The Battle With Mr Covey

In organizing and move-building circles, nosotros often talk honorifically near our "fearless" leaders: people who are unflinching, who are not afraid of any fight and who never dorsum downwards. However, over nearly ii decades of experience as a community and labor organizer, I accept plant that information technology is quite rare to notice a person who genuinely meets this standard. What's more, such people may be seen by others effectually them as foolhardy, unrealistic, or even untrustworthy—people exhibiting what Socrates one time called "foolish boldness" (Plato's Laches).

People are afraid to face their boss; they're afraid their coworkers won't stand up with them or that they might stab them in the back. They're agape they will get fired—falling further behind on their bills, losing health intendance for their kids, compounding their current suffering.

A sure corporeality of fear tin can be healthy, causing enough suspension to ensure that one makes an informed decision: is taking this hazard worth information technology? Layered on meridian of such fears, nosotros oftentimes find futility: the idea that even if we try, we are bound to lose, because in fact in that location is no way that it can get better. Like other fears, futility has the event of preventing human action. Overwhelmed by futility, human beings sink into despair. What is the point of even trying? Why go on?

Fear and futility are so mutual and widespread that a well-structured organizing conversation will address them direct and inoculate against them. But our reply to someone who is afraid cannot be "Don't worry almost it," just every bit we cannot absolutely guarantee victory in order to overcome futility. Workers know that such talk amounts to bullshit.  I recent study found that employers violate federal law in 41.v% of union elections, illegally firing workers in 20% of such campaigns, and making threats, conducting surveillance, and harassing workers in nearly 33% of such cases—all while spending hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-union consultants to stymie organizing.

For this reason, organizers need to develop our thinking around the function of courage in human action. As a mentor of mine one time divers it, courage is a quality that enables us to do something even when we are afraid to. That is to say: real courage does non mean existence unafraid. Instead, courage is the willingness to human activity in full knowledge our fears. The reverse of courage is cowardice: knowing what nosotros need to do but assuasive our fears to prevent united states of america from doing it. With roots in the Latin word cor, we can understand courage as an act related to and requiring heart.

I aim here to deepen our understanding of courage by drawing from the life and thought of Frederick Douglass. In his writings and speeches, Douglass offers a host of reflections on the tensions between courage and cowardice, in the role of courage played in his own transformation, and in the transformation of his relationship with those who enslaved him. The almost famous of these is introduced in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)—namely, Douglass's battle with the barbarous enslaver Edward Covey.

Through a close reading of several passages of the Narrative, I hope to open a give-and-take of backbone as it relates to the ongoing projection of man liberation and the work of edifice a better world.

Dehumanization and Despair

Confronting the massive strength of racial capitalism and its various forms of economical, legal, political, ideological, and cultural power is a daunting job. Fifty-fifty doing so on a small scale, in i workplace or community, can often appear to be an insurmountable challenge. Organizers will likely be familiar with interactions with people who are "broken" in one way or another—and at times, we may fifty-fifty see such a person in the mirror. We are certain that club needs to exist transformed, merely nosotros don't know if we are up to the task. The limited horizons and paralysis of human action that outcome from such despair are amidst the aims of neoliberal ideologies that proclaim the end of history, with no alternatives. Such, likewise, was the aim of enslavers like Edward Covey, whose office was to break human being beings.

The details of Covey'southward methods of fierce domination course the baseline for a clearer understanding of the significance of Frederick Douglass'southward decision to stand up upward to him. Douglass writes that Covey "had acquired a very high reputation for breaking immature slaves," which "enabled him to get his subcontract tilled with much less expense to himself than he could have had it done without such a reputation." In other words, the value of Covey's ability to break human beings was and then high to the regime of chattel slavery that he regularly was given enslaved people by other "slaveholders …[for] i twelvemonth, for the sake of the training to which they were subjected, without any other bounty" (l, emphasis added).

Still a teenager when he arrives on Covey's plantation on January i, 1833, Douglass experiences Covey'due south brutality within the first calendar week when "Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the claret to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large every bit my little finger" (51).  The whipping comes afterwards Douglass, inexperienced in driving oxen, was ordered to collect firewood using a team of "unbroken oxen" that go loose twice in the form of his labors, the ox-cart both times near burdensome him to death (Ibid).

Rather than showing sympathy or providing pedagogy on how to train and guide a squad of oxen, Covey berates Douglass for the delays caused by the accident—and and so beats him. Notice that Covey does not whip the unbroken oxen, an implicit acknowledgement that something must exist beaten out of Douglass—his humanity. In fact, Covey does not just treat Douglass as an animal; he treats him worse than an animal. Physical torture combined with a relentless labor regime are vital to Covey'southward psychological methods of control in the process of breaking human beings. Of his whippings, Douglass writes that during the kickoff vi months at Covey'south, "scarce a week passed without his whipping me. I was seldom free from a sore back" (52).

Further, the workday demanded of them past Covey pushed them "fully up to the indicate of endurance" (Ibid), and again beyond what is demanded of the farm animals. Douglass describes his work start before sunrise by feeding the horses, in order to be in the fields by daybreak, continuing to labor until afterward sunset, at times "midnight often caught us in the field bounden blades" (52–three). Again, when compared with the care given to the horses, Douglass notes the degradation faced by the enslaved: "Mr. Covey gave u.s. enough to swallow, merely scarce time to eat it. Nosotros were often less than five minutes taking our meals" (Ibid).

Their unabridged life was consumed, every bit Douglass writes, with "Work, work, work…scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were likewise short for him, and the shortest nights as well long for him" (55). What's more than, it was "never too hot or likewise cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snowfall, also hard for u.s. to work in the field" (Ibid). In summary, Douglass writes that "If at whatever one time of my life more than than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first 6 months of my stay with Mr. Covey" (Ibid).

Douglass describes how his period under the license of Covey affects his country of mind:

I was somewhat unmanageable when I offset went there, but a few months of this subject field tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was cleaved in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark nighttime of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a fauna!

Ibid.

Covey so dominates him that Douglass feels himself losing his humanity, experiencing his ain negation and social death, "cleaved in body, soul, and spirit." Though fundamentally Douglass knows that he is human being, he is "crushed" to the degree that even in his ain heed he is reduced to the status of a "brute" animal, or perchance fifty-fifty lower. As various elements of his personality disintegrate, Douglass feels himself condign not himself.

Something else is required in order for Douglass to reclaim his total humanity—his own activity.

Reassertion

Douglass describes a day where he is so sick and exhausted that he literally falls to the footing sick, unable to work. Rather than receiving care, medicine, or empathy, Covey beats him for his supposed "idleness." Upon recovery, Douglass decides to walk v hours to visit the person who had hired him out to Covey, Thomas Auld, to complain about Covey's harsh treatment. Douglass asks to exist transferred to another plantation or to come home to Auld, who in response demands that he return to Covey's plantation the side by side twenty-four hour period, under the threat of the lash should he refuse.

Such a refusal should not surprise united states of america. Auld had sent Douglass to Covey'due south plantation then that he would be broken by the very methods he was now complaining about. To a modern reader, Douglass's idea may read equally naïve, just in terms of Douglass' ain growth and transformation, information technology was important that he tried to "file a grievance" over his conditions. It was equally important to his development that this attempt to work within the rules of the system failed. Equally Lewis Gordon points out in a discussion of Frantz Fanon's thought in What Fanon Said (97), "Although one's freedom, license, or absenteeism of constraints could exist handed over by another, it is the struggle for liberation that actually engenders one's freedom."

In wedlock organizing, we ofttimes say that "the boss is the all-time organizer"—acknowledging that more than anything a skilled wedlock organizer can do or say, it is the actions of those that oppress and exploit workers that class the foundation of their decision to deed. By rejecting Douglass's well-reasoned pleas for sympathy and fairness, Auld solidifies Douglass' conviction for his future path—where he would test accepted boundaries and so begin to explode them. In the wake of this encounter, Douglass would now not simply be satisfied with being treated humanely, but, rather, he would demand to be treated humanly. Although reduced past Covey to the status of a brute animal, he promises the states nosotros shall soon see how he again becomes a man.

Later his return from his visit to Auld, a few days become past in which Douglass generally avoids Covey. One day as Douglass is working in the befouled, Covey sneaks upwards on him and grabs him as he is descending a ladder—tossing him to the floor in order to tie him up and whip him:

Mr. Covey seemed at present to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; simply at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don't know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my activity to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the pharynx; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was and so entirely unexpected that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a foliage.

Narrative, 61–two

This is an incredible moment, every bit Douglass surprises Covey (and in some means himself, although several earlier portions of the Narrative show his mental preparation to gratuitous himself) by suddenly fighting back. The entire legal, political, social, economic construction of slave society is built around keeping Black people in bondage, servitude, and in a condition of not-humanity. That is, Covey has and represents power. Yet here is Covey, a notorious slave-billow known in that region of Maryland for his brutality, and backed by all of slave society, "trembling like a leaf" in the hands of a self-described "awkward" teenager.

Douglass, as inexperienced equally he was in preparation oxen, surely had no feel in fighting his enslavers—and probable very little feel in any fighting at all. In fact, the only time the word "fight" appears in the text prior to Douglass' battle with Covey is when he is describing fights between enslaved people over which of their corresponding enslavers was richer or stronger. He could non know for sure what the issue of the fight would exist—not merely whether he would win or lose, simply what the actual consequences would exist for him because of the choice to fight. The expected i would exist his death. And even so he fights.

Polarization and Power

Taken ashamed, Covey and then calls upon another enslaved person named Hughes to assistance him restrain Douglass. Hughes shares more in common with Douglass than he does with Covey, simply Covey'southward activity reasserts the power that he has backside him; his power to command Hughes to help in the punishment of Douglass should spell the end of the affair. Such split and conquer strategies should be familiar to organizers, and the reason they are so mutual is that they oft work. Not this time, however. When Hughes steps in to assist Covey, Douglass understands that he has made a selection nigh which side he is on, and Douglass acts accordingly—kicking Hughes squarely in the ribs.

This kick fairly sickened Hughes, and then that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the issue of not merely weakening Hughes, but Covey besides. When he saw Hughes angle over with hurting, his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a beast for vi months, and that I was determined to exist used then no longer.

Ibid, 62

Although Douglass kicks Hughes, the blow weakens Covey—certainly in the sense of his morale and psyche, although possibly even physically. He is losing his power to control the situation and learning that Douglass will not be and then hands broken later all.

With Hughes out of the picture, Covey then turns to another enslaved person, Bill, for help in defeating Douglass. Neb, similar Hughes, plays a small but important part in these events, as in his response we tin can see Covey'south power diminishing even further. Douglass writes: "Bill said his master hired him out to work, and not to aid to whip me; so he left Covey and myself to fight our ain battle out" (62). Nib does not come up over to Douglass's side to aide in the fight (nor did Douglass inquire him to), but in seeing what happened to Hughes and observing Douglass'due south determination, Bill feels confident enough to be able to decline an lodge from Covey—an act of insubordination that certainly would put Bill at hazard for future punishment himself.

This refusal to cooperate is pregnant. Throughout the Narrative, multiple acts of refusal are made by white people—refusing requests or appeals, refusing to work with Douglass in a Baltimore ship-building shop, etc. —with no real consequence to them. With the exception of Bill's refusal (and obviously those of Douglass himself), the only other two refusals fabricated past Black people in the Narrative consequence in their immediate death (Demby, who is shot in the head past Mr. Gore for refusing to be whipped) or in their firsthand harm (Henry, who is beaten by several constables for refusing to exist tied up). As subtle equally it is, Pecker'south refusal demonstrates the shift in the master-slave dynamic that is occurring considering of Douglass's decision to fight.

The fight between Douglass and Covey would keep for well-nigh two hours until, Douglass writes, Covey would surrender and:

let me become, puffing and bravado at a bully rate, proverb that if I had not resisted, he would not accept whipped me half and then much. The truth was that he had non whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst finish of the bargain; for he had fatigued no blood from me, but I had from him. The whole half dozen months after that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger. He would occasionally say, he didn't want to get hold of me again. "No," thought I, "y'all need not; for you will come off worse than you did before."

Ibid., 62–iii

Covey'south face-saving "alert"—that if Douglass had not resisted, he would not accept been whipped as much—is entirely laughable. As Douglass notes earlier in the Narrative, he had been whipped nearly weekly during the first half dozen months on Covey's farm. After Douglass asserts himself, Covey never touches him once again for the remainder of the year that Douglass is rented to Covey.

In other words, it is non just Douglass who has been transformed past finding his courage, merely also Covey. Past standing upwardly to Covey, despite the considerable risk of doing and then, Douglass forces Covey to renegotiate the terms of their human relationship. Earlier the fight, Covey acted in a manner that demonstrated his license to exercise whatever he wanted to do to Douglass. He would not take been prevented from killing him based on any human empathy or possible criminal liability, for nosotros know that, as Douglass writes, "killing a slave, or any colored person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a offense, either past the courts or the community" (21).

Prior to the fight, the but thing that might have protected Douglass from being murdered by Covey were the economic consequences to Covey himself had he killed Douglass, as we larn when Douglass is pleading with Thomas Auld to exist transferred off of Covey's plantation. Auld "ridiculed the idea that there was any danger of Mr. Covey's killing me, and said that he knew Mr. Covey; that he was a skillful man, and that he could not remember of taking me from him; that, should he practise so, he would lose the whole year'southward wages" (59–lx). The only value placed on Douglass under chattel slavery is as a commodity; were he to be killed, the world would not exist losing a person; Covey would be losing his earnings. In other words, Covey killing Douglass would not have been, under that system, murder, just instead a matter of poor financial planning.

Rehumanization, Rebirth, Renewal

In fighting Covey, Douglass chooses to reassert his humanity, and in and then doing creates a set up of constraints on Covey's behavior, new restraints that Covey must obey. These rules practise not simply utilize to and restrict Covey, but also to every other white man Douglass meets thereafter, whom,  he writes, "I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white homo who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me." Though he remains enslaved for the next four years subsequently the fight with Covey, Douglass writes that in this time he "had several fights, merely was never whipped" (63).

Although his opportunity to escape from slavery in Maryland has not all the same presented itself, in the fight with Covey Douglass has transformed his condition, his relationship with and conception of his cocky, and his human relationship with others:

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning betoken in my career equally a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of liberty, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to exist free. The gratification afforded past the triumph was a total compensation for whatsoever else might follow, even death itself. He but can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the encarmine arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the 'tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom' My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, assuming defiance took its identify; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the twenty-four hours had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.

Ibid., 63

As part of reasserting his full humanity, Douglass here refers to his "career" as a slave, a device that serves to frame his enslavement equally if it were a task, his form in order rather than the entire fact of his existence. Finding courage to fight Covey, in Douglass'south example, results in a rebirth: from "the tomb of slavery to the sky of freedom."

This courage must be constantly renewed. Fifty-fifty later Douglass establish the courage to fight Covey, he does not become a "fearless" person. He plans an escape in 1835 with several others simply they are betrayed on Easter weekend by their own Judas before they tin begin. Contemplating his second try at escape in 1838, he expresses even greater trepidation about the stakes at hand:

the dread and anticipation of a failure exceeded what I had experienced at my first attempt. The bloodcurdling defeat I then sustained returned to torment me. I felt bodacious that, if I failed in this attempt, my case would exist a hopeless one—it would seal my fate as a slave forever. I could not hope to get off with anything less than the severest punishment, and existence placed across the means of escape. Information technology required no very vivid imagination to depict the most frightful scenes through which I should have to laissez passer, in example I failed. The wretchedness of slavery, and the blessedness of freedom, were perpetually before me. Information technology was life and death with me.

Ibid., 91-92

Douglass knows that he might not make it, and he fears that he might be killed forth any step of his journey. Just he does not surrender—and this courageous option is exactly the betoken.

Making a Fashion Out of No Style

Had Douglass non called to stand up upward to Covey, his whippings and degradation certainly would have continued. Douglass had no manner of knowing what the actual outcome of the fight would exist, but he fought anyway. Had he called not to try to escape Maryland—failing the first time but succeeding the second—it's like shooting fish in a barrel to conclude that his enslavement would take connected until the end of his life, that he would "live and die a slave" (56). Past choosing to non succumb to fearfulness or futility, and making a series of courageous choices, all of which involved significant adventure of pain or death, Douglass manages to liberate himself.

Finding his style north to New Bedford, Massachusetts, he keeps the proper noun Frederick but chooses a new last name and eventually—afterward several years as a laborer—a new career every bit an abolitionist making a powerful contribution to the fight to defeat slavery and leaving a lasting legacy of thought. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and the life and thought of the man who wrote it should serve every bit a reminder to today'due south organizers and movements that although it is easy to despair, our thoughts and our deportment exercise not accept to end there, nor should they.

It tin be easy to confuse the power and the omnipresence of the forces arrayed against us for their omnipotence. "Your arm's too short to box with God," wrote James Weldon Johnson in "The Prodigal Son," capturing well the dilemma of anyone who would attempt to battle an all-powerful entity. (In God's Trombones). And yet if capital letter and white supremacy were truly anointed gods, truly out of the achieve of our punches, why do they demand to do so much work to effort to discourage us from fighting back in the start place? The answer, of course, is that they are not in fact all-powerful; they just want us to think they are.

Accepting their inevitable victory—our own inevitable defeat—is a choice that, if we make information technology, becomes self-determining and self-fulfilling. Nosotros can either give in to our fears, which means we accept that things will continue the aforementioned manner that they always have, or we can notice our backbone to take activity despite our fears, which means that we might be able to change things. To be certain, nosotros cannot guarantee that we volition win and that our world will change when we find our backbone to act, but we know for sure that information technology will non change if nosotros do not act.

The anxiety and fear that we may experience in anticipation of a potential actions that carry risk, every bit we imagine the possible consequences, can frequently be more difficult to acquit psychically than what we feel in undertaking the activeness itself. Merely when we find and exercise our courage, every bit nosotros come across in the example of Frederick Douglass, we transform ourselves in important means: as we pierce through the veil of our fears, we reject the grasp that futility and despair has on our minds, what had previously held united states of america back drops away, and we (in an individual and a collective sense) are transformed. We transform those that oppose us, too, in that they did not look usa to fight dorsum and they must, one way or another, suit themselves to a new reality.

In adopting a exercise of courage in our lives and in our movements, we can become confident and powerful, and even liberated, in ways that we had not expected. Nosotros may exist helped along the path by remembering that in addition to courage, in that location is another give-and-take that has been delivered to u.s. from the Latin word cor, which brings to mind a formulation of commonage action that is more than than the sum of its various parts—the choir.

Lone, we may exist agape to sing out. Lifting every voice, we are stronger—and we can inspire 1 another to find the backbone we will need to win.

Chas Walker

Chas Walker earned a BA in African-American Studies at Chocolate-brown University and then worked for nearly ii decades as a customs and wedlock organizer with health care and kid intendance workers in Rhode Island, primarily with SEIU District 1199 New England . He now lives in Dorchester, MA, and recently published a column in The Boston World  on the anniversary of the 1999 WTO protests and the rising of today's labor and climate justice movements. Y'all can detect him on Twitter: @chasbwalker .

The Battle With Mr Covey,

Source: https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/02/18/frederick-douglass-and-the-transformational-power-of-courage-in-a-fearsome-world/

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