Home >  A & E >  Books

Abolitionist seen through eyes of wife and mistress

Sunday, November 17, 2002

By Sandra Lee Gould

Of Frederick Douglass' black wife, his white mistress Ottilie Assing wrote, "I shouldn't have hated her. She loved him just like me."

That insight came after sharing the great abolitionist for 18 years. Assing then waited 10 more to marry Douglass. When widowed, he wed another but far younger white woman.

This new book by Pittsburgh native Jewell Parker Rhodes is an elegant novel in which two women's imagined reflections paint pastel portraits of courage, self-restraint and passion.

	Douglass' Women By Jewell Parker Rhodes Atria Books ($25)

Through most of the novel, Frederick Douglass is like a mist from which Anna Murray, a homely and homespun free woman of color, and Ottilie Assing, a lovely German Jew, emerge.

Anna married her Freddy and conceived his five children. Ottilie, with her own room in the family's home, was Douglass' mistress.

Loving such a dashing, public figure could not have been easy. Anna could not read or write. Her feelings cross time through others' recollections. It's believed that Assing and Douglass exchanged many letters.

As with Rhodes' preceding novels ("Magic City" explores the devastating Tulsa, Okla., race riots of 1921, and "Voodoo Dreams" takes place in 19th-century New Orleans), the author revives important but overlooked events.

Because Anna and Ottilie lived between the Missouri Compromise and Reconstruction, one improvement in this engaging novel would have been more vibrant impressions of the customs and values Douglass' women negotiated that have changed in today's world.

Although several sources agree that Douglass said of his children's mother, "I'm married to an old black log," the novel's Anna reveals a passionate if fitful love between a visionary husband and his illiterate, self-denigrating, home-centered wife.

Assing was a blue-eyed blonde who first met the charismatic speaker in 1856, soon after she reached the United States. She left Germany to write about women's suffrage and abolitionist causes and wanted to interview Douglass for a prestigious German newspaper.

In the book, their affair began when Douglass fled a slave catcher and sailed to Europe with Assing, leaving his wife and children behind.

Rhodes, a professor of creative writing and American literature at Arizona State University, has written another worthy book, "Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Writers."

In it, she says: "Good writers probe themselves and their world; good writers laugh and cry; good writers observe."

Rhodes may have laughed but surely wept while writing her new novel.

Although the emotional tone feels removed, as though the images float from journals, Rhodes builds a touching story.

She offers colors, smells, sounds, tastes and textures that are experienced as though through a veil. The result is a pale world in which Rhodes steadfastly strengthens portraits of a rough-hewn, patient black woman and the tidal push-pull within a sophisticated white woman who cut through color and class to consummate a marriage of the mind.

Rhodes has crafted a thoughtful and evocative story. She presents wedlock as a territory with sexual boundaries that must be crossed like razor wire.

Reflecting on the grief they endured to love a handsome but driven man, the Anna of Rhodes' imagination says to Ottilie, "I thought he chose you over me. I thought he must love you, but now I see Freddy never really learned to love."

Before dying, Anna Murray Douglass truly did say, "Miss Assing wasn't a Delilah. I see that now. Freddy laid himself waste. Just as he raised himself high."

This poignant wisdom is one of many reasons that Rhodes' latest is a satisfying read.

Sandra Lee Gould of Pittsburgh is author of the novel "Faraday's Popcorn Factory."

Sunday, November 17, 2002