This paper turns to the symbol of disability in antebellum protest literature. Drawing out the narrative significance of disability, the analysis shows how images of physical disability were taken up by formerly enslaved authors and reworked for social resistance. Although most deployments of disability as metaphor reduce disability to a symbol of the flaws and failures of human existence (Schalk, 2013), in Frederick Douglass’s writings broken bones, limps, and burns retain symbolic force without diminishing concrete experience or erasing the more-than symbolic qualities of disabled life. In fact, Douglass depicts disabled people not simply as passive recipients of injustice, but as active participants in both the undoing and perpetuation of slavery. In addition, and unexpectedly, he recurringly positions disability alongside faith without framing faith as a cure.
Disability is a thread that runs through antebellum slave narratives (Barclay, 2021; Hunt-Kennedy, 2023). Amputations, burns, and brands on flesh embody the harsh realities of enslavement and fugitivity. Faith, in contrast, provided strength needed for resistance. Enslaved people, like Nat Turner, Phyllis Wheatly, and Harriet Tubman, took up Christian teaching and made it their own. They found messages of affirmation, hope, and freedom in the very religious texts used to justify their captivity. Indeed, personal faith helped fashion lives that far exceeded determination by oppression.
Surprisingly understudied, the convergence of disability and faith in slave narratives is striking. Images of disability placed side-by-side cries for a “balm in Gilead” disturb. Consider Frederick Douglass’s depiction of Doctor Isaac Copper, an enslaved “cripple,” who despite an inability to work “was no sluggard (Bondage, 71).” Copper cured the sick with “Epsom salts and castor oil”; he healed the soul with “the Lord’s prayer and hickory switches (Bondage, 72).” The institution of slavery debilitated Doctor Copper inside and out. Copper’s internalized racialized violence—a violence figured by his broken body and distorted desires—produced religious instruction that physically and morally debilitated dozens of children sent to his schoolroom.
Frederick Douglass also tells the story of his cousin Henny Bailey. When she was a child, “Henny had fallen into the fire, and burnt her hands so bad that they were of very little use to her” (Bondage, 133). Since Henny’s commodified worth was connected to her capacity to work, Captain Auld sent her away to burden Master Hugh; Master Hugh quickly decided he had “no use for the crippled servant.” And he sends her back. Captain Auld, then, uses Douglass himself as leverage, saying, “if he cannot keep ‘Hen,’ he shall not have ‘Fred’” (Bondage, 134).
This experience of maltreatment and marketplace reveals the false piety of white slave owners and unravels, for Douglass, the relationship between family and faith. Whereas he had learned that faith was transmitted through the family and social attachments, now his religious commitments challenged relations of subordination within plantation households. Faith in God's "instruction" contradicted what he had been taught about God by white people. Outraged at Henny's situation, Douglass forms, right then and there, a “plan to escape from slavery” (Bondage, 135).
In contrast to other nineteenth-century rhetorical deployments of disability, Douglass refuses to attach innocence and passive receptivity to the disabled body. Instead, Douglass imbued disabled bodies with activity and resourcefulness. His narratives use disability to condemn slavery, as in the figures of Doctor Copper and Henny Bailey, as well as point to the possibility of slavery’s undoing. This paper explores the entanglement of disability and faith in Douglass’s writings. I’ll argue that, for Douglass, disability was more than a metaphor or revelation of false piety. Disability was lived materiality produced by a “diseased [white, Christian] imagination” that, when re-membered through its agential capacity, held promises of kinship and freedom.
The paper makes a series of critical interventions. First, the paper contributes to the much-needed emphasis on race in scholarship on religion and disability. Second, the paper acknowledges that reducing disability to its symbolic function oversimplifies the complexities of human existence. At the same time, I’ll show how narrative metaphor functions on multiple levels, making social, theological, and political claims without erasing active, embodied realities. Third, the reconsideration of disability in Douglass examines the complex ways disability and faith converge and underscore not only the value and worth of disabled life but also that disabled, enslaved persons themselves led contradictory lives. Finally, I hope this paper opens up another avenue for constructive conversation between disability histories, religious studies, and theology, so as to re-orient field discussions around archives beyond more "traditional" white Eurocentric Protestant and Catholic theologies.
This paper explores the entanglement of disability and faith in Frederick Douglass's writings. In contrast to other nineteenth-century deployments of broken bones, burns, and limps, Douglass refuses to attach innocence and passive receptivity to the disabled body. Instead, Douglass imbued disabled bodies with activity and resourcefulness. His narratives use disability to condemn slavery, as in the figures of Doctor Copper and Henny Bailey, as well as point to the possibility of slavery’s undoing. I’ll argue that, for Douglass, disability was more than a metaphor or revelation of false piety. Disability was lived materiality produced by a “diseased [white, Christian] imagination” that, when re-membered through its agential capacity, held promises of kinship and freedom.