Women in the World of Frederick Douglass by Leigh Fought

Author:Leigh Fought
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.2 Frederick, Anna, and Rosetta’s family outside of the Douglasses’ A Street home in Washington, DC. Because they lived only a block away from the Capitol, Anna stayed busy protecting her husband’s “work-time” from visitors of all classes and tending to the needs of extended family and long-term guests who occupied the house. National Park Service, Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Washington, DC, Capitol Hill home, [c. 1871–77], FRDO 11001.

Still, although Douglass clearly enjoyed Assing’s companionship, their friendship became unequal as his fame continued to grow. Whereas he had once looked to her to expand his audience and his knowledge about the world, she had become dependent on him for work as a journalist and her sense of self. “Your company for me has such a charm and affords me a gratification the like of which I never feel elsewhere,” she effused to Frederick. “Aside from other attractions it is such comfort to be allowed to communicate anything and everything to each other, to confide unconditionally without the least reserve or distrust.” He, on the other hand, silenced such outpourings as “incendiary,” inappropriate to the platonic nature of their friendship and a sign of disrespect to his marriage, although she protested that she had only “honest intentions and promises to the contrary.” She boasted of corresponding with a wide array of people, many quite important, but in reality she had only a small group of close friends, most of them German expatriates and none approaching the fame of Frederick. He, as she herself noted, had far more friends and associates, many of great stature, who filled his life and his house regularly and who rearranged their lives around his. She was only one of them, closer to him than most and certainly dear, but not as close or as dear as she liked to think, and unwilling to acknowledge or unaware of the intimacies that he shared with other people. As a result, he figured much larger in her life, or in the life that she portrayed to her other correspondents, than she in his.28

“If you are in as close of a relationship with one man as I am with Douglass,” she intimated in a letter to her sister, Ludmilla, “you get to know the whole world, men and women, from perspectives that would otherwise be hidden.” She possibly intended her sister to infer a sexual liaison from this passage in order to elicit intimate details about Ludmilla’s collapsing marriage. The two had an often acrimonious rivalry in which Ludmilla had bested Ottilie not only by surpassing her professionally but also by getting married. Ottilie followed the alleged disclosure with a direct request for more explicit information, “Let me know, I beg you!” She sought the evidence to satisfy her schadenfreude over her sister’s misfortune. In truth, she more likely described what she believed to be her special insight into the life of a famous man as his confidante and devotee, more intimate than all others and closer than a wife.

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