When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all, when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians: this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric, not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
When I read about the idea of freedom, I find myself most often moved when I hear of it spoken of by those who have had to live without it. I empathize with that longing, having, at times, felt myself lacking in that same freedom--though certainly not in any way comparable to that of slaves or black people in America. Still, I think we know it and understand it in some intrinsic way, and the idea that we might have imposed such lack of freedom upon others in such a cruel and inhumane way leaves me both angry and soul-sick in a way that even those words are mere shadows of those feelings within me.
But let me take a step back from the poem for a moment to say a few things first about Robert Hayden and then Frederick Douglass. Hayden had a hard life, growing up mostly with foster parents. He was also near-sighted, but he became one of the first black faculty member in the University of Michigan's English department, and also the first African American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a post we now call the U.S. Poet Laureate.
He was very interested in history, especially the experiences of black men and women in America. Which brings us to Frederick Douglass--a staunch abolitionist, runaway slave, and advocate for equality of not only black men and women in America, but also for women's suffrage as well. To him, everyone was deserving of equality, no matter their ethnicity or sex.
And so we come once more to the poem, where Hayden celebrates not only an icon of African American history, but also the ideas and hopes that Douglass advocated for during his lifetime. Hayden also speaks of a longing for freedom--not just the platitude of it, but the actual, realized embodiment of it. Then, when such a thing is truly realized, will Frederick Douglass' legacy be truly remembered, not by just these words or with statues or other such works, but in the very flesh and blood of our beings that were given life by Douglass' hopes and ideals all those many years ago.
It is, to me, a truly aspirational poem--one meant to inspire not only longing for freedom, but also for its realization. And this was something for which Frederick Douglass worked and spoke, wrote and struggled. It was the devotion of his life, and in so devoting these words to his memory, Hayden not only memorializes the man but also his lasting aspirations and hopes.
I have always loved the idea that the past can speak through us, because it truly does. The history we grow up with, the history we learn, becomes a part of the present that we create, and will be a part of the future that comes of our work. It is comforting in a way to know that what we long for now has a lineage of longings that came before us, that shapes us and clothes us. We are not alone in our journeys and struggles here; for, those who came before us, and those who will come after us, share a common heritage--a common humanity. And that is why I truly love this poem.
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