Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born a slave on Maryland’s Mid-Shore near Tuckahoe Creek in 1818, and taken to the Wye House Plantation as a small boy. He learned to read and write as a house slave at Fells Point in Baltimore, but was returned to Talbot County to suffer under the whip of slave-breaker Edward Covey, and spent four days in Easton’s jail for trying to escape by boat from the Miles River.
He’ll return to Talbot County in 2011 to talk about his youth, the people who loved him and shaped his character, and others whose cruelty and hypocrisy planted an unquenchable thirst for freedom deep in his soul.
In 2011, many others will talk about the man Freddie became, the renowned abolitionist, impassioned speaker and writer, Frederick Douglass. Freddie Bailey will speak only about the traumatic and indelibly formative first 20 years of his life: of mean-spirited Aunt Kate who boxed his ears and deprived him of food; of overseers rewarded by plantation-owners for keeping slaves subdued and subservient under the whip; of his loving mother who twice walked 12 miles from Tuckahoe to Wye to visit him after working a full day in the fields, and of the amazing day he was made servant and companion to the plantation owner’s young son.
He will recall mournful songs of slaves working in the fields, the old and weary praying for death to set them free. His voice will rise in anger when he tells today’s children that a slave owner in the 19th century counted among his possessions black human beings, along with his horses, cows, pigs and sheep.
The memory of his beautiful aunt Hester, brutally beaten by an enraged master, will be part of his story. And the day he fought slave-breaker Edward Covey for two hours until both were exhausted was a turning point in his life that he will recite in detail.
Throughout the four days he was held in Easton’s jail, he was told he would be sold to southern slave traders, a death sentence. He had seen slaves chained together in Baltimore and marched to ships that would take them to the deep South, never to be heard from again. He knew Solomon Lowe’s tavern in Talbot County was the site of an annual slave auction. And he will acknowledge the profound relief he felt when he was spared that fate and sent back to Baltimore.
That no stigma was attached to slave trading troubled him deeply. That greed overwhelmed human decency among supposedly God-fearing, Bible-reading men and women disgusted him, for slavery was indeed a lucrative business. Collusion of clergy, publishers, slave sellers and slave buyers reinforced the piously held belief that a fair and compassionate God had made white men masters and black men slaves. Even as a boy, Freddie knew it was an atrocious lie and that one day he would be free to speak the truth. As we know, he added the name, Douglass, to aid in his escape by train to the north, age 20, disguised as a sailor.
“Born To Be Free” is a 20-minute monologue I have written for performance in 2011 in conjunction with events commemorating the remarkable life of Frederick Douglass. It is a history lesson on slavery in the early 19th century. Washington-based actor Jabari Exum will premiere the play as part of a weekend commemoration of Frederick Douglass culminating in the unveiling of his statue on the Talbot County Courthouse Green June 18.
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