Author Sidney Morrison captivates Cleveland audience with a bold, fictional take on Frederick Douglass’s life

Author Sidney Morrison captivates Cleveland audience with a bold, fictional lens on Frederick Douglass's life

I didn't know what to expect from author Sidney Morrison's appearance last month at the Main Library.

Fresh from releasing his book , Morrison was in town for "Writers Unplugged," an authors series the Cleveland Public Library runs year-round. He came to share what Douglass, former slave and fervent abolitionist, had gone through in his journey from slavery to freedom.

Morrison tackled the man's life through a literary lens I'm not altogether comfortable with. Unlike the autobiographical he had written a historical novel, which so many contemporary authors have fashioned great literature around.

Douglass told his story well in 1845, but perhaps it didn't age as gracefully as it might have. Of course, proses are more polished today, and historians can use a person's own writing to illuminate his life.

In telling the Douglass saga, Morrison put words to characters and scenes to events that never occurred — that's the novel. Yet he did nothing more than Rebecca Skloot did in or what Gregory A. Freeman did in .

Even the eccentric Truman Capote manufactured scenes in "In Cold Blood," his chef-d'œu·vre, so Morrison hardly stretched history to its breaking point or treaded on new grounds.

His book, however, stood tall on a different set of legs, and partly because its subject, Douglass , left millions of his own words for historians and writers to sift through and use.

Morrison did that.

He took four decades and three versions to get to the finish line, and what he gave readers was history with a fictional veneer.

His book elaborated on the complicated life of a freedman who refused to let convention govern his life. Douglass dressed impeccably and had the audacity, unheard of in the 19th century, to bed white women, who supposedly played central roles in his life and in Morrison's historical fiction.

"Novelists can speculate," said Morrison, a retired educator. "Historians can't."

People's prurient interests might drive them to buy his book. Sex does titillate; sex does sell.

In his appearance here, Morrison didn't dwell on sex. He had too much rich material to share about Douglass.

"He was a badass," Morrison said. "He didn't believe anybody could say what he could do because of his skin color."

I can't forget that about Douglass. Nor could the rapt audience that came downtown to hear Morrison, who left people like me wanting to know more about Douglass and his extraordinary life during and after slavery.

Riveting as Morrison's talk was, I wish it had occurred in the " Writers Unplugged " series at a different time of year. I thought Black History Month would have been a better fit for it, a point I made to library officials.

What time is best, though, to tell the stories of men like Frederick Douglass? Should they be penciled in only as February topics of discussion when the history of Black people is 365 days?

I'll resist telling too much about Morrison's appearance. It was all it should have been, but I hope if he does an encore, his audience will be filled with people who identify as millennials, not as Baby Boomers.

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