, but rather the musical invention of playing that artifact in a way different from the one it was meant to be played -- off-prescription, as it were. It's like the backbeat taking over THE BEAT from the downbeat.

I was privileged one time to share with an African-American audience in the auditorium of what used to be Frederick Douglass High School a personal rendition of the "history" of this musical invention: whether or not it came as a result of "freaking" the inhaled (drawn, pulled, sucked) notes low down on a harmonica, at some point someone in America of African descent struck upon the idea that the basis of harmonica playing is not blowing, but inhaling: when you pick up a harmonica, don't blow; draw. That is your key. And this changes everything for a harmonica player. It is to me a discovery right up there with Franklin's lightning: it is musical electricity. I can be thankful to whatever unnamed musician(s) made the discovery, and turn the power to my advantage. But at the same time, if I do not carry with me an understanding of the historical context of this music -- an appreciation as it were, as informed as everyone ought to be of where Henry Ossawa Tanner's paintings came from -- and accept the gift as a challenge not only to mourn the wrongs of the past but, as well, to try to right their continuing consequences, then I'm just another American celebrating a soulless heritage like a sucking dove.