Book Review

German, did so, and found German publishers for the translations. Working together, they became close friends, and over the next 28 years, they attended many events together in support of abolition.

Jewell Parker Rhodes’ “Douglass’ Women,” a historical novel published a dozen years ago but new to me, recently opened up a part of Frederick Douglass’ life I’d known nothing about.

Frederick Douglass has been one of my heroes ever since I read his “Narrative of the Life of an American Slave.” In that memoir, Douglass first related the deprivations, humiliations, and beatings he endured as a young slave on the huge Maryland plantation owned by the white man who was probably his father. He then described how his being sent to Baltimore as a house slave enabled him to learn to read and to master a trade in ship building and how it also led to meeting Anna Murray, the free Black woman who helped him escape and whom he married once they were both in a free state.

As you know, once free, Douglass became a nationally recognized spokesman for abolition, speaking widely, publishing his own newspaper and meeting with President Lincoln during the Civil War. After the war he served the nation in a number of positions, one of which was United States minister-resident and consulgeneral to the Republic of Haiti and Chargé d’affaires for Santo Domingo.

When I visited Douglass’ home in Washington D.C., now a National Historic Site open to the public, I discovered that he had married a white woman after his wife Anna had died. Thus when I saw the title of Rhodes’ novel, “Douglass’ Women,” I assumed it would be about Douglass’ two wives. Not so! It seems there was another woman.

Ottilie Assing, an immigrant from Germany, read “Narrative of the Life” and, impressed, went to Rochester, NY, to interview Douglass in 1856. She volunteered to translate his work into

They were so close that Assing stayed with his family numerous times, living in their Rochester home for months over many summers. She also sheltered Douglass at her home in New Jersey when he was facing conspiracy charges after John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, which, as it became clear, he’d had nothing to do with.

Although some assumed Douglass and Assing were lovers, their surviving letters contain no proof that they were. But that has not stopped Rhodes from imagining that that was the case.

In the novel, Douglass’ two women, Anna Murray Douglass and Ottilie Assing, narrate alternate chapters, each providing her own response to Douglass, to each other, and to the menage-a-trois Rhodes cooks up.

Rhodes’ primary sympathy lies with Anna. She provides historical details like Anna’s illiteracy and her age (several years older than Douglass but not so very much older since she bore him five children). She imagines her as a woman immersed in Black folklore and in homemaking—a devoted gardener, housekeeper, mother, and wife, loving Douglass even after his marital betrayal becomes clear.

Rhodes accords some sympathy to Ottilie Assing as the daughter of a mixed German marriage between her Jewish father and Christian mother, a mixture that resonates in her mind and heart with Douglass’ mixed parentage. Rhodes also gives her an upbringing saturated with 19th-century romanticism and its devotion to the passions.

Rhodes has little sympathy, on the other hand, with Ottilie’s failure to acknowledge how the affair affects Anna, the betrayed wife. In utterly cold complacency, Ottilie tells Anna that she loves him too and love ought to be free.

Rhodes reserves her fullest criticism for Douglass himself. She does not deny that he was devoted to the most important cause in his lifetime, the end of American slavery, a cause in which he was a vital leader because of his experience as a slave, his outstanding power as a speaker and writer, and his manly nature and handsome appearance.

But Rhodes nevertheless portrays him as a man who loved his people greatly but his women too poorly. Anna laments that he never does the little things that show a man’s love. He never even tells her he loves her. Ottilie says the same thing: when she confronts him with the question, he replies that he loves her in his way. Whatever that might mean!

In a scene near the end, when Anna and Ottilie are alone together, they confess that neither knows if Douglass loves them.

In the end, Rhodes has made her version of the three lives into the touching tale of a mighty man of astounding gifts and accomplishments and two women who long for his love but never feel sure they have it. N