ABSTRACT
Towards the end of his life, Frederick Douglass made a dramatic trip back to the plantation where he had lived as a child. The visit to the plantation at Wye House on the eastern shore of Maryland was a symbolic return not merely to the site of his youth but also to the site of his enslavement. As an act of nostalgia, it combined the bitter remembrance of slavery with the triumphant homecoming of the prodigal son, a freeman returning to the scene of his earliest awakening to the realities of slavery. By the time of his trip, the original patriarch, Colonel Edward Lloyd, was deceased and Wye House was owned by his grandson, Edward Lloyd. Only this man’s sons were on hand to greet Douglass, three generations removed from Douglass’s experience and thus forestalling a dramatic confrontation or reconciliation with the perpetrators of his enslavement, the symbolic father of his slavery.1 Perhaps as a substitute to a scene of human drama, Douglass requested to see the Lloyd family cemetery, the picturesque family plot in which Col. Lloyd was interred and that Douglass had described in detail in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. His request was granted and Douglass was able to revisit the white tombstones that had stood as embodiments of power and privilege to him as a young slave. From his new perspective as a freeman, international celebrity, and political leader, the meaning of the cemetery space had changed dramatically. His final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, treats the scene as an iconic moment in the grand sweep of Douglass’s freedom story, the boundary of the grave enacting the change in fortune, power, and lineage between the two men.
