Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass - Review

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Christoph Irmscher

The biographer's "split consciousness" manifests itself most clearly whenever Diedrich suddenly steps out of her own narrative and begins to pass judgment on her characters. More often than not, it is Assing who bears the brunt of Diedrich's opprobrium, as if the sheer fact of Douglass's race exonerates him, while Ottilie's lingering class prejudice and her European refinement do her in. Teaching him German and introducing him to Feuerbach's atheism, Assing seems to have looked at Douglass as her creation--which is why, Diedrich seems to argue, her life fell apart when Douglass, after the death of his wife, not only married someone else but also had a minister officiate at the wedding! In Diedrich's view, Douglass's choice appears as the more honest one: "Was it right to discard this dream of a perfect relationship with Helen Pitts for the sake of pity and gratitude?" Perhaps Douglass had, she speculates, tired of his intense companion; while Assing knew only "friend or foe," writes Diedrich, Douglass possess ed "a rare gift of differentiation." Some readers may think this an overly generous interpretation of an act of sheer male egotism. But Love Across Color Lines is a difficult book about a difficult relationship that cannot be approached "in a direct line," and Diedrich makes clear that all judgments, including her own, cannot be other than provisional.

In the final analysis, however, all attempts at Douglass-boosting fail, as Diedrich admits, when confronted with the silent figure of Anna Murray Douglass, the abolitionist's illiterate first wife, who had barely mastered the checkbook and recognized with certainty only the two words that spelled her famous husband's name. Racked by bouts of vomiting and other illnesses, Anna put up with Douglass's white groupies, watching the departure, after four long years, of the Englishwoman Julia Griffiths from her household, only to see her soon replaced with Ottilie Assing from Germany, who made no secret of her profound contempt for the "stupid old hag." Raising, as best she knew how, Douglass's five children, washing his laundry and placing good food on his dinner table, Anna was perceived by visitors, if they noticed her at all, as a harmless, wordless, morose drudge, dressed in plain cotton, a red bandana wrapped around her head. Inevitably, she has faded into the footnotes of Douglass's life, is mentioned only c asually in his autobiographies, and appears only once--as Douglass's "completely black wife"--in Assing's public writings. Even Douglass's biographers have been hard put to account for her presence, invoking, as William McFeely did not too long ago, Anna's "primal tenacity," as if she symbolized the return of the repressed, the beckoning of a remote African past, in the life of a man whose public successes allowed him to forget occasionally "that my skin was dark and my hair crisped." But the woman we see in the most widely known photograph of Anna is clearly a more complex person. Dressed in her Sunday best, her hair carefully done, she stares defiantly at the viewer. As Diedrich astutely suggests, Anna's stubborn illiteracy might have been a conscious choice rather than a condition, the indication of a refusal to accept, as her husband obviously had, "white middle-class culture as the norm." But this, of course, we cannot know for sure. Since Anna wrote nothing down, she had no papers to burn. "Border State " was the nickname Douglass and Assing invented for her, possibly also because Anna defined the limits of their relationship--just as she now, proudly, defines the limits of the biographer's ambition to know everything: the blank that no invention can fill in. In a letter to her sister, Ottilie Assing referred to Anna as that "unknowledgeable" creature. Unknowable would have been a better word.