BY GREGORY E. RUTLEDGE

The current state of the union—recurring mass shootings, raging white supremacy (manifested in voter disenfranchisement, anti-immigrant hostility, violence against Asian Americans, and efforts to foment a racial civil war), a pandemic, outrageously foxy lying by US senators and representatives, and increasing economic desperation alongside massive wealth gains by billionaires—and the complacency of so many Americans is cause not only to debunk notions of American exceptionalism, justice, morality, freedom, and democracy but also education itself. What were we being taught—as a nation—seeing Derek Chauvin on trial for George Floyd’s murder when nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds of video evidence shows that he’s guilty as sin?

We don’t need another trial as much as we need truth and reconciliation to uncover the past (not just recorded history), be educated about it, and have a chance to be truly global citizens.

We need truth and reconciliation, starting with our schools. What would truth and reconciliation look like, as a pedagogical matter?

Scene from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

For example, instead of an “Uncle Tom”—a fictional character, a symbol of black Christian martyrdom, and the veritable curse leveled against pliant Toms (and Aunt Jemimas)—it would look like and be “Sandy,” as depicted by Frederick (Bailey) Douglass. That Uncle Tom, an African Americanist construct of the white imaginary, looms supreme is testament to the historic legacy of a lack of academic freedom that patrols—and enslaves—the nation even now.

Illustrations from Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom.

If there were truth and reconciliation wedded to academic freedom, genuine diversity, instead of focusing on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, courtesy of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Honest Abe’s famous rhetorical nod, we would shift our attention to the antebellum lessons of the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, which completes the first book.

Douglass’s Narrative offers his epic life story as antislavery critique, detailing the atrocities of upper-South proslavery culture, amply proving his literacy with a mastery of letters, and then going one step further: teaching literacy! Douglass’s Narrative provides so many details that it is easy to overlook the fact that during his final period of enslavement, he was a teacher. During his period with Mr. Freeland in St. Michaels, Maryland, Douglass sparked interest in the other three people laboring there—Henry Harris and John Harris, owned by Freeland, and Sandy Jenkins, who was married to a freewoman—and they soon “mustered up some old spelling-books.” “Henry and John,” Douglass notes, “were quite intelligent.” With the word spreading, Douglass soon hosted a “Sabbath school” on Sundays at a freeman’s home for more than “forty scholars.”

Slaves, as “scholars.”

And committed Douglass was: “I kept up my school nearly the whole year I lived with Mr. Freeland; and, beside my Sabbath school, I devoted three evenings in the week, during the winter, to teaching the slaves at home.”

Rewarding slave labor, indeed, at the most extreme risk!

When Narrative was published in 1845, at the antebellum height of King Cotton, Douglass as teacher of a Sabbath school and “Freeland” extension was doing an amazing job. Appearing well before there was any formal notion of black arts, his academy represents one of the most peculiarly American moments. Today, scholars like me study Phillis Wheatley, Douglass, and their progeny, but imagine the curriculum of Douglass’ schools, where the forty-plus scholars—a black community—were themselves the source of countless unbelievable, but true, untold stories. Their personal stories, but also our American stories. The core idea of the slave-narrative genre created, edited, and published—that is, controlled—by northern abolitionists was to tell a true story.

But because a fugitive Douglass was not free to tell his 1845 narrative, which was introduced by two white abolitionists, forces were set in motion to deny the education he and his “scholars” offered. Forces still alive and well—controlling—in education today.

And that’s how you get Uncle Tom. Douglass’s teaching was patrolled in “bloody manner” as “Mssrs. Wright Fairbanks and Garrison West, both class leaders” and others attacked them with “sticks and stones, and broke up our virtuous little Sabbath school, at St. Michael’s.”

Worse than this, worse than an Uncle Tom, was the betrayal—surveilling—by one of their own. This is a story only alluded to in Narrative—presumably because of abolitionist policing. Just as Victor Séjour’s 1837 “The Mulatto” informed Parisian readers (in French), “Hush. . . . Hush, Georges. The walls have ears and someone will talk,’” Douglass, early in Narrative, writes, “The slave-holders have been known to send in spies among their slaves.” Curiously, though the “maxim” Douglass articulates—“a still tongue makes a wise head” (23)—is frighteningly applicable, and he attaches no face to the betrayer in Narrative. Instead, he artfully gestures to this person: the “old advisor,” one who gave him a “root” to ward off whippings (performance-enhanced resistance) and the one who was “spreading manure” with Douglass when “I,” he writes, “was overwhelmed with an indescribable feeling; . . . I turned to Sandy, who was nearby, and said, ‘We are betrayed!’” (62). Discovered, Douglass and two “scholars”—conspiring to escape—were arrested.

Narrative closes, and yet Douglass does not reveal who the informer is. The revelation comes after Douglass, breaking with William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist, publishes his own unmediated autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom: Sandy Jenkins.

We have “Uncle Tom,” a canonized put-down, instead of “Sandy” because of the policing of academic freedom from the mid-antebellum to now. The South as a surveillance state might have been too much to countenance, but this truth and reconciliation, an essential part of academic freedom, has been denied. No wonder our high-tech present also feels, disturbingly, like 1840s America. Academically, this opens up possibilities: “Sandy,” a diminutive of “Alexander,” implies imperial defense; “sand” (xand?) reaches far into mythic potency, with its Indo-European root, *bhes-, meaning “to rub off, pulverize”; and its 10,000-year-old form in the hypothetical (and controversial) Nostratic macrofamily, which includes many indigenous language families as well, means “to rub, to grind.” Racially, the policing of and in the academy has meant that stories like those of Douglass and his “scholars”—an untold sum potentially as numerous as grains of sand—have been hushed. This when Sandy signifies the protean pulverizer, the essence of silicon—agent of the matrix—who can be a Tom, yo’ mom, a “scholar,” quicksand, your worst nightmare.

The “walls have ears.” What would we hear from today’s “scholars” of color, emancipated to tell their own Sandy stories, of being patrolled-surveilled-policed in the “walls” of academia? If diversity is to mean anything, truth and reconciliation, and academic freedom, is what it needs to look like.

Guest blogger Gregory E. Rutledge is associate professor in the Department of English and Institute for Ethnic Studies of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He specializes in African American literature.