I didn’t know much about Frederick Douglass until recently. I knew he was an author, and that he had probably written about the evils of slavery and the treatment of African Americans in general. I’d never read anything he’d written, so I wasn’t positive, but it seemed like a good bet.
Then I listened to an interview with the author of Douglass’s definitive biography. In the middle of the conversation the biographer mentioned rather offhandedly that once he was no longer a slave, Douglass made his living almost exclusively from his writing and lectures. It was one more remarkable fact about this man’s remarkable life.
That detail, however, stayed with me. I know what it is to try to make a living from writing and speaking in 2021. That’s what I do. Thanks to the Internet I was able to keep giving talks and workshops even when the whole world shut down. Most of my writing career grew from online periodicals, outlets that have expanded exponentially in the last ten years. I have a YouTube channel and a podcast, neither of which cost me anything, and both of which are able to reach people anywhere on the globe instantly and at any time of the day.
I’m also not an ex-slave. Nowhere in the United States is it illegal for me to know how to read and write. I don’t live under the oppressive force of systemic racism.
Even given all of these advantages, it still took me a long time to learn how to make a living doing what I do. I spent almost two decades experiencing mostly failure and rejection. It was frustrating and disappointing and confusing. Though I knew intellectually it wasn’t so, the publishing world still often felt as if it existed behind high walls sealed with iron gates. I knew people were walking through those gates, but why they were permitted in and I was not remained elusive and mysterious to me.
Then there’s Douglass. He made a living doing more or less what I do with no Internet, no digital publishing, and despite at least half the country believing he was only 3/5 of a human. His environment couldn’t have been more hostile, and yet this did not prevent him from succeeding. Is this because he was special? If Douglass was special, that means some people are just inherently better than other people, the very idea from which slavery grew.
I believe that Douglass had found his connection to the source of all human inspiration, ingenuity, and expression. Anyone can tap into what he was tapped into, but many people aren’t, and many people will spend their entire lives struggling to accept such a connection is possible. But this doesn’t mean they can’t and they won’t, and it certainly doesn’t mean some people are superior to other people. Equality is equality is equality, and it must be extended in its inherent concept to those we call geniuses as well as those who are suffering, or it isn’t true equality.
I think of Douglass whenever I hear people debating whether systems are more powerful than individuals. The system in which Douglass lived could not have been more hostile. It was designed to limit and punish large swaths of the population. Douglass worked actively and incessantly to change those systems. In addition to being a national leader in the abolitionist movement, he also participated in The Underground Railroad and fought for women’s suffrage. His life was devoted to changing the systems that kept people oppressed.
But if Frederick Douglass’s life taught me anything it’s that no system, no matter how backward and corrupt, is more powerful than an individual aligned with themselves and their own inherent creative power. While I was struggling to find success as a writer, it was the niggling belief that the publishing world, the array of gatekeepers and business types, were the problem, that the system in which I was hoping to thrive contained Byzantine and capricious rules for entry. It was a depressing and hopeless thought, but I struggled on anyway against its oppressive current.
The rules for entry turned out to be much simpler than I had long feared. I spend a fair amount of time talking to other authors now, and some of them will complain about the publishing world and how it treats writers. They complain about agents and advances and reviewers and Amazon. They complain that the system has changed too much and that it isn’t changing fast enough. I try to avoid complaining since I know I won’t be the one to change publishing. I can only control what I write and how I share what I’ve written.
I believe that’s enough. It’s enough for writers and enough for anyone who wants to create anything, from a business to a political movement. As I said, I’ve never read Frederick Douglass’s work, but I would not be surprised if I were to find this eternal truth within his writings, that our creative drive was not meant to be nor can it be enslaved by anything as transitory as our ever-changing laws and institutions.
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