It's Important I Remember That Abraham Lincoln Always Measured Before He Cut—, and: It's Important I Remember That Frederick Douglass Learned How to Read—

Abstract

It's Important I Remember That Abraham Lincoln Always Measured Before He Cut—, and: It's Important I Remember That Frederick Douglass Learned How to Read— Cortney Lamar Charleston (bio) It's Important I Remember That Abraham Lincoln Always Measured Before He Cut— saying less, for now, about the steady hand holding the penof proclamation and presidential address, saying more of the one wrapped around the axe handle,that brought the head down straight and split the rails that built the fence which became the borderthat separated the "civilized" from those they labeled savage and created farmland from their land, that Abe labored onfor no payment except for his father's admonishment while living on the frontier of difficult feelings, eyes forever fullof mood and storm. Say more of the man of lithe stature who was too small in status to perjure himself before the public, of the candidatewho was common enough to be a trustworthy steward over the common interest as far as working men saw it. Say moreof the sense of duty and command he had, of his executive competence and sense of determination. See, I can indulge a good mythmade of a mortal man up until the point it makes myth of me as well: when my thanks are invited implicitly in every retelling of his storyfor a piece of paper that cut around electoral edges, that freed my forebears as battle tactic to spare a fiction grand enoughfor people to keep dying for in perpetuity. He would save the Union without freeing any slave if he could, the president wroteto Horace Greeley with hallmark honesty: without any slaves [End Page 135] it wouldn't have been possible to save it and without any slavesit wouldn't have needed saving, the war between states and their stated ideals made moot, so say more of the price paid to refortify the foundationof a house that is burning now because it didn't fall back then. Say more on prudence when insistence is the only righteous option. Say moreabout what happens when common men have a measure of control in their leathered hands: ink and parchment, blade and hilt. [End Page 136] It's Important I Remember That Frederick Douglass Learned How to Read— and Anna Murray Douglass, his first missus, did not. Before her husband left boyhood's single digits,his lessons in letters were swiftly ended by his new master—intervening in his own wife's illegality—with the recognitionan ability to read ruins a slave's fit for enslavement. As legend goes, this launched Frederick's pursuit of literacyand the liberation it would deliver, but this poem, for one thing,for once, is not about him in the first, though it must turn aroundhis decisions as Anna did whenever he disappeared, literally,into his work, a literary man and lecturer in demandrunning across borders like a sentence let off its chain. Whereas her husband had come to be seenas unfit for anything less than acclaim, Anna was seenas unfit for him by many in the academy of abolitionists,a woman so dark the marks of beauty couldn't be seen under sunlight,a woman so dull in intellect she couldn't thumb the autobiographies she was written out of. The womanwho housed them in their organizing visits. The womanwho fed them with food from the soul. The womanwho tended to the tender-headed babiesand made the household math work; the one who was no fugitiveherself but transformed her betrothed into one with her own coin andconnections, who harbored those to follow his footsteps to freedom. What the renowned Frederick would want in a wife like Annawasn't mystery; she could skim the slants of people's bodies awayfrom hers—an alphabet of small indignities and silent sufferings—who filed in and filled her bedrooms from wall to wall, even asher spouse took flight to Seneca Falls to uplift women's suffrage.What he wanted, what he needed, she provided despite the feeling of it. [End Page 137] Living...