The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial by Sharon Ewell Foster Page A

proven to be a thoughtful, capable manfull of insight. In addition to author, respected orator, and editor, Douglass also was now a newspaper publisher.
    He was a man of his own opinion and provided sound reason and argument. He was independent of thought, so much so that it appeared he might be parting ways with his friend William Lloyd Garrison. William now espoused abandoning both the Constitution and the Church; both, he felt, had been bloodied and rendered useless by slavery. Douglass believed both could be redeemed.
    In the pulpit, Henry clutched his heart. “No man knows true happiness till he has learned how to love.” The crowd cheered, and Frederick Douglass tapped his cane on the floor.
    Without Frederick Douglass, she might never have met fugitive slaves like Henry Bibb, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth. Without him and others, she might never have heard the stories—and each story made her life richer.
    Without Douglass’s association, she might never have read the works written by the hands of black authors like William Wells Brown or Douglass himself. Why should she read them? What could their broken phrases and buffoonery, their clumsiness with language, have to offer her? Harriet was surprised at what she discovered.
    It seemed impossible to her now, but there was a time when they and their thoughts were strangers to her, except for caricatures in her mind. Without Mr. Douglass, she might never have known that God had given the gift of elegant thought and word to His black children. She might never have read their beautiful prose and poetry and acknowledged that it was inspired by God. Their words were cousins to her own, sometimes offering lance and balm to places she had not known were tender.
    Without Mr. Douglass’s influence, she might never have shared a meal with a Negro—not as servant but as equally welcomed guests at the table. Certainly they would not have been welcomed at her father’s house. As she observed them reading and taking part in debates, Harriet wondered who the refugees might have become but for slavery.
    Challenged by Mr. Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and others, Harriet had come to realize that even she, with her good intentions and moral upbringing, had been poisoned by slavery’s lies. Slavery denied that it was the cause of the slaves’ condition—their poverty, their illiteracy. But by associating with fugitive slaves, she was learning to view them as people no different from she or her brother.
    Perhaps the worst sin of slavery was the stunting of so many lives, seeds unable to blossom into what they might have been.
    In the not too distant past, she had viewed the enslaved Negroes paternally: She must speak for them and protect them as creatures inherently incapable of certain higher thoughts and feelings—people entitled to freedom, but childlike, in need of care and unable to determine what was best for themselves.
    As the music from the Plymouth Church organ swelled, she looked around the sanctuary, at Henry, and then back at Frederick Douglass. Before him, she had lived her life smelling only rare lilies and white roses.
    Knowing him, and the other refugees, had turned the granite under her feet to sand; she often found herself tilting from side to side and even pitching forward.
    She had not expected to find them as she. She had seen herself and her brother as champions of the lowly.
    When the Negroes refused her thoughts, her gifts, or her offerings, she was at first angered by their hubris and then embarrassed by her own. There were times, she realized, when she felt betrayed and jealous that the hand of Providence might have blessed them with some insight He did not originally bestow upon her. She had devoted her life to God, and her face warmed with the thought that He might have given them some favor He had not given her. Then she was ashamed of her emotions. She was surprised to find pride hidden in her bosom.
    She was