The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative [Illustrated] 0199731489, 9780199731480

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments   The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014

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Acknowledgments

I started planning the Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative at the beginning of 2009, and it’s been a long journey since then, one that has included a num­ ber of personal trials and turns of fortune. I am grateful beyond measure, then, to the contributors to the volume for never losing faith that this journey would eventually come to a successful conclusion. I believe that this journey’s end, the publication of this vol­ ume, will be a significant beginning for many scholars and students interested in studying slave narratives, and for those countless others who understand the importance of being attentive to the voices that reach to us from the past. I am grateful to the contributors for bringing so much expertise, care, imagination, and passion to their chapters for this vol­ ume. I’m both grateful to and impressed by the outstanding people at Oxford University Press for their guidance and hard work. I’ve benefitted greatly from conversations with colleagues at West Virginia University and the University of Delaware, and I’m especially grateful for the support I’ve received from Deans Bob Jones (WVU) and George Watson (UD) as I’ve worked to finish this project while also serving as department chair. Thanks are always due to Gordon Hutner, Bill Andrews, Bob Levine, Donald Pease, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for their encouragement and support. Teresa Goddu has been especially enthusiastic about promoting the work of this project. Her commitment to this work has been a real inspiration. My closest collaborators in all things scholarly are Eric Gardner and Joycelyn Moody, both of whom can always be trusted to have a broad and deep under­ standing of what this field requires of its scholars, and both of whom are always available for advice and support. If acknowledgments are designed to amplify gratitude as they progress, so that those who are mentioned at the end are the ones worthy of the greatest, the most intimate, the quite-nearly-inexpressible expressions of gratitude, then I would need to go on for pages, volumes, before finally mentioning Brendan O’Neill, who has been unflinching, enthusias­ tic, and tireless in helping me get this project to such a successful conclusion. And only then would I begin to prepare to thank Denise for all she does to support and encourage me, and for all she brings to my life. (p. x)

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Acknowledgments

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About the Contributors

About the Contributors   The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014

(p. xi)

About the Contributors

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. Her areas of specialization include African American literature and culture and gender and sexuality studies. Her first book, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race, was published by Duke University Press in 2012.

Nicole N. Aljoe is a member of the Department of English at Northeastern Universi­ ty. Her research and teaching centers on 18th and 19th century Black Atlantic writ­ ing, with a particular focus on Caribbean texts. She is the author of Creole Testi­ monies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVa, forthcoming). Her cur­ rent project focuses on contemporary Caribbean multi-disciplinary engagements with the neo-slave genre.

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Comparative Lit­ erature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of about 50 books on a wide range of African American literature and cul­ ture, chiefly before World War I.

Daphne A. Brooks is Professor of English and African-American Studies at Prince­ ton University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP) and Jeff Buckley’s Grace

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About the Contributors (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity (Harvard University Press, forth­ coming).

Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., is Professor, Emeritus, of History at the University of Califor­ nia, Irvine. His books include Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915 (1989) and The Origins of African American Litera­ ture, 1680–1865 (2001)

Jeannine Marie DeLombard is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her most recent study, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (2012) serves as a prequel to her first book, Slavery on Trial: Law, Print, and Abolitionism (2007).

John Ernest, Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Delaware, is the author or editor of ten books, including Liberation Historiography: African (p. xii) American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861, Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History, and A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African American Communities before the Civil War.

DoVeanna S. Fulton is dean and professor at the University of Houston-Downtown. Her scholarship examines African American women’s oral and written discursive practices in fiction and non-fiction. She is the author of one book and two co-edited volumes: Speaking Power (2006), Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts (2009) and Sapphire’s Literary Breakthrough (2012).

The recipient of a 2012-2013 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Er­ ic Gardner teaches at Saginaw Valley State University. His Unexpected Places: Relo­ cating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2009) won the Research So­ ciety for American Periodicals/EBSCOhost Book Award and was a Choice “Outstanding Academic Title.”

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About the Contributors Teresa A. Goddu teaches at Vanderbilt University. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, she is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, His­ tory, and Nation (Columbia UP) and is currently completing a book project on anti­ slavery print, material, and visual culture.

Justin A. Joyce is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. His work on the Western genre and self-defense has appeared in journals and edited collections. Man­ aging editor for the forthcoming journal The James Baldwin Review, he is currently editing a collection of critical essays, Keywords for African American Studies.

Mitch Kachun is Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He is author of Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Cel­ ebrations, 1808-1915 (Massachusetts, 2003) and co-editor of The Curse of Caste; or the Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins (Oxford, 2006). His current research examines Crispus Attucks in American memory.

Dwight A. McBride is Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American Studies, English, & Performance Studies and Associate Provost & Dean of The Graduate School at Northwestern University. He has published five books, including Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony and Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality.

Barbara McCaskill is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, and co-directs the Civil Rights Digital Library. She has co-edited Post-Bellum, PreHarlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919 (2006) and Multicultur­ al Literature and Literacies (1993). Her next study focuses on William and Ellen Craft in transatlantic abolition (2014).

Joycelyn K. Moody is Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature and Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches 19th-century African American literature and culture, life writing, and print cultures. She is also founding Director of UTSA’s African American Literatures and (p. xiii)

Cultures Institute.

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About the Contributors

Sharon Ann Musher is Associate Professor of History and Director of American Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and the Jewish Journal of So­ ciology. Forthcoming publications include A New Deal for the Arts (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and a chapter in The New Deal and the Great Depression (Kent State University Press, 2014).

Elizabeth Regosin is Professor of History at St. Lawrence University. She is the au­ thor of Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipa­ tion and Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Recon­ struction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (with Donald R. Shaffer).

Marie Jenkins Schwartz is Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston. Her research focuses on the history of slavery and its legacy, especially the experiences of women and children. Schwartz is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and numerous other awards.

Winfried Siemerling is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and an As­ sociate of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard. His books include Canada and Its Americ­ as: Transnational Navigations (co-ed., McGill-Queen’s UP 2010), The New North American Studies (Routledge 2005), and The Black Atlantic Reconsidered (McGillQueen’s UP, forthcoming 2014).

Kimberly K. Smith is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Political Science at Carleton College. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Uni­ versity of Michigan. Her research centers on intellectual history and philosophy, par­ ticularly the history of American environmental thought and environmental political theory.

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About the Contributors Brenda E. Stevenson is Professor of History at UCLA. She is the author of Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South and The Contested Mur­ der of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots.

Helen Thomas is Principal Lecturer in English and Writing at Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK. Her research interests include C18th literature and culture, slave nar­ ratives, postcolonial theory and texts, black British writing, and contemporary narra­ tives of illness and disease.

Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University, has published Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1774– 1903 and the scholarly edition of Jane Hunter’s autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer. She also co-edited the forthcoming The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought, a Reader.

John Michael Vlach is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at The George Washington University. His numerous publications include By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife, Plain Painters: Making Sense of American Folk Art, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery, and The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings, and Barns. He has developed exhibitions for art museums, historical societies, and libraries from coast to coast, including the National Museum of American History and the Library of Congress. (p. xiv)

Maurice O. Wallace is Associate Professor of English and African & African Ameri­ can Studies at Duke. He is author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture (2002) and co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (2012).

Kenneth W. Warren is Professor of English at the University of Chicago and author of What Was African American Literature? (2011). He coedited Renewing Black Intel­ lectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American

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About the Contributors Thought (2009) with Adolph Reed, Jr. and Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sut­ ton E. Griggs (2013) with Tess Chakkalakal.

Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist, film maker, and Professor of English at the University of Sussex. This many publications include Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (2000), Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (2002), Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America (2013), and, as editor, The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthol­ ogy, 1764-1865.

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Introduction

Introduction   John Ernest The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.026

Abstract and Keywords The introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative argues for the importance of sophisticated approaches to slave testimony while also presenting an overview of the diversity and complexity of that testimony. The Handbook addresses a broad range of sources, far beyond the traditional book-length autobiographies usually associated with the genre of slave narratives. The introduction offers background on the troubled history of scholarship on the history of slavery, the gradual recognition of the im­ portance of slave testimony, and then the challenge of recovering and reading often high­ ly mediated accounts from the formerly enslaved. Highlighting the role of slave testimony in battling against misrepresentations and racism, the introduction argues for a more ex­ pansive understanding of the formative role of the institution of slavery in U.S. history and culture. The introduction then provides an overview of the Handbook's organization, with brief commentary on individual chapters. Keywords: slavery, abolitionism, slave narratives, slave testimony, racism, American history

ON November 14, 1847, William Wells Brown delivered a lecture to the Female Anti-Slav­ ery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, a lecture recorded by Henry M. Parkhurst, “phono­ graphic reporter,” and published by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. In that lec­ ture, Brown announced that his subject would be American slavery “as it is,” including “its influence on American character and morals” (4). Brown knew his subject, for he was born a slave near Lexington, Kentucky, the son of an enslaved black woman and a slave­ holding white man, and indeed was probably related to his owner. He escaped from slav­ ery in 1834 and eventually would become one of the leading abolitionists of his time, a recognized and respected lecturer and prolific writer. In this lecture, though, Brown be­ gins by claiming that he faces an impossible task. “Slavery has never been represented,” he asserts, and “Slavery never can be represented” (4). Any attempt to represent the sys­ tem of slavery could only fail; and if he were to try to represent it, he would need to whis­ per it to his audience “one at a time” (4). Brown then goes on to represent slavery in a masterful performance that includes definitions of slavery, examples of its intimate viola­ tions, commentary on the white press and commercial interests involved in the mainte­ Page 1 of 18

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Introduction nance of the national system of slavery, remarks on the legal system required by slavery, and observations on the extent to which slavery has corrupted white American character, including the political and religious ideals to which white Americans claimed devotion. It was a system, as Brown’s opening remarks indicated, at once so extensive and so inti­ mate as to both resist and require representation—and the representation that could only fail would somehow need to be both general and individualized, both a grand dissertation and an intimate communication, whispered to individual ears but finding the one in the many, the many in the one. For Brown, slavery was the economic, political, and social system that provided the un­ derlying but unspeakable unity to a nation all but lost in its own mythology and its own degradation, and subsequent national experience and historical research have demon­ strated there is ample reason to agree with his conclusions. In this address—and, indeed, in his very existence—Brown represented a nation that regularly proclaimed its devotion to liberty even though every aspect of the nation—political, economic, social, (p. 2) legal, even theological—was devoted to slavery. This was a nation that regularly celebrated a founding document proclaiming that all men are created equal even as it was devoted to creating the fictions of race so as to enforce unjust, enslaving, and even murderous social distinctions. This is a nation whose champion of liberty, New Hampshire’s Daniel Webster, helped to craft a political compromise in 1850 that violated the rights of African Ameri­ cans, both those who had escaped from slavery and those who were nominally free. This was a nation whose highest legal authorities declared in 1857 that black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This was a nation whose most popular and influential form of entertainment was blackface minstrelsy, and indeed a na­ tion almost obsessed with defining and controlling the terms of black identity. The impact of slavery was felt in every corner of American life—and in the century-and-a-half since slavery was legally ended, the lingering effects of slavery still remain strong. Try to imag­ ine American history without slavery. It simply isn’t possible. No matter where you look— be it the history of the labor movement or the history of entertainment—you will soon en­ counter clear evidence of the forceful effects of slavery or of the racial attitudes and dis­ tinctions that slavery both required and encouraged. This is not the story of slavery that you will encounter in any American textbook, even to­ day. In most cases, you’ll find slavery safely relegated to a discrete chapter, or a portion of a chapter—a difficult episode in American history, but one finally resolved by the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment, a resolution even more firmly established by the successful election and reelection of an African American President (including his negotiation of the electoral college that was itself shaped by the history of slavery). However, the full history of slavery is not one that can be brought to a neat conclusion, particularly since prominent among the effects of history have been a studied avoidance of the subject in American society and the mis-education of both white and black Americans on their shared history. In Brown’s time, those African Americans fortunate enough to live in nominal freedom faced lives shaped by persistent and crip­ pling racism, what Hosea Easton, one of Brown’s contemporaries, called “slavery in dis­ guise” (Treatise 46). This “slavery in disguise” was just as pernicious in its way as was le­ Page 2 of 18

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Introduction gal bondage, restricting African American opportunity to the extent that it limited the growth and threatened the vitality of African American communities struggling to estab­ lish themselves in a racist environment. Surveying the effects of being excluded from schools and from lifelong prospects, African American activist David Walker bemoaned in 1827 the prevalence in black communities of “ignorance, the mother of treachery and de­ ceit, [that] gnaws into our very vitals” (Appeal 21). But there was ignorance enough to go around, as white Americans developed increasingly elaborate legal, social, and theologi­ cal justifications for maintaining slavery and racial dominance in the land of freedom. Even in New England, often considered the center of anti-slavery activity, white Ameri­ cans who resisted the anti-slavery movement (and even many who supported it) tried to contain or, in various ways, eliminate African Americans as a significant presence in the region. Historian Joanne Pope Melish is particularly instructive on this point in her book Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, (p. 3) 1780–1860. “New England whites,” Melish notes, “employed an array of strategies to effect the re­ moval” of people of color “and to efface people of color and their history in New Eng­ land.” Melish looks at a wide range of measures by which New England whites tried to render African Americans, along with the history of slavery in New England, invisible: Some of these efforts were symbolic: representing people of color as ridiculous or dangerous “strangers” in anecdotes, cartoons, and broadsides; emphasizing slav­ ery and “race” as “southern problems”; characterizing New England slavery as brief and mild, or even denying its having existed; inventing games and instruc­ tional problems in which the object was to make “the negroes” disappear; digging up the corpses of people of color. Other efforts aimed to eliminate the presence of living people of color: conducting official roundups and “warnings-out”; rioting in and vandalizing black neighborhoods. Finally, some efforts involved both symbolic and physical elements, such as the American Colonization Society’s campaign to demonize free people of color and raise funds to ship them to Africa. (Melish 2) As Melish notes, many of these measures involved the strategic misrepresentation of black character and of the black presence in national history (which was, for many, white national history). Even those who escaped from slavery to tell their stories in the North found that the white North had stories of their own to tell. The problems Melish summarizes extended far beyond New England, and African Ameri­ cans recognized the importance, though also the challenge, of fighting their battles on the printed page. In 1827, an editorial from the first edition of Freedom’s Journal announced the central mission of the newspaper—to be the voice of the community, and to thereby exercise some influence in the representation of African American character. “We wish to plead our own cause,” the editorial stated:

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Introduction too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by mis­ representations, in things which concern us dearly, though in the estimation of some mere trifles; for though there are many in society who exercise towards us benevolent feelings; still (with sorrow we confess it) there are others who make it their business to enlarge upon the least trifle, which tends to the discredit of any person of color; and pronounce anathemas and denounce our whole body for the misconduct of this guilty one (“To Our Patrons”). In 1853, African Americans amplified the central conditions of this mission in the Pro­ ceedings of the Colored National Convention, Held in Rochester, July 6th, 7th and 8th, 1853, emphasizing that black uplift required responses to white characterizations. “What stone has been left unturned to degrade us?,” the convention members asked: What hand has refused to fan the flame of prejudice against us? What American artist has not caricatured us? What wit has not laughed at us in our wretched­ ness? What songster has not made merry over our depressed spirits? What press has not ridiculed and contemned us? What pulpit has withheld from our devoted heads its angry lightning, or its sanctimonious hate? (16–17). (p. 4)

In 1859, publisher and editor Thomas Hamilton continued this cause in his opening “Apol­ ogy” for the Anglo-African Magazine, emphasizing the systemic nature of those misrepre­ sentations. “The wealth, the intellect, the Legislation, (State and Federal,) the pulpit, and the science of America,” Hamilton asserted, “have concentrated on no one point so heartily as in the endeavor to write down the negro as something less than a man” (An­ glo-African 1). Small wonder that William Wells Brown believed that slavery never had and never would be represented. Even if one could do justice to the subject, one would still have to break through imposing walls of prejudice and racial control before one could hope for a proper hearing. But that is exactly what many African Americans who had experienced slavery firsthand tried to do, and their efforts to tell their stories, to represent the unrepresentable, are collectively known as “slave narratives,” the body of testimony to which the book you are reading is devoted. In a study that was essential—indeed, foundational—in inspiring and guiding serious scholarly interest in slave narratives, Marion Wilson Starling provided in 1946 “a bibliographic guide to the location of 6006 narrative records,” records that “ex­ tend from 1703–1944” (xxvi). These records, Starling notes, “are to be discovered in judi­ cial records, broadsides, private printings, abolitionist newspapers and volumes, scholar­ ly journals, church records, unpublished collections, and a few regular publications” (xxvi). Included among those narratives are the book-length autobiogra­ phies and biographies that have been celebrated for their historical importance. Books such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gus­ tavus Vassa, the African (1789), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901) were well known in their own time and have come to be considered as definitive accounts Page 4 of 18

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Introduction of the different significant eras of slavery from the colonial to the post-Civil War eras. Other books, such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) or Lucy A. Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom, were rela­ tively unknown in their own time but have since been recognized as essential entrances to the history of slavery, even as correctives to the history viewed through the pages of narratives written by men. But beyond the books lies a broad range of testimony, includ­ ing over 10,000 pages of interviews gathered by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The record of slave nar­ ratives is, in other words, extensive, varied, and rich. African Americans, it turns out, did much to address their exclusion from and misrepresentation in the historical record. So why are we still struggling to come to a balanced and comprehensive understanding of this history, one that extends beyond a discrete chapter in a history textbook, a chapter seemingly designed to keep slavery, as it were, in its place? In part, the answer is that scholars were slow in appreciating the value of this rich record. For many years, scholars dismissed the recorded testimony of the formerly enslaved as unreliable historical records, to the extent that they considered such testimony at all. The early histories of slavery—most prominently, Ulrich B. Phillips’s influential American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929)—focused their studies, and based their find­ ings, on the records of white southerners, the planters who relied on (p. 5) slave labor, at­ tending almost exclusively to the plantations that have come to symbolize slavery. Accord­ ingly, many were prepared to accept Phillips’s assumptions about “negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited pater­ nalism rather than repression” (Phillips 341–342). Certainly, many nineteenth-century white Americans viewed the enslaved in this way, and any historian looking at the “evi­ dence,” the great balk of books and documents written by white Americans characteriz­ ing enslaved blacks, would have reason to come to such conclusions, but critical attention to slave narratives would lead one to different conclusions. Phillips’s conclusions were challenged strongly, though, in the 1950s. Kenneth Stampp offered a more comprehen­ sive view of plantation life in The Peculiar Institution (1956), arguing for the need to dis­ sociate white romantic views of plantation slavery from hard reality, and arguing against the assumptions of fundamental racial difference central to Phillips’s thinking. In Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959, revised in 1968 and 1976) Stanley Elkins also argued against such assumptions, but reached conclusions simi­ lar to Phillips’ by a different route, arguing that docile slaves—the Sambo type, in Elkins’s study—were not born but shaped by hard experience under slavery. As historians increasingly debated such conclusions about the character of the enslaved, they eventually recognized the importance of considering slave testimony itself. Neither Stampp nor Elkins relied on slave narratives, either written accounts or the large body of WPA testimony, but by the 1970s slave testimony inspired a flood of important reconsider­ ations of slave life, and, therefore, of the history of slavery more broadly. Among the most influential of these studies were John W. Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the American South (1972), George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup: The Mak­ Page 5 of 18

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Introduction ing of the Black Community (1972), Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Herbert G. Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976), and Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977). The importance of this shift in historical practice cannot be overstated. Blassingame, for example, begins his preface to The Slave Community by noting that “even a cursory examination of the literature shows that historians have never systematically explored the life experience of American slaves,” whereas “southern planters, on the other hand, have had an extremely good press in the United States” (xi). Historians, he observes, “have, in effect, been listening to only one side of a complicated debate” (xi). His concerns in The Slave Community, he em­ phasized, were dramatically different: “This book describes and analyzes the life of the black slave: his African heritage, culture, family, acculturation, behavior, religion, and personality” (xi). As this list suggests, the range of questions to ask of slave testimony was broad, and the books published in the 1970s, while doing much to prepare for a bal­ anced debate, largely surveyed a previously unexplored historical landscape. With new resources, though, came new complications, for slave testimony was anything but transparent. Many early book-length narratives were published specifically to (p. 6) promote the anti-slavery cause, and their authenticity was questioned so frequently—of­ ten, because white readers didn’t believe that black Americans were capable of writing their own life stories—that the phrase “written by himself” or “written by herself” be­ came a regular feature of these publications. Addressing those narratives, James Olney has observed, Unlike autobiography in general the narratives are all trained on one and the same objective reality, they have a coherent and defined audience, and have be­ hind them and guiding them an organized group of ‘sponsors,’ and they are pos­ sessed of very specific motives, intentions, and uses understood by narrators, sponsors, and audiences alike: to reveal the truth of slavery and so to bring about its abolition. How, then, could the narratives be anything but very much like one another? (154) Although Blassingame had hoped to find in his sources evidence of “the slave’s inner life, his thoughts, actions, self-concepts, or personality,” Olney suggests that such interiority is obscured by the political conditions under which the narratives were produced. Indeed, Olney argues that “the conventions for slave narratives were so early and so firmly estab­ lished that one can imagine a sort of master outline…drawn from the great narratives and guiding the lesser ones” (152). This outline would include the presentation of the book, the testimonials or prefaces written by white abolitionists “or by a white amanuensis/edi­ tor/author actually responsible for the text” (152); but it would include as well a number of narrative episodes—for example, the struggle for the acquisition of literacy, descrip­ tions of “Christian” slaveholders who were more cruel than others, descriptions of whip­ pings, and a “description of the amounts of food and clothing given to slaves, the work re­ quired of them, the pattern of a day, a week, a year” (153). What “truth of slavery” could

Page 6 of 18

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Introduction one hope to find from such resources beyond the views that guided them in the first place? Even if we note that Olney’s conclusions apply only to a relative handful of slave narra­ tives, we face other challenges in getting to the heart of the testimony both revealed in and obscured by these accounts. If we focus only on book-length narratives, we need to account for autobiographies published specifically in the service of anti-slavery organiza­ tions; autobiographies published independently and often without a primary political pur­ pose; multiple versions of autobiographical narratives, offering both contradictory and evolving accounts of the same life story; biographies by white authors on black subjects, often revealing much more about the author than the subject; autobiographies written by a white amanuensis, often with white authors clearly engaged in acts of ventriloquism, putting words in the mouths of their subjects; multiple versions of narratives written by a white biographer or amanuensis; hybrid narratives of fiction and autobiography, with un­ clear lines between the actual and the imagined; and singular tales of discovered or local stories—for example, Henry Trumbull’s Life and Adventures of Robert, the Hermit of Massachusetts, not a book that fits into any clear political purpose or any master outline of the genre. If one were to bring together examples of all these forms of “the slave nar­ rative,” one would have trouble piecing together a clear history of “the slave community.” Even the three versions of his life that Frederick (p. 7) Douglass wrote and published over the years—Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881)—do not add up to a clear and consistent life portrait. If we extend our perspective to take in the whole of slave testimony, the story gets even more complicated, and the call for a coherent portrait is both compelling and elusive. Nor would a comparative reading of these narratives allow one to focus exclusively on the history of slavery, for almost all the narratives published before the Civil War were writ­ ten after the enslaved subject had reached at least nominal freedom, and all the narra­ tives published after the war are as much about a tenuous and restricted freedom as about slavery. As Rhondda R. Thomas explains in her contribution to this volume, locating the narratives both geographically and historically can sometimes be difficult. Are these stories about the South or about the North—or about Canada or Great Britain, where many fugitive slaves moved to protect the freedom they had struggled to attain? Do we account for them by their points of departure or by their points of arrival and publication sites? One thinks, for example, of William Andrews’s collection of North Carolina narra­ tives, Arna Bontemps’s collection of Connecticut narratives, and Eugene McCarthy and Thomas Doughton’s collection of narratives associated with Worcester, Massachusetts. In each case, the scholars have made connections among a gathering of narratives and pub­ lished them together to address a particular regional history, but the same narratives could have been gathered differently to speak of other regions, other histories. Some nar­ ratives were written in England, such as William and Ellen Crafts’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom or the “First English Edition” of Henry Box Brown’s story; others are associated with other significant historical sites (Elizabeth Keckley, for example, who served in the White House during the Lincoln admistration); and some were published Page 7 of 18

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Introduction and promoted in social spaces generally (and sometimes strangely) not marked in current scholarship as significant sites of nineteenth-century African American history (for exam­ ple, Lucy Delaney’s, published in St. Louis—a significant site of African American history, but one only gradually earning the attention of scholars—or Louis Hughes’s, published in Milwaukee). In virtually all slave narratives, one needs to account for significant move­ ment, involving different social spaces, shifting social and political contingencies, and sometimes even fundamentally different legal and social definitions of “blackness” or “whiteness” as the narrative subject travels from place to place, where different laws and customs applied. Even if we focus on a single account, we are likely to have reason to question the means by which we can get to the views of those who experienced slavery. In both book-length narratives and the wider field of slave remembrance, the testimonies of those who had ex­ perienced slavery are often highly mediated—that is, presented to us by others. Since all of white culture so frequently seemed devoted to creating fictions about what it means to be black, the interest of even the most trusted white Americans in the life stories of black Americans was almost always a mixed blessing. Scholars and teachers still struggle to make the point, for example, that many of Sojourner Truth’s speeches were later misre­ membered and misrepresented, as white writers not only put words in her mouth but also presented Truth’s speech patterns in stereotypical black southern dialect, (p. 8) even though Truth was raised in a Dutch-speaking area of New York. Sarah Bradford, looking to help Harriet Tubman, wrote a biography that begins by having the young Tubman en­ gaged with “a group of merry little darkies,” a biography that also praises Tubman by dis­ tinguishing her and her family from other African Americans, asserting that “all should not be judged by the idle, miserable darkies who have swarmed about Washington and other cities since the War” (Bradford 13, 69). Such well-intended but prejudiced misrep­ resentations were not unusual, and almost all African American public figures of the time demonstrate a keen understanding of what it means to live in a white supremacist cul­ ture. African American narrators accordingly were cautious about the prospect of reveal­ ing the details of their lives even to benevolent white readers who were simultaneously being influenced by a culture bent on trivializing, eliminating, and otherwise controlling the African American presence in the North. As many slave narrators realized, to tell your story is to give someone control over your life, unless they are willing to reveal just as much about themselves. As Robert B. Stepto has observed, The risks that written storytelling undertakes are…at least twofold: one is that the reader will become a hearer but not manage an authenticating response; the oth­ er is that the reader will remain a reader and not only belittle or reject storytelling’s particular “keen disturbance,” but also issue confrontational re­ sponses which sustain altogether different definitions of literature, of literacy, and of appropriate reader response. (308) Slave narratives, accordingly, are difficult acts of remembrance—difficult in the attempt to tell a deeply intimate story of violation, and difficult in the means by which that story is related and received. Page 8 of 18

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Introduction The most striking example of an African American life virtually lost in its story is that of Josiah Henson, who became associated Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous fictional charac­ ter Uncle Tom. Following the publication of the original version of his story in 1849 and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Henson became famous, somewhat improb­ ably, as the “model” for the character Uncle Tom in Stowe’s novel. By the time the last version of Henson’s story was published, his life had become so identified with that of Un­ cle Tom that any hope of understanding the actual man was lost in the fame of the fiction­ al character. As Robin Winks has observed, “Henson was seldom left free to be himself, to assimilate if he wished to into the mainstream of Canadian life—even of black Canadian life—for he became the focus of abolitionist attention, a tool to be used in a propaganda campaign which was not above much juggling with the facts, however proper its ultimate goals may have been” (Introduction vi). Henson’s original narrative, published in 1849, was written by Samuel A. Eliot, “a former Mayor of Boston who was well-known for his moderate anti-slavery views” (Winks xiii). This version tells the story of a man who es­ caped from slavery and eventually settled in the Dawn settlement in Canada, where he worked to promote that developing African American community. There is no evidence that this narrative provided Stowe with her model for the character Uncle Tom, but after Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, the association developed all the same, perhaps aided by Stowe’s preface to the “substantially revised” version of Henson’s life published (p. 9) in 1858 (Winks xxxi). After that time, Henson’s narrative was in the hands of the English clergyman-editor John Lobb. The third version of Henson’s narrative, published in 1877, was entitled “Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life”: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom”), From 1789 to 1876. In 1881, Lobb pub­ lished The Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (“Uncle Tom”) From 1789 to 1881, a version that includes a chapter entitled “Mrs. Stowe’s Characters,” another entitled “‘Un­ cle Tom’ and the Editor’s Visit to Her Majesty the Queen,” a “Summary of ‘Uncle Tom’s’ Public Services,” and an appendix offering “A Sketch of Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe.” One could trace a similar path in the histories of many of those who tried to draw from their lives either to testify against slavery or to leave some sign of a life, a community, and a world all but lost in the dominant version of history. The different editions of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth can be viewed as a struggle between someone known for her strong voice and the sometimes condescending voices of those who present them­ selves as her biographers and champions. Many scholars view Frederick Douglass’s sec­ ond autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), as a declaration of indepen­ dence from William Lloyd Garrison and other white abolitionists who helped make possi­ ble Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an Ameri­ can Slave (1845). Henry “Box” Brown followed his original narrative, authored by white abolitionist Charles Stearns—Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide, Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself. With Remarks upon the Remedy for Slavery (1849)—with one that emphasizes Brown’s attempt to reclaim his story, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (1851). In a different kind of self-reclamation, Thomas Jones resisted the kind of association that haunted Josiah Henson. Jones’s original narrative, published in 1855, Page 9 of 18

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Introduction was entitled Experience and Personal Narrative of Uncle Tom Jones, Who Was for Forty Years a Slave. Years later, Jones published another version, still written by another, but this one highlighting Jones’s professional accomplishments and community: The Experi­ ence of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years, Written by a Friend, as Related to Him by Brother Jones (1885). For those who published just one ver­ sion of their narrative, similar problems abound, and one needs to be attentive to the ca­ cophony of voices and the challenges of local contexts and interracial connections if one is to get at the full story of slavery and its effects. When we turn from book-length slave narratives to the broader field of slave testimony, we encounter even greater challenges. As Marie Jenkins Schwartz and Sharon Ann Mush­ er explain in their contributions to this volume, the WPA interviews of the 1930s yielded a great deal of testimony that historians have sometimes ignored and often struggled to evaluate. In many cases, the interviewers were white, and those who had experienced slavery (not to mention the harsh racial climate following slavery) were naturally hesitant to trust such interviewers. Moreover, those being interviewed were, in many cases, only children when they experienced slavery, so their stories often carry traces of the ways in which oral culture and other influences shape memory over time. Other recorded testimo­ ny comes to us from various sources—newspapers, diaries or memoirs, even pension records, to mention only a few. In each case, we receive these narratives through the complicating filters of a difficult history, and the narratives we receive often reveal as much about those filters as about the conditions of slavery or the struggle for freedom. (p. 10)

The slave narratives, from whatever source, are valuable to us, though, not despite such complications but because of them, for such complications are not incidental to the story of American slavery and its effects but very much a part of it. Unless we want to continue the struggle to maintain the history of U.S. slavery as a conveniently discrete chapter in American history, we need to attend to the comprehensive reach of this story. In other words, we need to catch up to William Wells Brown, who in his 1847 speech before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, insisted that addressing the reali­ ties of slavery means addressing its effects far beyond the experiences of the enslaved. It is difficult to think of any aspect of U.S. culture and society that has not been influenced and, at times, fundamentally shaped by the political, economic, philosophical, and theo­ logical gymnastics required to maintain a system of slavery in a land that declared itself for liberty and equality. The difficult collaborations and other transactions between white and black Americans in the slave narratives reveal a great deal about the effects of slav­ ery, the ways in which a convoluted and incoherent social order settled into habits of mind. So much slave testimony comes to us indirectly, making the larger story one of patchwork history and gathered traces of a still-dynamic past—but the search for that larger story is a quest that involves us in the heart of American history. As we discover anew as the past erupts again and again, forcing itself back into our consciousness, this is a story that has everything to do with who Americans are, who they can reasonably hope to be, and how they can move closer to the ideals they have for so long claimed as central to their national character. Page 10 of 18

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Introduction Addressing the ongoing challenge to “manage an authenticating response” to the enor­ mous and still only partially examined body of slave testimony, The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative is both a glance back and a look forward. Included in this Handbook are 25 essays from some of the most thoughtful, informed, and consci­ entious scholars in the field, and in their individual chapters, each scholar offers a view of the work that has come before so as to get to the work that remains. The guiding princi­ ple for the volume is that articulated by William Wells Brown so many years ago, that slavery both cannot and must be represented, and that the task of addressing this vast world of concerns takes one beyond the usual borders that distinguish between south and north, slave and free, black and white. Applied to the slave narratives, the challenge is to look for narratives beyond those contained in the usual historical archives, beyond the book-length narratives that usually represent the whole of testimony, and beyond the few leading figures who usually are expected to speak for all—most often, Frederick Dou­ glass, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, and only a very few others. As Deborah E. McDowell has noted, scholars and teachers have long “privileged and mystified Douglass’s narrative” by having it serve a “double duty: not on­ ly does it make slavery intelligible, but the ‘black experience’ as well” (p. 11) (38–39). When offering this observation, McDowell was especially concerned with the absence of attention to women who wrote or told of their lives under slavery. “It is this choice of Dou­ glass as…‘representative man,’” McDowell argues, “as the part that stands for the whole, that reproduces the omission of women from view, except as afterthoughts different from ‘the same’ (black men)” (56). The same point could be made more broadly to include au­ thors who were less recognizably literary in their approach to their stories, or slaves whose stories relied on others for the telling, from those whose stories were related in, say, the pages of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a collection of doc­ umentary evidence to support her contested representation of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) to those whose stories relied on the understanding of, or even the questions se­ lected by, the interviewers for the Federal Writers’ Project. A central premise of The Ox­ ford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative is that the search for slave testi­ mony is ongoing, as is the attempt to give that testimony a fair hearing and an appropri­ ate context once it has been recovered. The essays included in this volume are designed to promote scholarship that will continue the work of recovering the testimony of the enslaved while also developing innovative methods for attending to that body of testimony creatively and thoughtfully. In planning the volume and preparing the essays, we have prioritized the broad tradition over individ­ ual authors, and while we account for the important scholarship that has brought us this far, we offer, as well, approaches that will take us deeper into the environment, even the soundscapes, of slavery. Our intent is not to highlight the singularity of any particular ac­ count, nor to comfortably locate slave narratives in traditional literary or cultural history, but rather to faithfully represent a body of writing and testimony that was designed to speak for the many, to represent the unspeakable, and to account for the experience of enslaved and nominally free communities. There are no chapters devoted to major writ­ ers, since various resources already exist for that purpose and since those writers natu­ Page 11 of 18

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Introduction rally emerge as central figures in many of the essays. In almost all the chapters, we have tried to encapsulate the conventional wisdom on the subject in the process of exploring critical new directions for approaching these concerns. The goal of this Oxford Handbook is to encourage research on a great number of understudied narratives while demonstrat­ ing the rich complexity of this field of study for those just entering it.

Historical Fractures What stories do slave narratives tell? What histories do they reveal? How do they fit into, challenge, undermine, or otherwise complicate the stories we rely upon, the histories to which we turn and from which we draw for inspiration and guidance? The chapters in this section address the challenge of answering such questions. In many ways, Mitch Kachun offers an introduction to all that follows by addressing the importance of memory in our approach to slave narratives—both the memories of those who told their stories, and the remembrance that should follow the telling. Attending to our reliance (p. 12) on both the vagaries and the intimacies of memory, Kachun explores the fractured but insistent pres­ ence of slave narratives in the nation’s shared history, a sense of history that often comes to us piecemeal, in traces and fragments through various sources. Following those traces, Eric Gardner addresses the deep connection between the recording and the remem­ brance of history. African American historians have long recognized that many of the doc­ uments they need to piece together African American history are scattered among public records and other archives devoted to other purposes. The story of African American at­ tempts to come to an understanding of their own history is a story of ongoing attempts to identify and gather those scattered documents. Gardner explores the challenges of doing this work in search of slave testimony, working from archive to archive, both with and against the intended purposes of those archives. Dickson Bruce takes us from the archives to the practice of history, addressing the impact of the recognition of slave nar­ ratives as important if complicated forms of historical evidence. Noting that the slave nar­ ratives that receive the most attention were usually written or narrated by exceptional men and women, Bruce notes how these narratives nonetheless provide us with an en­ trance into communities otherwise obscured by the historical record. Jeannine DeLom­ bard approaches the historical record from a different angle, reminding us that slavery was a legal institution—a seemingly simple fact, until one remembers that most slave tes­ timony emerged from a difficult legal transaction—presented either by fugitives from American law or by those who had negotiated a legal “freedom” from slavery, which is far different from the idealized freedom that seems to await at the end in popular stories of the heroic Underground Railroad. Slave narratives, DeLombard demonstrates, are often quite focused on legal matters—from commentary on Constitutional theory to negotia­ tions and disputes over the nature or even the possibility of one’s always tenuous “free­ dom.”

Page 12 of 18

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Introduction

Layered Testimonies Although they are sometimes treated as straightforward individual statements, slave nar­ ratives are anything but, and the challenge of identifying and working through the lay­ ered testimonies is the subject of this section. Marie Jenkins Schwartz comments on the challenges posed by the rich records of the WPA interviews. Noting that scholars initially viewed the narratives with suspicion, since there were so many reasons to see the inter­ views as biased or otherwise flawed, Schwartz notes that historians should always treat historical documents with some skepticism, but she notes that the historical commentary on the WPA records itself constitutes an important historical archive that should also be approached with some skepticism. When these records are considered together—WPA in­ terviews and the scholarship marking their gradual acceptance as historical evidence— we are able to realize the value of this testimony, including its ability to shape the meth­ ods, practice, and conclusions of historical scholarship over time. Sharon Ann Musher addresses the WPA documents as well, emphasizing the importance of a body of (p. 13) testimony that takes us beyond the stories of the exceptional figures we encounter through most of the “classic” book-length slave narratives. Noting the challenge of evalu­ ating these documents, Musher focuses on specific problems the WPA narratives pose for researchers and explains how such problems can be productively addressed. Exploring yet another layer of the historical record, Elizabeth Regosin reminds us that slave narra­ tives can be found in documents not specifically devoted to recording individual accounts of enslavement. Regosin turns to the Civil War pension records in the National Archives to gather testimony from those who looked for compensation for the service of African American soldiers during the Civil War. In doing so, she not only uncovers a rich body of testimony that, like the WPA narratives, take us beyond the perspectives of the exception­ al few, she also underscores the ways in which slave narratives always speak of a difficult negotiation over the legal terms of one’s recognition as a national subject. John Michael Vlach extends the point still further, noting that slave testimony is written across the landscape, inscribed even on the oft-romanticized facade of slavery, the plantation. Who built the plantations, Vlach asks, and shaped the surrounding landscape—and what can we learn by studying the design of the houses of the enslaved and the environments shaped by the enslaved, either in collaboration with or against the designs of their own­ ers?

Textual Bindings After searching WPA accounts, pension records, and the architecture of slavery for a sta­ ble and reliable record of the lives and perspectives of the enslaved, one might be pre­ pared to believe that the most prominent of the slave narratives—the published texts for­ mer slaves authored or narrated—should be easy to access. In fact, though, these narra­ tives are deeply layered as well, and the enslaved sometimes found themselves bound in print as they had been bound in life, at the mercy of white narrators, editors, publishers, and critics. What does it mean to think of these narratives as books, to place them in the Page 13 of 18

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Introduction world of publishing, distribution, and reception, to consider the presentation of this testi­ mony in a culture in which books circulated widely and had broad and intimate power? What does it mean to consider them in the context of American literary history? Teresa Goddu initiates this section’s concerns by meditating on the slave narratives as material objects, as books in an active print culture that included conventions of printing, distribu­ tion, and reception. Dwight McBride and Justin A. Joyce examine the significance of print culture as well, focusing on readers. Slave narrators found a ready audience, McBride and Joyce observe, but it was an audience rather too ready—that is, an audience ready to understand them before they had told their individual stories. Both of these chapters, then, address the ways in which those who told their stories had to work with and against assumptions about black Americans and slavery, negotiating the (often racist) conven­ tions of communication and understanding. Kenneth Warren, in turn, explores the role of these narratives in the most elevated realm for considering matters of communication and understanding, literary history. Noting that the story (p. 14) of the individual fugitive slave’s quest for freedom has played a more pronounced role in American literary history than has the more significant history of emancipation, Warren explores the tension cen­ tral to the slave narratives—between exceptional individuals and anonymous, exploited la­ borers—and finds in that tension a central theme of American intellectual and literary his­ tory. Indeed, ideological contradictions and cultural tensions abound in slave narratives, and if we are to fully address the implications of these challenging but revealing texts, we need to pay attention to their visual as well as their discursive cues, as Marcus Wood explains in his chapter. Slave narratives often make pointed use of illustrations, but those illustrations (even photographs of prominent people) are anything but straightforward supplements to the narrative message. Rather, the illustrations themselves offered lay­ ered testimony, often carrying traces of other sources, and often opening up rather than resolving narrative possibilities. And what happens to those narrative possibilities when the assumed purpose of slave narratives—a strong anti-slavery message, a call to action— is no longer the primary or even a pressing point? Addressing this question, William An­ drews looks at slave narratives published after the Civil War, and thus at a time when one could not hope for even the problematically sympathetic readers that McBride and Joyce describe.

Experience and Authority We return, then, to the larger purpose of slave narratives—not just to argue against the institution of slavery but to represent the lives affected by slavery, that is, the individuals and communities shaped by the economic, political, and social policies and practices needed for the maintenance of this system for controlling laboring populations. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman explores the intimate challenges of serving as a witness to the sexual con­ trol and violations fundamental to experience of slavery, including the challenges of strategically turning such violations to the reader’s own experience, forcing recognition of the fundamental wrongs encouraged by a system that gave people absolute control over others. But even that message of sexual violence needed to operate in a culture with established prejudices about the possibilities and rights assigned to women, and DoVean­ Page 14 of 18

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Introduction na Fulton accordingly explores the deeply feminist work promoted by women who told their story, work still required if we are to do justice to those stories today. Maurice O. Wallace extends that point by noting that even black males needed to struggle against the priorities of a patriarchal culture, particularly in that the system of slavery and the defini­ tion of masculinity were both deeply shaped by capitalist ideology. Given the challenges of establishing individual authority over one’s identity, many slave narratives highlight the importance of family and community, though these relationships were often compli­ cated by the realities of slavery and what counted as freedom for those who escaped. Brenda Stevenson addresses the broad spectrum of family and community affiliations pre­ sented in slave narratives, from African ties to loved ones separated by slavery. Finally, Barbara McCaskill explores the difficult collaborations involved in virtually every slave narrative—from (p. 15) collaborations between black narrators and white authors to those broader collaborations suggested by the presentation of family and community in the nar­ ratives.

Environments and Migrations As individuals are shaped by their communities, so both individuals and communities are influenced by their environments and, through acts of both resistance and witnessing, can work to influence those environments in turn. Kimberly Smith explores the ways in which slave narratives both reflect and comment on a landscape itself managed by the dictates of the economic and social priorities of the system of slavery. Although these nar­ ratives are not often included in the history of nature writing, Smith explains why they should be, and how they might lead us to a better understanding of terms and goals of en­ vironmental studies. But as we consider the role of the communities and environments central to the perspectives and identities of those who offered their testimonies of en­ slavement, Rhondda R. Thomas cautions us to think carefully about how we locate slave narratives. Slave narratives, she notes, are complex commentaries on the importance of place and often resist our attempts to categorize them geographically in support of a con­ ceptually neat understanding of the past (and, accordingly, of the present). Accounting for Thomas’s analysis, we need to question this Handbook’s own conceptual foundation—the focus on African American slave narratives. Although this volume is devoted primarily to those narratives that address the history of slavery in the United States, one cannot ac­ count for that history without accounting for nations and communities beyond U.S. bor­ ders. Winfried Siemerling explores the presence of slave narratives in the Americas broadly, and builds to the special significance of Canada in these narratives. Nicole N. Aljoe turns to another particularly significant region and surveys Caribbean Slave Narra­ tives that, important in and of themselves, offer important perspectives on the conditions and dynamics of slave testimony broadly. As these scholars demonstrate, such interna­ tional perspectives are important not only for context but because U.S. slavery is ground­ ed in a deeply international and intercontinental history. Nor is this history limited to the dynamics of the slave trade or to the border-crossing of U.S. slaves, as Helen Thomas demonstrates, noting the ways in which the history of the slave trade influenced British Page 15 of 18

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Introduction literature, and then the ways that literature, in turn, became an important presence in slave narratives.

Echoes and Traces That slave narratives can teach us much about who we are and how our world was shaped is now firmly established, though there is still much work to do. Some of that work involves the ongoing attempt to recover existing slave testimony wherever we can find it. Some of that work, too, involves following the traces of this history, and of this (p. 16) narrative tradition, beyond the testimony of the enslaved. Just as the history of slavery involved and influenced every aspect of American governance and culture, so slave narratives have been influential as well, for the importance of accounting for lives shaped by this history has not diminished over time. This final section, accordingly, ad­ dresses the echoes and traces of slavery in other narratives and expressive forms. Daphne Brooks explores “the poetics of the sonic slave narrative” in her chapter on Blind Tom, whose testimony is as pressing but also as complicated as anything we might find in a “classic” narrative by Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs. Joycelyn Moody, in turn, looks at two “postmemory narratives,” two narratives not about the experience of slavery but rather about slavery’s traces in the narratives of two African Americans in Rhode Is­ land, Elleanor Eldridge and William J. Brown. Together, these chapters are intended to guide us to the broad world of testimony essential to the larger story toward which all slave narratives gesture, the story that we can only come to know gradually, and often through traces that themselves carry the shadows of an obscuring history. Following such traces, some have talked of certain African American novels and autobiographies as part of a “neo-slave-narrative tradition,” others have traced influences that lead from the spiri­ tuals to jazz, and still others have noted continuities in dance, in pottery, in quilting, in folklore, even in physical gestures. Fundamentally, the slave narratives are about a histo­ ry that presses for a hearing, and the closing chapters of this volume are case studies in responding to that call. To understand the ways in which the story of an individual life can be understood as a sto­ ry about history is hardly a simple matter. In their introduction to History & Memory, Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally suggest that “the first black American historians may have been the authors of slave narratives, those whose testimonies comprised not only eyewitness accounts of remembered experience but also a set of world views with in­ terpretations, analyses, and historical judgments.” “At these points,” they argue, “memo­ ry and history come together.” As the following studies of slave narratives collectively demonstrate, ths history of slavery involves conditions and struggles that can be under­ stood only if one accounts for the perspective and moral understanding that arises from lived experience. Who tells the story, how one tells the story, why one is telling the story, and what larger vision of history one is serving—these are questions of inescapable impli­ cations for this history that, as William Wells Brown suggested, never can be fully repre­ sented. One must bring oneself to this history, as did those who left us these narratives, and even as we attempt to tell the larger story, we can never allow ourselves to stray too Page 16 of 18

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Introduction far from the many individual stories that have provided us with our intimate entrance to this difficult past. The scholars who have contributed the chapters to this volume have all entered into a deeply personal relationship with this demanding but elusive history, and with the sources they study. We hope that this volume offers its readers with the back­ ground, guidance, and vision that might inspire them to carry this work to the next gener­ ation.

References The Anglo-African Magazine, Volume 1—1859. Ed. William Loren Katz. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford U Press, 1972. Bradford, Sarah. Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People. 2nd. ed. 1886. Rpt. New York: Citadel Press, 1991. Brown, William Wells. A Lecture Delivered Before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, at Lyceum Hall, Nov. 14, 1847. Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1847. Delaney, Lucy A. From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom. In Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews. The Schomburg Library of Nine­ teenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford U Press, 1988. Easton, Hosea. A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States; and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them: With a Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them. 1837. Rpt. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969. Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. 3rd Edition. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1976. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2000. McDowell, Deborah E. “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-Amer­ ican Narrative Tradition,” in African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Es­ says, Ed. William L. Andrews. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993: 36–58. Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New Eng­ land, 1780–1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Liter­ ature,” in The Slave’s Narrative, Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1985. 148–175.

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Introduction Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, Held in Rochester, July 6th, 7th and 8th, 1853, in Minutes and Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830-1864, Ed. Howard Holman Bell. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969. Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Vintage, 1956. Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Howard U Press, 1988. Stepto, Robert B. “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives,” in Reconstructing American Literary History. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 1986. 300–322. “To Our Patrons.” Freedom’s Journal. March 16, 1827. Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime. New York: D. Apple­ ton, 1918. Walker, David. David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of United States of America. 3rd. ed. 1830. New York: Hill and Wang, 1965. Winks, Robin W. Introduction, in An Autobiography of The Reverend Josiah Henson. Four Fugitive Slave Narratives. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969. v–xxxiv. (p. 18)

John Ernest

John Ernest, University of Delaware

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory

Slave Narratives and Historical Memory   Mitch Kachun The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.001

Abstract and Keywords This essay examines the problematic nature of individual memory in the writing of slave narratives; considers scholars’ attention to both individual and collective memory in their interpretations of slave narratives; and evaluates slave narratives’ changing role in shap­ ing the broader public’s understanding of slavery in American history. Scholars and gen­ eral readers largely ignored slave narratives from the late nineteenth century until oral interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administra­ tion became widely available in the 1970s. Since that time, slave narratives have become central to our collective cultural memory of slaves and slavery. Keywords: slave narratives, collective memory, autobiographical memory, traumatic memory, oral history, histori­ ography, Works Progress Administration

IN a very fundamental sense, the slave narrative has everything to do with memory. Like all autobiography, a slave narrative represents the imaginative remembering, after the fact, of an individual’s life and experiences, either written down by the person or narrat­ ed to someone else who then recorded the person’s recollections. Critic Robert B. Stepto argues that “the strident, moral voice of the former slave recounting, exposing…and above all remembering his ordeal in bondage is the single most impressive feature of a slave narrative” (225). We must also not lose sight of the fact that these individual recol­ lections, like all acts of purposeful memory, necessarily take place within a social context. This is equally true of published slave autobiographies (which are generally crafted and published with particular political or economic ends); interviews of former slaves (which are heavily influenced by the particular context of the interview—the race of the inter­ viewer, the questions asked, the time and place, and the interviewee’s sense of the best answers for that situation); and unpublished personal narratives (often written in order to preserve the memories and experiences of the author for family members and descen­ dants). Scholars critically assessing the interconnections of slave narratives and memory must therefore approach the topic considering both individual and collective memory, broadly defined. We must ask questions of the individual’s personal memory of his or her experi­ Page 1 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory ences. How close to the events was the narrative written? How credible and reliable is the author? What motives might move the author (or interviewer or amanuensis) to dis­ tort, omit, or completely fabricate aspects of the tale? To what extent does individual psy­ chology affect what is remembered and what is forgotten? We must also ponder the social context within which the narrative is produced. What sorts of public issues influence the telling of the tale? Are certain types of events and perspectives more meaningful, more readily accepted, or more politically useful at particular historical moments and loca­ tions? What roles have publicly available slave narratives played over time in shaping our shifting collective cultural memory of slaves and slavery? (p. 22) The origin of the term “slave narrative” is itself intriguing and not completely clear. Searches in several online historical databases—Making of America, Reader’s Guide Ret­ rospective, and Readex American Historical Newspapers—produce no references to the phrases “slave narrative” or “slave narratives” during the nineteenth century. Of course, many of the most famous autobiographers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actually use the word “narrative” in their titles, as with Briton Hammon, Olaudah Equiano, Nancy Prince, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and many others. This very likely contributed to the term’s general adoption. W.E.B. Du Bois used the phrase in a 1913 essay on “The Negro in Literature and Art” (235). Alain Locke referred to the “socalled ‘slave narratives’” in 1928, and E. Franklin Frazier used the term two years later (Locke 238, Frazier 246). In 1932, a reviewer cited as one of the signal literary accom­ plishments of Vernon Loggins’s The Negro Author that Loggins “emphasizes sufficiently for the first time the importance of the slave narrative or autobiography, and points out that it should be regarded as distinct type or class of writing” (Nelson 322). As scholars after the 1940s began slowly to pay greater attention to slaves’ own life experiences and perspectives, they relied on both published antebellum autobiographies and recently col­ lected interviews with former slaves. Funded by the New Deal’s Works Progress Adminis­ tration, the Federal Writers Project collected thousands of oral histories of former slaves between 1936 and 1938. Those interviews were assembled and made available in the Li­ brary of Congress rare book room in 1941. The project’s formal title, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, seems to have established the terms in which subsequent scholars have discussed these sources. As scholars explored the published narratives and oral history interviews, they began to construct a generally shared understanding of the narratives that would shape public per­ ceptions and the narratives’ place in Americans’ collective memory. Long before this postWorld War II revival of interest in slave narratives—going back to the time when the first antebellum narratives entered public discourse—readers contested their legitimacy and implications. Critics at times disputed their veracity. When Charles Ball’s narrative, Slav­ ery in the United States, was first published in the 1830s, an anonymous reviewer for the Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine readily accepted it as “a true narrative which has fallen from the lips of a veritable fugitive,” even though he regretted the absence of “an appen­ dix of some sort, containing some documentary evidence to that effect” (8). Another sym­ pathetic reviewer in the abolitionist press, this one commenting on the Narrative of James Williams (1838), bemoaned the “marvelous unbelief” expressed by “our northern citi­ Page 2 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory zens” and even “many of our anti-slavery friends” when faced with the narratives of the only “competent narrators of slavery as it exists in our country. Thus the only citizens [the slaves themselves], who personally know what slavery is from their own observation…are not only disbelieved, but are suspected of untruth” (9). Indeed, Williams’s narrative was roundly condemned, even by some abolitionists, as a fabrication “filled with statements of the most inflammatory and improbable character” (“Narrative of James Williams” 11). Af­ ter listing numerous refutations of names, locations, and other details in Williams’s narra­ tive, abolitionists James (p. 23) G. Birney and Lewis Tappan called for its publisher to “dis­ continue the sale of the work.” The American Anti-Slavery Society, which published Williams’s narrative, continued to argue for the author’s character and his story’s truth­ fulness (“Summary” of William’s Narrative). The question of the narratives’ truthfulness was critical, and hinged not only on percep­ tions of the authors’ honesty, but also on the faithfulness of their memories. Literary scholar James Olney has argued, quite logically, that authors of antebellum slave narra­ tives needed to exercise caution in calling attention to potential flaws in their memories or their use of imagination in constructing their narratives. Such admissions would neces­ sarily call into question the narrators’ veracity and, by extension, the case they were mak­ ing against slavery. Olney argues further that autobiographical memory is largely irrele­ vant in antebellum slave narratives since they are “most often a non-memorial description fitted to a pre-formed mold” (151). Olney is correct in pointing out the formulaic charac­ ter of many antebellum narratives and their unapologetic use as propaganda to further the abolitionist cause. Ann Fabian also has observed that marginalized nineteenth-centu­ ry autobiographers, in general, tended to adapt language, structure, and metaphor from existing texts, crafting their own memories in a way that would be readily recognized by the reading public (6). Yet to fully discount the working of individual memory in the slave narratives goes too far. Some of the early slave narrators themselves directly addressed in their texts not only their own truthfulness, but also the clarity of their memories. One of the earliest and most widely read narratives, that of Olaudah Equiano, contains numerous telling phrases like, “I remember” (5, 6, 21, 23, 29, 30, 31), “I do not remem­ ber” (21, 32, 34), “from what I can recollect” (23), or “if my recollection does not fail me” (32). It is interesting that Equiano, writing in the late-eighteenth century, departs so frequently from Olney’s dictum regarding antebellum narratives, and even more so be­ cause the vast majority of these references are concentrated in chapter one, which deals with the author’s purported childhood in West Africa. The rest of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative is notable for the paucity of such references. Given the evidence presented by Vincent Carretta, suggesting that Equiano was actually born in Carolina, it pays to con­ sider what meaning we might attach to the author’s calling attention to his own acts of recollection of a time about which many scholars believe he was neither telling the truth nor recounting actual memories. On the one hand, since Equiano was a young boy at the time of his purported capture, his memory may well have been uncertain regarding de­ tails of cultural practices and daily life among the Ibo. On the other, the frequent uses of “I remember” and similar phrases may be a case of Equiano protesting too much in order to lend credibility to a fabricated tale. It is unlikely that his use of language can help de­ Page 3 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory termine the truth of Equiano’s nativity, but it does call our attention to slave autobiogra­ phers’ references to the strength or weakness of their own memories. Equiano was not alone in presenting evidence running counter to Olney’s argument. In his nineteenth-century narrative, Charles Ball related his separation from his mother as a young child, claiming that “the terrors of the scene return with painful vividness upon my memory” (11). Frederick Douglass, in describing his aunt being (p. 24) brutally whipped by her master, adamantly asserted his indelible memory of the incident: “I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remem­ ber it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing.” Like Equiano, Douglass also gave occasional indications that his memory might be fallible, using phrases like “as well as I can remember” (6, 23, 86). Others made no such concessions. Harriet Jacobs fre­ quently reminded her readers of the lucidity of her recollections: “That day seems but as yesterday, so well do I remember it” (35). “I well remember one occasion when I attended a Methodist class meeting” (108). “The memory of it haunted me for many a year” (140). “To this day I shudder when I remember that morning” (171). “The memory of those beloved and honored friends will remain with me to my latest hour” (224). Perhaps no an­ tebellum autobiographer was more persistent in bringing his memory into the readers’ consciousness than John Brown. Dozens of passages in his Slave Life in Georgia (1855) included phrases like “I remember” (2, 13, 21, 63, 71, 114, 121, 124, 198, 204, 233) “I re­ member well” (3, 5, 10, 94, 163, 230) or, movingly, “One of my chief regrets is that I can­ not remember the name of the place where John’s wife lived” (44). Perhaps not surpris­ ingly, the more emotional moments in his narrative were especially vivid: “What I en­ dured of anxiety that night will never be effaced from my memory” (155) The capacity to say, “I remember,” and to convey those often bitter memories to a reading audience, was surely a powerful motivation to write. While the process of recalling and setting down one’s life story must have been cathartic for many of those who had en­ dured slavery and its torments, Harriet Jacobs suggests a sharp contrast between the memories of the slave and those of the master. Jacobs informs her readers that, after hav­ ing contributed to the protracted illness and death of her aunt, her “hard-hearted” mas­ ter, Dr. Flint, “wish[ed] that the past could be forgotten, and that we might never think of it” (219–20) Surely many former slaves, for different reasons, shared the desire never again to revisit that part of their lives. But many who did record their narratives were em­ powered by their ability to speak their truths and impose narrative control over the expe­ rience of their enslavement and liberation. Jennifer Fleischner, writing about selected women’s narratives, argues that slave narratives are imbued not only with the “narrators’ insistence that the stories they tell about their slave pasts are true,” but also that “the vi­ olent theft of their memories—of their own selves, and of themselves by others—lay at the sick heart of slavery” (3). Autobiographical theorist George Gusdorf has similarly assert­ ed that autobiography presents the author with “the final chance to win back what has been lost” (qtd. in Fleischner 3).

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory For no authors can this have been truer than the early slave narrators. During the eigh­ teenth and nineteenth centuries, European and American intellectuals emphasized the “crucial role of memory, of a collective, cultural memory, in the estimation of a civiliza­ tion” (Davis and Gates xxvii). Hume, Kant, Jefferson, and Hegel, for example, all pointed to the centrality of both literary capacity and a sense of collective history and heritage to any people’s claims to civilized status and even humanity. Henry Louis Gates and Charles T. Davis succinctly capture this argument’s logic: “Without writing, there could be no re­ peatable sign of the workings of reason, of mind; without memory (p. 25) or mind, there could exist no history; without history, there could exist no humanity” (xxvii). Aside from any other motivations, black autobiographers’ writings implicitly refuted the notion that blacks lacked those fundamental human characteristics. The indisputable black voices at the heart of their stories, their insistence on embracing their memories, and the collec­ tive thematic unities among their narratives established not merely a black literary tradi­ tion, but also the race’s intellectual legitimacy. Of course, the more immediate purpose of the antebellum narratives was to expose slavery’s horrors and persuade readers to join the abolitionist cause. To fulfill this task, antebellum autobiographers needed readers’ trust. Calling attention in a very personal way to their own vivid memories helped humanize their stories and establish that trust. After emancipation, however, slave narratives occupied a different place in American pub­ lic culture. Historian Julie Roy Jeffrey, writing about the post-emancipation autobiogra­ phies of white and black abolitionists, argues that these activists remained committed to the principle that “slavery might be over, but its cruelties and crimes should not be for­ gotten” (71). But the recollections conveyed in the post-emancipation slave narratives changed in some fundamental ways. Scholars have identified approximately sixty-five original slave narratives published be­ fore 1865, and over fifty which appeared between 1865 and 1920 (Blight 11–12). Howev­ er, the popularity and public presence of antebellum slave narratives declined markedly after emancipation, and the new autobiographies and reminiscences of former slaves en­ tering the literary marketplace failed to generate the attention such works had received during the struggle against slavery. Major publishers recognized the lack of a market, and many narrative authors resorted to local presses or newspapers to print their stories, usu­ ally with limited distribution and often at their own expense. Although Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881, sold over 3,000 copies during its first year, it failed to generate anything approaching the attention of his antebellum narratives. David W. Blight has argued that, as the nation began to concentrate on the future in the decades after the Civil War, Douglass believed “blacks were morally bound to uncover and tell their history, to reshape the national memory by pushing their experience to the center of the story” (9). Despite its publisher reportedly “push[ing] and re-push[ing] the book con­ stantly,” Life and Times was barely reviewed in American periodicals, suggesting that the American public did not share Douglass’s insistence that his emancipationist vision shape the nation’s collective understanding of its recent past (Jeffrey 171). Perhaps too, former

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory slaves’ recollections were too closely tied to the horrific losses of the Civil War, which many Americans seemed eager to forget. One significant exception to the public’s neglect of post-emancipation narratives was William Still’s hefty 1872 book, The Underground Rail Road. Unlike individual autobio­ graphical slave narratives, Still’s nearly eight hundred pages contained the stories of hun­ dreds of fugitive slaves who had made their way over the years through his post as “con­ ductor” at the Underground Railroad station run by Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee. Like the autobiographical narratives, Still recounted the traumas and triumphs of fugitive slaves and their riveting journeys from the slave South to freedom. Moreover, he went be­ yond most antebellum narratives by supplying details that were (p. 26) too dangerous to include in pre-emancipation tales. Perhaps because of the sheer volume and variety of his accounts, and their focus on brief but thrilling stories of flight and liberation, Still’s book sold far better than those of the many other African Americans who were similarly at­ tempting to preserve and disseminate the memory of slavery’s cruelty and the courage of those who fled to freedom (Still; Jeffrey, 61–90). As far as Americans’ collective memory of slavery was concerned, a romanticized and reconciliationist vision of the underground railroad and the plantation tales of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and others of the southern “plantation school” had significantly greater impact than the autobiogra­ phies of former slaves (Blight, Race and Reunion 222–31; Schwalm 291). In the first generations after slavery, while many former slaves shared their experiences of slavery with family members and acquaintances, precious few made any effort to dis­ seminate their stories to a wider American audience. Yet some did set down their recol­ lections in writing for the benefit of the much smaller private audience of their families and descendants. David W. Blight has recently brought two such stories to light, thanks to handwritten manuscripts being passed down through families to local historical societies. The former slaves John Washington and Wallace Turnage had no illusions of attaining lit­ erary glory or even modest economic success from their narratives, as neither appears to have made any effort to seek a publisher. Nonetheless, as Blight suggests, “they pos­ sessed the will to write, to make their stories of liberation known, to find readers and gar­ ner recognition—even if only within their own families—as men who conquered their con­ dition as slaves, remade themselves as free people, and left a mark on time as best they could” (7). Both these narratives, like many published narratives written in the aftermath of war and emancipation, focused less on the degradations of slavery than on each man’s empowering self-liberation and uplifting journey to respectability as free men. But this pattern is perhaps less pervasive than many assume. Historian Leslie Schwalm questions the widely held generalization that published postbellum narratives consistently under­ played the horrors of slavery in favor of tales of post-emancipation uplift and accomplish­ ment. She cites, as one example, the relatively unknown 1912 narrative of Samuel Hall, who focused most of his recollections on a “portrayal of slavery as a horrific institution; he denounces slavery and…offer[s] a deliberative act of resistance against the tide of na­ tional forgetting” (298–299).

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory But the dozens of published post-emancipation narratives failed to achieve the goals of Samuel Hall, Frederick Douglass, and other activists who sought to etch the slaves’ expe­ riences and perspectives in the nation’s memory. A number of the more widely known early narratives (by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, for exam­ ple) had generated a good bit of national and even international attention in their day, and had a concomitant effect on public perceptions. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative went through several dozen editions prior to 1850 and Douglass’s 1845 Narrative sold 30,000 copies by 1860 (Davis and Gates xvi). However, between the abolition of American slavery and the early twentieth century, former slaves’ recollections of their experiences of the peculiar institution and their journeys to freedom failed to (p. 27) generate comparable sales. The fate of the once popular antebellum slave narratives paralleled Americans’ se­ lective elision of blacks’ role in the Civil War and the emancipatory meaning of that con­ flict: they had been all but erased from the American public’s consciousness. Henry Louis Gates and Charles T. Davis may have overstated the case only slightly in observing that, during this period, “the literary presence of the speaking black subject was replaced by the deafening silence of his absence” (xviii). Recent scholarship has demonstrated that African Americans engaged in numerous historical and commemorative activities to pre­ serve key elements of the race’s history and accomplishments, yet even blacks seemed to pay little attention to the antebellum slave narratives (Blight, Race and Reunion; Blair; Fahs and Waugh; Neff; Kachun; Clark). This cultural silence regarding slave narratives continued through the first half of the twentieth century, among both the general public and scholars. Historian Geoffrey Cubitt has observed that twentieth-century historians “readily presented themselves…as the guardians and transmitters and presenters of…national memory” (40). As late as 1974, in assessing slave narratives’ usefulness as historical sources, historian C. Vann Woodward noted that “historians have almost completely neglected these materials” (471). Prior to the 1970s, virtually all efforts to understand slavery among mainstream historians had been based mainly on quantitative data and the observations of slaveholders or other white observers. Even contributors to the Journal of Negro History, whose articles since its founding in 1916 had consistently challenged mainstream historians’ one-sided view of slavery, paid little attention to the slave narratives. The JSTOR electronic database pro­ vides access to over one thousand scholarly journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, some of which, like the American Historical Review and the Journal of Ameri­ can Folklore, date back to the nineteenth century. A search for the phrase “slave narra­ tive” in the database yielded an impressive 1,321 hits; yet only 50 appeared prior to 1969. Slave narratives’ significance in mainstream historical scholarship—and through that scholarship, in American education and public discourse—is in fact a very recent phenom­ enon. Between slavery’s demise and the mid-twentieth century, slave narratives largely slipped from national consciousness. In terms of collective memory, then, until relatively recently any consideration of slave narratives and remembering would necessarily focus primarily on slave narratives and forgetting. But the memories of former slaves did receive re­ newed attention during the 1920s and 1930s, as a small number of academics began to Page 7 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory interview elderly African Americans in order to salvage and preserve their childhood memories of bondage. While the best known of these efforts was conducted through the WPA’s Federal Writers Project between 1936 and 1938, it is important to note the work done mainly by African American scholars and institutions over the preceding decade. Be­ tween 1927 and 1935 scholars working independently from one another at Fisk Universi­ ty, Southern University, and Kentucky State University collected oral histories from more than seven hundred former slaves in their respective regions. The scholarly objectives and types of questions in these studies varied, with topical questions ranging from reli­ gious conversion experiences to master-slave relations to the material conditions of slaves’ lives. But historian Sharon Ann Musher argues that they all approached (p. 28) the former slaves’ memories as part of a shared “search [for] a ‘usable past,’ one which might foster self respect and group identity among blacks” (6). Responsibility for the much better known WPA interviews, on the other hand, “shifted from the hands of black academics…primarily to those of white government bureaucrats and relief workers.” African Americans were largely excluded from organizational and ad­ ministrative leadership of the program, and white leaders like John A. Lomax “encour­ aged the interviewers to explore the folklore of slavery more than the themes that had in­ terested black interviewers: racial uplift, slave resistance, and attitudes toward free­ dom” (Musher 6–7). As with any oral history, the script of questions, the context of the in­ terview, and the social relationship between interviewer and interviewee had an enor­ mous impact on the kinds—and honesty—of memories that emerge. The interview ques­ tions put forward by Lomax, along with the fact that interviewers were mostly southern whites, generated narratives that mainly “concluded with a note of reconciliation rather than one of anger, pain, or rebellion” (Musher 10–11). In addition to the potential biases stemming from the interview process and its context, one of the most problematic aspects of these oral histories relates to the age of the for­ mer slaves and the reliability of their memories. Virtually all who have used or written about the narratives make some mention of the prudence historians must exercise when forming interpretations based on the memories of elderly people recalling events from their childhoods more than six decades earlier. C. Vann Woodward, for example, noted the “failing memory” of the interviewees, and advised that historians should use the inter­ views “with caution and discrimination” (Woodward, qtd. in Spindel 249). Nonetheless, as Donna J. Spindel has argued, “at the same time that scholars were acknowledging the shortcomings of the data and advising caution regarding its use, they continued to devel­ op an interpretation of slave life based upon it” (249). This was especially true of the revi­ sionist histories of slavery published during the 1970s. Charles L. Perdue, Jr., went so far to assert that the “ex-slave interviews…are as reliable as most other historical documents” (Perdue, qtd. in Spindel 249). Similarly, after acknowledging that “human memory is fallible,” Paul D. Escott contended that “there is no reason to believe that the memories of the ex-slaves interviewed were worse than anyone else’s” (42).

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory Escott and others defending the use of former slaves’ recollections at times cite psycho­ logical research supporting the idea that age need not have deleterious effects on one’s long-term memory, and suggesting that people are especially likely to recall accurately significant moments in the life cycle or “critical junctures” in their lives. Spindel, howev­ er, argues that proponents of this view mined the psychological research very selectively and often oversimplified or misinterpreted the studies’ findings. Citing a wide range of materials, she concludes that “the general thrust of the literature in psychology is that long-term memory is suspect”; nonetheless, she also cites numerous studies challenging the position “that general memory loss is a necessary function of age” (259). Psycholo­ gists in the mid-1990s, when Spindel wrote, had produced no consensus in their assess­ ments of the impact of age on long-term memory, so the jury remained out (p. 29) on the extent to which historians might rely on the ex-slave interviews in shaping their interpre­ tations of slavery. Spindel counseled a “vigorous skepticism” (260). Psychological research on memory accelerated during the first decade of the twenty-first century, but there is still no definitive conclusion in this debate. A 2003 longitudinal study indicates that memory declines significantly after age seventy, with even more precipi­ tous impairment after age eighty (Singer, Verheghen, et al.). Other recent studies suggest that older adults have better long term memories for positive events from the past, and for those that have significant emotional resonance (Petrican, et al.; Spaniol, et al.). A 2006 study concludes that older adults “can subjectively travel back in time” to relive personal events in the most distant past better than those in the recent past” (Piolino, et al. 510). The import of psychological studies of long term and autobiographical memory for our un­ derstanding of the twentieth-century slave narratives, however, does not involve a direct answer to the question of whether elderly former slaves’ memories are accurate. The rel­ evance of such studies for historians is much more complex. Historian Geoffrey Cubitt ar­ gues that we must view autobiographical memory “not as a collection of one-to-one repre­ sentations of discrete and specific moments in past experience, but as a continuous inter­ pretive reconstruction of that experience.” Memory, whether relating to the recollection of specific events or to one’s general feelings about past experiences, is inextricably tied to synchronic changes in personal identity. The meanings attached to the past are neces­ sarily malleable, as individuals’ constructions of selfhood evolve over the course of their lives. It is in this sense that Cubitt speaks of “the inherent mutability of experiences, the meanings of which are never fixed definitively…but are always evolving as these memo­ ries become subsumed in longer developments, or are refracted through the prism of lat­ er events” (89–90). This same logic applies equally to what is remembered and what is ei­ ther purposefully forgotten or unconsciously elided from a personal recollected narrative. To some extent, our approach toward understanding oral histories of the memory of slav­ ery can be informed by analogous research in other fields. Memory studies are often as­ sociated with traumatic memory, and history’s “turn to memory” in the late twentieth cen­ tury was fueled by (if not originated in) studies of Holocaust memory. Some of the most prolific areas of research have been in the collective memory of twentieth-century wars, Page 9 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory genocides, the American Civil War, and slavery—all of which involve traumatic experi­ ences (Berntsen and Thomsen; Eyerman; Winter; Portelli; Hinton and O’Neill; Langer). While individuals’ narrative recollections of the experience of war or genocide are hardly identical with one another or with recollections of slavery, there may be shared elements worth considering. For example, historian Mark Hewitson has observed that some Ger­ man veterans of the First World War “seem to have believed themselves members of a separate group…which was privy to a special kind of knowledge, but which proved large­ ly incapable of communicating it to non-combatants.” As one German veteran of the Se­ cond World War put it, “Those who haven’t lived through the experience may sympathize as they read [a soldier’s memoir], the way one sympathizes with the hero of a novel or a play, but they certainly will never understand, as (p. 30) one can never understand the in­ explicable.” Nonetheless, Hewitson points out, participants in twentieth-century wars “have generated a vast and growing literature in which they grapple with their experi­ ences and the meaning of war and try to make it intelligible to a wider public in a nation­ al act of remembering,” even as they maintain “the claim that only they know what war is like.” Substituting the word “slavery” for “war” in the last sentence should suggest the parallels in the memoirs and autobiographies of these two distinct groups of survivors of traumatic experience (Hamilton and Shopes, x; Hewitson, 310). Hewitson’s analysis points to the necessity of reconciling the interconnections and con­ testations between personal recollections and national collective memory. While the iden­ tification of soldiers as national heroes can often be woven seamlessly into a nation’s memory, the situation surrounding American slavery is somewhat more complicated (He­ witson, 316–17). The experiences of slaves, and the slave narratives, have played shifting roles in shaping society’s collective understanding of slavery and its relevance to Ameri­ can history and identity. One useful gauge of the slave narratives’ place in America’s col­ lective memory is their presence in the public sphere. One measure of that presence is the availability of the narratives to the general public. According to the WorldCat global catalog of library collections, during the twentieth cen­ tury, the most well-known and widely read antebellum slave narrative, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, did not appear in print until 1960. And of the dozens of new editions appearing between that date and 2010, only four more appeared prior to 1980. In contrast, fifteen editions appeared between 1980 and 1992, thirty-seven be­ tween 1992 and 1999, and another fifty-eight between 2000 and 2010. The extraordinary expansion of this one text’s availability after 1980 is all the more im­ portant because of the proliferation of editions geared explicitly toward secondary and post-secondary educational audiences. Journalist and popular historian Frances FitzGer­ ald argued that history textbooks have traditionally been “essentially nationalistic histo­ ries” intended “to tell children what their elders want them to know about their coun­ try” (47). While not a textbook, per se, the inclusion of Douglass’s narrative in school and university curricula validated him as an important American figure, and his narrative as a legitimate and trustworthy perspective on American slavery. Thus the memories of former slaves came to represent the basis for the kinds of stories increasing numbers of Ameri­ Page 10 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory can historical and educational authorities selected to construct a revised collective memo­ ry of slavery that would inform the coming generations. The narratives’ entry into the public’s consciousness expanded after the 1970s in part be­ cause that decade saw a proliferation of historical monographs on American slavery which relied heavily on published slave autobiographies and/or the WPA interviews. Those interviews themselves became much more widely available when historian George P. Rawick undertook to prepare the original WPA typescripts for publication in the early 1970s. By 1979, under Rawick’s editorial direction, forty-one volumes of the transcribed narratives had appeared under the title, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Unlike the typescripts, copies of which were held in a handful of research libraries, volumes from The American Slave collection were acquired by hundreds of (p. 31) libraries around the world. Rawick’s widely read introductory volume in that se­ ries, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, offered a convincing argument for privileging the slaves’ own words as transcribed in the WPA narratives in developing an understanding of the institution of slavery and the lives of the enslaved. Around the same time, John Blassingame made a similarly influential argument, using the published antebellum slave narratives, in his book, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Scholarship produced by academic historians tends to trickle slowly and unevenly into American public consciousness. But the 1970s slavery historiography made remarkably rapid headway, paralleled as it was by an enormously popular cultural event: the 1976 publication of Alex Haley’s book Roots, and the subsequent television miniseries that be­ came an unprecedented cultural sensation. Based on Haley’s genealogical research into his own family’s history, Roots chronicles the fictionalized lives of several generations of an African American family from a young boy’s capture in Africa through the period of an­ tebellum southern slavery. Though historians criticized its historical inaccuracies and ten­ dencies toward romanticization, the book’s—and especially the TV miniseries’—moving depictions of slavery’s brutality and the slaves’ humanity had a powerful impact. Whether it altered people’s opinions about black history or race in American society is open to de­ bate, but there is no denying its impact in placing slavery and black history squarely be­ fore the American public imagination as at no time since emancipation (Haley; Roots; Hur and Robinson). In the years after Roots, numerous forms of actual slave narratives have been adapted in books for adult and young audiences, documentaries, and dramatic films (Berlin et al.; Moses and Christensen; Butler; Jones; Paulson; Hill; Harriet Tubman; Amis­ tad; Unchained Memories; Solomon Northup’s Odyssey). Perhaps the most famous of these, which garnered widespread attention in both book and film versions, was Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The book, based loosely on the real experiences of Margaret Garner, was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the 1997 feature film earned numer­ ous awards and nominations (Morrison; Beloved). As the editors of the text and audio publication, Remembering Slavery, noted in 1998, “the historical memory of slavery remains central to Americans’ sense of themselves and the society in which they live” (Berlin et al., xlvi). Yet that memory has always been a con­ Page 11 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory tested one. For generations after slavery’s demise, most Americans elected to remember as little of the institution as possible, or to very selectively craft its story into one that was consistent with a national narrative of progress and expanding liberty. In that project the recollections of the former slaves could have little place, and their narratives were rele­ gated to the historical dustbin. But the silenced past has a way of reemerging given changes in cultural conditions. As these conditions took shape in the mid- to late-twenti­ eth century, both published slave narratives and the oral histories of former slaves began to receive recognition as credible sources for revising our collective understanding of the nation’s peculiar institution. Despite the numerous problems the narratives present as historical sources, in recent decades the slaves’ recollections of slavery and its meaning has largely displaced the perspectives of the slaveholders. With (p. 32) no living person remaining to offer personal recollections of antebellum American slavery, we will likely continue to rely heavily on slave narratives in shaping our collective memory of the insti­ tution. But as new contexts give rise to new and shifting questions about the past, that collective memory no doubt will remain malleable, adaptive, and contested.

References Amistad. Universal City, CA: Dreamworks, 1997. Ball, Charles. Fifty Years in Chains, or, the Life of an American Slave. 1859. Documenting the American South. University of North Carolina. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. . Beloved. Burbank, CA: Touchstone Home Video, 1999. Berlin, Ira, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. New York: New Press, 1998. Berntsen, Dorthe, and Dorthe K. Thomsen. “Personal Memories for Remote Historical Events: Accuracy and Clarity of Flashbulb Memories Related to World War II.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 134:2 (May, 2005): 242–57. Blassingame, John. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Blair, William. Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Blight, David W. Prologue. A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Includ­ ing Their Own Narratives of Emancipation. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2007. 1–16. Blight, David W. Prologue. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cam­ bridge: Belknap Press, 2001.

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory Brown, John. Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave. London, 1855. Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979. Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens: Universi­ ty of Georgia Press, 2005. Clark, Kathleen Ann. Defining Moments: African-American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Davis, Charles T. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Introduction. The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. xxi­ ii–xxx. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston, 1845. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Negro in Literature and Art.” The Negro’s Progress in Fifty Years. Spec. issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 49 (1913): 233–39. Elder, Orville, and Samuel Hall. Samuel Hall, 47 Years a Slave: A Brief Story of His Life Before and After Freedom Came to Him. Washington, Ia: Journal print, 1912. Escott, Paul D. “The Art and Science of Reading WPA Slave Narratives.” The Slave’s Nar­ rative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 40–7.

(p. 33)

Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Vol 1. 1789. Documenting the American South. University of North Carolina. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. . Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Fabian, Ann. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Fahs, Alice, and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Fitzgerald, Frances. America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century. New York: Little Brown and Company, 1979. Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Page 13 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory Frazier, E. Franklin. “The Negro Slave Family.” The Journal of Negro History 15.2 (1930): 198–259. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1976. Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Hamilton, Paula, and Linda Shopes, eds. Oral Histories and Public Memories. Philadel­ phia: Temple University Press, 2008. Harriet Tubman. Irving, TX: Nest Entertainment, 1996. Hewitson, Mark. ““I Witnesses”: Selfhood and Testimony in Modern Wars.” German Histo­ ry 28.3 (2010): 310–325. Hill, Lawrence. Someone Knows My Name. New York: Norton, 2007. Hinton, Alexander Laban, and Kevin Lewis O’Neill, eds. Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Hur, Kenneth K. and John P. Robinson. “The Social Impact of ‘Roots,’” Journalism Quarter­ ly 55.1 (1978): 19–24. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston, 1861. Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfin­ ished Work of Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Jones, Edward P. The Known World: A Novel. New York: Amistad, 2003. Kachun, Mitch. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African-American Emanci­ pation Celebrations, 1808–1915. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1993. “The Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave.” Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine 1.4 (1836): 375–93. Rpt. in The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 6–8. Locke, Alain. “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature.” The American Negro. Spec. issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 140 (1928): 234–48. Morrison, Toni. Beloved: a Novel. New York: Knopf, 1987.

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory Moses, Sheila P., and Bonnie Christensen. I, Dred Scott: A Fictional Slave Narrative Based on the Life and Legal Precedent of Dred Scott. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Musher, Sharon Ann. “Contesting ‘The Way the Almighty Wants It’: Crafting Memories of Ex-Slaves in the Slave Narrative Collection.” American Quarterly 53.1 (2001): 1–31. (p. 34)

“Narrative of James Williams.” The Liberator 9 March 1838. Rpt. in The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 8–11. “Narrative of James Williams.” African Repository 15.10 (1839): 161–66. Rpt. in The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1985. 11–15. Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconcili­ ation. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. Nelson, John Herbert. Rev. of The Negro Author: His Development in America, by Vernon Loggins. American Literature 4.3 (1932): 322. Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Liter­ ature.” The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 148–75. Owens, Leslie H. This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Page, Amanda M. “Summary.” Documenting the American South. University of North Car­ olina. Web. 4 Oct. 2010. . Paulson, Gary. The Legend of Bass Reeves: Being the True and Fictional Account of the Most Valiant Marshal in the West. New York: Wendy Lamb Books, 2006. Petrican, Raluca, Morris Moscovitch, and Ulrich Schimmack. “Cognitive Resources, Valance, and Memory Retrieval of Emotional Events in Older Adults.” Psychology and Ag­ ing 23:3 (September 2008): 585–94. Piolino, Pascale, et al. “Autobiographical Memory, Autonoetic Consciousness, and Selfperspective in Aging.” Psychology and Aging. 21.3 (2006): 510–25. Portelli, Alessandro. The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 41 vols. West­ port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972–79. Page 15 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory Rawick, George P.. From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. West­ port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. Vol.3 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiog­ raphy. 41 vols. 1972–79. Roots. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007, 1977. Schwalm, Leslie. “‘Agonizing Groans of Mothers’ and ‘Slave-Scarred Veterans’: The Com­ memoration of Slavery and Emancipation.” American Nineteenth-Century History 9.3 (2008): 289–304. Singer, Tania, Paul Verhaeghen, et al. “The Fate of Cognition in Very Old Age: Six-year Longitudinal Findings in the Berlin Aging Study.” Psychology and Aging 18:2 (June 2003): 318–31. Solomon Northup’s Odyssey: Twelve Years as a Slave. Thousand Oaks, CA: Monterey Video, 2004, 1984. Spaniol, Julia, Andreas Voss, and Cheryl L. Grady. “Aging and Emotional Memory: Cogni­ tive Mechanisms Underlying the Positivity Effect.” Psychology and Aging 23:4 (December 2008):859–72. Spindel, Donna J. “Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsid­ ered.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27.2 (1996): 247–61. (p. 35) Stepto, Robert Burns, “I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Autho­ rial Control in Four Slave Narratives.” The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 225–41. Still, William. The Underground Rail Road. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872. “Summary” of Williams’s Narrative, “North American Slave Narratives,” Documenting the American South , accessed Oct. 4, 2010. Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives. New York: HBO Documentary Films, 2003. Webber, Thomas L. Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Community, 1831–1865. New York: Norton, 1978. Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twen­ tieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Woodward, C. Vann. “History from Slave Sources.” Rev. of The American Slave: A Com­ posite Autobiography, by George P. Rawick. American Historical Review 79.2 (1974): 470– 81.

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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory

Mitch Kachun

Mitch Kachun is Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He is author of Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Cele­ brations, 1808-1915 (Massachusetts, 2003) and co-editor of The Curse of Caste; or the Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins (Oxford, 2006). His current research examines Crispus Attucks in American memory.

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research

Slave Narratives and Archival Research   Eric Gardner The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Oct 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.006

Abstract and Keywords This essay calls for reevaluation of how archives crucial to the study of African American slave narratives have been defined, constructed, used, misused, and ignored. Grouped around questions of textual studies and biographical studies, the essay explores how liter­ ary historians can navigate, reshape, and even (re)create archives in and surrounding slave narratives. In treating slave narratives vis-a-vis textual studies, the essay argues for placing slave narratives within print culture matrices to reconsider questions of author­ ship/composition and dissemination/circulation; in this, the essay attends to how slave narratives have (and have not) come to contemporary readers. The essay's discussion of biographical studies surveys key resources and identifies troubling gaps. It argues for recognizing the archival impulse inherent in many slave narratives and asserts that read­ ing slave narratives as archives can shape both the interpretation of such texts and the exploration of other existing records. Keywords: African American, archives, authorship, Black, literary history, print culture, slave narratives, slavery, Lucy Delaney, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs

STUDENTS of the archive(s) surrounding slave narratives swim in a sea of contradictions and ironies. We know more about North American slave narratives than ever before, yet that knowledge remains miniscule. The entry of slave narratives into the academy has been a deeply archival project—often requiring archival research simply to find such nar­ ratives; nonetheless, many scholars integrate slave narratives into larger literary land­ scapes in ways that sever them from any sense of context. Certainly, it is good that texts like Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl have become expected in survey courses and anthologies alike. However, such canonization sometimes smacks of tokenism, suggests that some period scholars have read no more than perhaps a dozen slave narratives, and neglects the recognition— made in studies from Frances Smith Foster’s Witnessing Slavery and William Andrews’s To Tell a Free Story—that most uses of the phrase “the slave narrative” are oversimplifi­ cations of a complex and still little-explored collection of genres and texts. For the larger story, one needs to turn to the archives, but such work is undervalued by many poststruc­ Page 1 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research turalist critics who dismiss archival scholarship on slave narratives, even though such scholarship offers an object lesson in competing stories, gaps, absences, and shifting meanings. Others assume that biographical and historical criticism inherently preclude thoughtful examination of rhetorically constructed subjects. Thus, the lives that suffuse the printed texts often remain thinly understood, and a key function of many slave narra­ tives—not just to battle slavery but to remember Black lives—is often forgotten, ignored, or dismissed. To begin to come to terms with such ironies and contradictions, and to offer an act of re­ membrance, this essay examines the construction and uses of a set of archives crucial to the study of slave narratives. My discussion is loosely grouped around questions of, first, textual studies and, second, biographical studies, and I emphasize how scholars can navi­ gate, reshape, and even (re)create archives in and surrounding slave narratives.

(p. 37)

Archives and/in Textual Scholarship

Certainly a first step in addressing textual scholarship might be to place slave narratives more fully within larger matrices of print culture studies—a field that has rarely attended to Black texts. (There are signs that this is changing—as evidenced especially by the ger­ minal March 2010 conference on “Early African American Print Culture” and Leon Jackson’s sweeping essay “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian,” both build­ ing from Foster’s 2005 “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins.”) This section thus begins by briefly sketching two areas where archivally based print culture approaches are espe­ cially needed: questions of authorship/composition and of dissemination/circulation. My goal is to recognize and frame the massive amount of study that remains to be done if we are to have a sense of slave narratives as more than disembodied stories or as, in a wider but still reductive formation, Black interventions solely in antebellum battles against slav­ ery. I then attend to the ways slave narratives have (and have not) come to contemporary readers—especially through what I term “anthologistic archives” but also through smaller comparative groupings building from such efforts. Simply the fact that the manuscripts of almost all known slave narratives are missing— and my use of this word holds out hope, as it is not synonymous with “not extant”—com­ plicates the primary step in considering most texts’ moves toward publication. The ab­ sence of manuscripts has stalled discussion of several factors tied to the mechanics of composition—study of paper, handwriting, etc.—and what they might tell us about au­ thors. More importantly, the lack of manuscript evidence of, say, authorial or editorial re­ visions has limited consideration of crucial but complex questions of authorship. These latter questions have always been especially challenging for students of slave narratives, given proslavery and/or racist accusations that white abolitionist ventriloquists were sim­ ply using Black puppets in their production. Consider, for example, the reasonably wellknown story of the effectual silencing of Harriet Jacobs and Incidents by not just biased nineteenth-century figures but also fine scholars who made crucial contributions to the study of slave narratives (e.g., John Blassingame) but who concluded it was neither Black Page 2 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research authored nor “truthful”—until Jean Fagan Yellin verified Jacobs’s authorship and key facts of the narrative. Especially given the lack of a manuscript, Yellin’s work had to participate in a binary: the text was either, per the famous tagline of many narratives, “written by himself” (or, in this case, herself) or it wasn’t. Given the raced and gendered basis of Jacobs’s long exclusion, many subsequent scholars have been skittish in considering myriad middle grounds of au­ thorship—and specifically just what kinds of “contributions” white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child might have made as the volume’s “editor.” So difficult were such discussions that Frances Smith Foster’s 1993 “Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents and the ‘Careless Daughters’ (and Sons) Who Read It” attempted to create a heuristic, a conception of care, for talking about early African American authorship beyond existing binaries. Foster’s fig­ uration remains useful if underutilized: a “gray envelope”—a (p. 38) revision of John Sekora’s 1987 “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative”—that suggested a structure for honest and self-aware theo­ rizing of diverse forms of collaboration between white and Black figures, one that was aware of power differentials and contexts in such relationships. In this light, scholars must draw from both Yellin, whose intense archival work challenged the boundaries drawn around the genre, and Foster, who recognized that slave narratives were often the product of careful negotiation, given the control white establishments and individuals might force on to Black texts and authors. Scholars must thus dig deeply for traces of Black composition and “gray” interactions—in the letters and records of white abolition­ ists, Black writers’ comments in prefaces and periodical pieces, the occasional Black doc­ ument holed away amid white personal papers—and they must confront those traces forthrightly. (In this vein, we must richly reconsider the archives of and surrounding dic­ tated and collaborative narratives, other white-mediated Black texts, and the so-called au­ thenticating documents that preface many narratives as sites of Black writers’ multilay­ ered negotiation.) A fuller understanding of the circumstances surrounding composition needs to be linked to a greater archival sense of slave narratives as physical objects that were designed, printed, published, distributed, and circulated. Many of the better-known narratives went through numerous editions, yet, beyond discussions of Douglass’s revisions, limited work on Incidents, and John Ernest’s consideration of Henry “Box” Brown’s story, there has been little attempt to do anything approaching careful descriptive bibliography. We also lack full publication histories for many narratives—senses of the size and character of print runs, publishers’ backgrounds and practices, patterns of publisher-author interac­ tions, publishers’ catalogs, etc. While much has been made of the failure of Boston pub­ lisher Thayer and Eldridge in studies of Incidents, for example, only the rare scholar notes that they also published material on John Brown and an early edition of Leaves of Grass. Consideration of publishers’ interactions with Olaudah Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, “free” Northerner Harriet Wilson, and Lucy Delaney remain the exception in the field. Similarly, little attention has been paid to questions of illustration, book design, and phys­ ical properties. Even though more slave narratives are more readily available than ever Page 3 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research before, the possibility of studying these texts as physical objects remains at risk, given the natural deterioration of paper and sweeping budget cuts to libraries. Not surprisingly, the few “major” narratives have also received the most attention in terms of distribution, circulation, and reception—a small set of excellent studies of the distribution of Equiano’s narrative (like John Bugg’s “The Other Interesting Narrative”) being among the best. Discussion of reviews and reviewers of slave narratives is scatter­ shot at best. Studies of actual readers beyond reviewers are similarly absent—except for Akiyo Ito’s work on the New York subscribers to Equiano’s first American edition, my sur­ veys of extant copies of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (whose place among slave narratives re­ mains uncomfortable), Elizabeth McHenry’s landmark Forgotten Readers, and select mo­ ments in Ronald and Mary Saracino Zboray’s groundbreaking Literary Dollars and Social Sense. Ideally, scholars studying individual narratives, editors of reissues, and contribu­ tors to the kinds of larger anthology projects discussed below need, in short, to take much more time to do the archival work of true textual study—from composition to recep­ tion. The bonded close reading—or close reading paired with general histories of genre, slavery, race, and/or gender—that has dominated most editorial work to date has per­ (p. 39)

formed the invaluable service of sharing texts with more readers, but it is time to build from and beyond such work. Given this need, I now turn to the creation of larger collections of narratives—attempts to fashion what are essentially portable archives that began in the last third of the twentieth century and that represent one of the central modes through which contemporary read­ ers gain access to slave narratives. A full genealogy of such projects is beyond my scope, but they count among their forebears what were arguably the first large-scale modern an­ thologistic archives, George Rawick’s collection of Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives (published as The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography) and the Black Abolitionist Papers, a valuable collection released in full in microform (and later online) and in part in richly annotated print volumes that gathered both manuscript and rare published texts tied to the abolitionist movement. These efforts trace their ancestry to Arno Press’s reprinting of texts tied to slavery in the late 1960s; John Blassingame’s im­ portant work; the activism of Black librarians and bibliophiles like Dorothy Sterling, Dorothy Porter Wesley, and Charles Blockson; and pioneering bibliographic efforts like Marion Starling’s 1946 dissertation, which formed the basis of her 1981 The Slave Narra­ tive. These forebears, in turn, trace to earlier collectors and librarians like Robert Adger, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray, and Arthur Schomburg and historians like I. Garland Penn and then to projects ranging from William Still’s 1872 compendium of underground railroad narratives to William Cooper Nell’s 1855 Colored Patriots of the American Revo­ lution. All of these efforts shared the desire to remember Black lives that might otherwise be dis­ carded or forgotten because of both larger societal efforts to devalue Black lives and his­ tories and their specific incarnations in the seemingly mundane activities of libraries’ col­ Page 4 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research lection development and weeding practices. Within “mainstream” collections, slave narra­ tives and related artifacts—when acquired at all—were often collected in specific ways for specific purposes: white abolitionist historians created collections tied to slavery and so collected slave narratives as examples, as secondary pieces tied to white lives; this result­ ed in key collections like the Garrison papers at Smith, the Post papers at Rochester, and the Sumner papers at Harvard. Early Black bibliophiles saw themselves as creating col­ lections tied to Blackness and so interwove slave narratives in larger collections, result­ ing in the bases for what became the collections at Temple (built from Charles Blockson’s base), Wellesley (built from the Adger collection) and the Library Company of Philadel­ phia (enhanced greatly by Philip Lapsansky), though there are now several notable collec­ tions of African Americana in major universities and lesser-known local repositories. One of the earliest and most important contemporary anthologistic archives of Black liter­ ature fits deeply in the Black bibliophile tradition: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s (p. 40) fortyvolume Schomburg reprinting of works by early Black women writers, which he rightly argued were “buried in obscurity, accessible only in research libraries or in overpriced and poorly edited reprints. Many…have never been reprinted at all; in some instances on­ ly one or two copies are extant….Until these works are made readily available…a signifi­ cant segment of the Black tradition will remain silent” (xvi–xvii). As essentially a readymade archive of rare texts, the series marked both a major scholarly achievement and a guiding methodological shift for the presentation of diverse and diffuse Black texts. The collection photographically reproduced original page images—recognizing the impor­ tance of the texts’ physicality—and some of the individual volume introductions (prepared by majors scholars in the field) attend to the kinds of archival work described herein, es­ pecially Jean Yellin and Cynthia Bond’s accompanying bibliography The Pen Is Ours. This landmark series also shared texts now recognized as essential to understanding slave narratives—including narratives of Lucy Delaney and Elizabeth Keckley, among others. However, the collection is organized around gender rather than genre, and while that fo­ cus was—and is—of massive importance, it determined and limited this wondrous collection’s content for students primarily interested in slave narratives. The Black Periodical Literature Project (BPLP), also led by Gates (and begun with Charles Davis and Blassingame in 1980), similarly offers a created archive that is both valuable and innovative, though its organizing principles also limit its specific connections to slave narratives. Conceived to save remnants of the massive and still-understudied Black press, the project collected thousands of pieces of fiction, poetry, and book reviews from 110 Black periodicals published between 1827 and 1940, microformed the material, and pre­ pared a CD-ROM index. This collection—generally listed simply as Black Literature, 1827–1940—was nonetheless weighed down in dissemination efforts by available media and cost: the expensive 3,000-piece microform collection is accessible at only a few large research libraries. Still, project leaders have successfully made the collection’s index freely available online at 〈[http://www.blackliteratureindex.com]〉 and have made strides in planning full online access. Students of slave narratives who can access this collection face two complications, both tied to the project’s structure. First, the project’s definition of literature—fiction, poetry, and book reviews—draws generic limits that only some slave Page 5 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research narrative authors crossed. (The project’s planned expansion should begin to remedy this question, as should a small but growing number of full-text newspaper databases.) Se­ cond, the collection is in some ways a kind of scrapbook—and I use that term to invoke the wondrous power of cutting and pasting suggested in Ellen Gruber Garvey’s work, but also in frustration. Scholars searching for Still’s Underground Rail Road, for example, will be rewarded with literary notices in papers from the Indianapolis Freeman to the San Francisco Elevator, but will not find, for example, the ads that also appeared in the Eleva­ tor or the pieces Philip Bell and Jennie Carter published in answer to Still’s book. They would then have to move to the hard-to-access original periodicals from which these (vir­ tual) clippings are drawn. (Key sources for such work include James Danky’s African American Newspapers and Periodicals and Penelope Bullock’s The Afro-American Periodi­ cal Press. The caveats (p. 41) discussed later in this essay for online indexes also apply here: the searcher for “Lucy Delaney” will come up empty handed, although the searcher for the words [but not the phrase] “from the darkness” will find a brief July 1891 Freeman notice that gives an incorrect title for Delaney’s narrative and misidentifies the author as “Lacy Delancy.”) The North American Slave Narratives collection within the online Documenting the Amer­ ican South project at 〈[http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/]〉, which was created under the guid­ ing hand of editor William Andrews, is perhaps the single most important anthologistic archive yet developed for students of slave narratives. Collecting pre-1920 narratives by formerly enslaved authors in a free, fully searchable, and carefully prepared online form, this massive archive has changed the face of slave narrative studies. The collection does have some gaps: like almost all studies of slave narratives to date, it includes only slave narratives written in English; even as it considers pamphlets and broadsides (expanding beyond a focus on bound books), it does not fully attend to periodicals; its apparatus is sometimes uneven—with only some texts paired with in-depth contextual commentary. It makes important nods toward the importance of physical books by offering images of cov­ ers, key front matter, and illustrations; however, those nods are limited by available me­ dia that can, at this point, only offer representative two-dimensional visuals. Still, the collection’s features and grand scale represent something earlier anthologistic archives could only dream of; almost as important as its size and accessibility, the collection testi­ fies to the diversity of the supergenre of slave narratives. Taken together, these anthologistic archives represent a tremendous leap in terms of bringing texts of (and related to) slave narratives to a broader audience: they are the gi­ ants on whose shoulders twenty-first-century critics stand, and they open up avenues for scholarship simply not possible before. Nonetheless, they must be viewed as germinal rather than final: the Schomburg’s introductions begin conversations rather than con­ clude them; the BPLP was never intended as a substitute for work with full periodicals; the enormous bibliographic range of the freely accessible North American Slave Narra­ tives collection does not lessen the need for individual scholarly editions that attend to the archival questions discussed above and below.

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research Perhaps one of the best next steps thus might be the creative disaggregation of these massive collections—the organization of select slave narratives into smaller informative groupings for comparative purposes. Among myriad possible groupings—by publisher, various subjects, or themes, etc.—a set of recent paper anthologies have intriguingly fo­ cused on location as a basis for affinity in ways that emphasize archival research both in terms of textual questions and the biographical and contextual questions discussed in the next section. Arguably descended from Five Black Lives (Arna Bontemps’s innovative 1971 collection of slave narratives with Connecticut connections), standouts among such geographic groupings include North Carolina Slave Narratives, a 2003 collection of four narratives collaboratively edited under Andrews’s leadership; B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton’s 2007 From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives, a collection of eight narratives with ties to the title city; and Susanna Ashton’s 2010 I Be­ long to South Carolina, which gathers seven narratives. What is most (p. 42) exciting about these smaller geographic anthologistic archives is that their explorations of place necessitate intersections with local history and microhistory; beyond simply anthologiz­ ing, they push scholars into archival spaces barely touched by students of slave narra­ tives, and they contextualize the Black lives at the center of narratives and those at the margins. They thus begin to expand our sense of Black textual communities, and they en­ courage us to think comparatively—inherently calling for a wider reading of slave narra­ tives as well as a fuller sense of context.

Archives and/in Biographical Studies Readers seeking reliable biographical information on most authors of slave narratives have been deeply frustrated. This section thus first briefly surveys key established re­ sources for biographical study before exploring the ways biographical study can be fur­ thered through archival work. I then reflect on the archival impulse inherent in many slave narratives and consider how reading slave narratives as archives can shape work with other existing collections of records—especially various public records. I conclude by briefly examining one of the most exciting possible approaches to studying slave narra­ tives—which has to date reached only the most prominent authors, Douglass and Jacobs: the creation of published collections of papers that are essentially new portable archives. Prior to the late 1960s, select authors might be found in a handful of Black-authored text­ books designed for a segregated educational system or the essential publications of indi­ viduals like Benjamin Quarles and John Hope Franklin and periodicals like the Journal of Negro History; these works often, in turn, built from rare biographical compendia like William J. Simmons’s 1887 Men of Mark and Lawson Scruggs’s 1893 Women of Distinction, crucial early accounts of Black antislavery activity like Still’s Underground Rail Road, various early church histories, and early works like Martin Delany’s 1852 The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Race, Nell’s Colored Patriots, and William Well’s Brown’s 1863 The Black Man. All of these works were con­ sciously designed to place African Americans in a historical record that (often conscious­ ly) excluded them, but, like the Black bibliophiles described above, their “collections” of­ Page 7 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research ten focused on Blackness widely and/or emphasized specific types of national or regional import. They thus often excluded many authors of slave narratives. The end of the twentieth century saw wider academic attention to Black biography. Blassingame’s calls for comprehensive scholarly reference sources in African American studies—to which scholars like Gates have rightly paid homage—encouraged the develop­ ment of several collections (e.g., Rayford Logan and Michael Winston’s Dictionary of American Negro Biography, Jessie Carney Smith’s Notable Black American Women, and Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in America) and a few monograph biographies of ma­ jor figures like Douglass. Still, many of these sources’ entries on authors of slave narra­ tives—and pre–twentieth-century figures generally—remained plagued by thin (p. 43) re­ search and by a mantra-like dependency on the words “little is known”; lesser-known au­ thors often simply aren’t included. The difficulties such efforts faced in terms of access­ ing information cannot, however, be overstated: many of the key nineteenth-century sources mentioned above were exceedingly hard to find; more recent innovations (from ancestry.com’s online resources to national cataloging projects like WorldCat) simply weren’t even dreamed of. The 1987 Black Biographical Dictionaries, 1790–1950 collection —a microform compilation of almost 300 key early biographical dictionaries and compen­ dia with a usable paper index by Randall K. Burkett, Nancy Hall Burkett, and Gates—may well thus be the signal moment foreshadowing a more wide-reaching and scholarly sense of Black biography. The collection’s 2001 transition into the digitized African American Biographical Database (available by subscription through Chadwyck-Healey) widened its availability considerably, and it remains an essential early step for scholars researching early African Americans—including authors of slave narratives. These developments set the groundwork for the most important contribution to Black bio­ graphical studies to date, the 2008 multivolume African American National Biography (AANB), edited by Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Containing peer-reviewed bio­ graphical entries on over 6,000 African Americans and now also available online (with im­ portant supplemental entries) as part of the Oxford African American Studies Center sub­ scription database, the collection gives reliable basic biographical information on a host of figures—from summative entries on better-known figures like Douglass and Jacobs to the first real studies of authors of lesser-known slave narratives, from Peter Randolph to Kate Drumgoold. That said, like other crucial sources above, scholars should view the AANB as germinal rather than definitive: many authors of lesser-known narratives remain absent, some entries still feature the phrase “little is known” prominently, and, of course, brief entries cannot fully analyze the richness of complex lives. As we work to address the comparative dearth of biographical information, we must be­ gin by recognizing the sad irony of such absences: slave narratives are by definition sto­ ries that remember Black lives. These absences come from a host of factors including not just broad racial discrimination but also the tendency of some contemporary critical theo­ ry to, as it were, kill off the author as an entity; to sever consideration of biographical subjects from rhetorically constructed subjects; to create centers and margins through canonization; and to favor literature that meets modernist/neomodernist standards and/or Page 8 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research uses novelistic approaches. All of these have slowed scholarly consideration of what Robert Stepto referred to as more “eclectic narratives” (xvi). As we expand our sense of the lives of authors of slave narratives, we must also recognize that those authors were carefully collecting and fashioning their own archives of their lives and worlds—often for purposes beyond basic antislavery arguments and generally in the face of cultures that wanted to forget them. Douglass and Jacobs—and authors of the handful of well-known narratives generally— shaped their stories with novelistic devices and schema that retooled or hid the kinds of archival impulses that are more obvious in lesser-known narratives like Lewis (p. 44) and Martin Clarke’s 1846 Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Martin Clarke (a revision and expansion of Lewis Clarke’s 1845 narrative), or Norvell Blair 1880 Book for the Peo­ ple! which chronicles Blair’s enslavement in Tennessee, freedom, and move to Illinois. Readers of the Clarkes’ volume are confronted by not one but two autobiographical nar­ ratives of slavery as well as a family history authored by Lewis Clarke, a question-and-an­ swer section mirroring what often followed Lewis Clarke’s antislavery lectures, prose, and poetry by various authors, two prefaces, and—sometimes within the narratives— quotes from newspapers, letters, and a host of other documents. Rare readers of Blair’s text see a similar mix of letters, a certificate, and even—at the end of the volume—a prayer. Further complicating the expectations that readers of Douglass’s Narrative and Jacobs’s Incidents may bring, while Blair’s book does narrate his life in slavery, it focuses much more on the postbellum discrimination he faced. While this emphasis might seem logical for a narrative written after emancipation, a similar mix can be found in John Berry Meachum’s 1846 Address to All the Colored Citizens of the United States, in which Meachum’s brief narrative prefaces a longer political polemic and almost functions as an authenticating statement for such. Such moves—from Lunsford Lane’s quotation of a North Carolina state law and a petition to the legislature to Elizabeth Keckley’s reproduction of her emancipation documents to Moses Roper’s inclusion of lists of his past lectures in later British editions of his narra­ tive—have often been dismissed as “eclectic” or simply as nonliterary. Works that follow a “life and times” schema have been similarly excluded—even though this approach is key to many postbellum slave narratives (e.g., Douglass’s later work) and has deep roots (e.g., Richard Allen’s autobiography). Critics who devalue such “eclectic” narratives fail to un­ derstand the use of fragmentation as a rhetorical and literary technique—and fail to see how well suited it is to telling but also, to use John Ernest’s term, un-telling stories of Blackness in American culture. Such critics not only circumscribe a full bibliographic sense of the genre but also miss the deep similarities between these types of witnessing and those clothed in more novelistic schema in works like Douglass’s Narrative and Jacobs’s Incidents. Finally, they do not recognize that the documentary impulses in these texts differ markedly from the most archive-like texts produced by white abolitionists—for example, Theodore Weld’s Slavery as It Is or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin—in which the names of enslaved individuals are often deemed of little import and the individuals themselves are often subsumed by the books’ sociopolitical arguments. Page 9 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research While many slave narratives share some of these white texts’ broad sociopolitical argu­ ments, the archival function of slave narratives often also had deeply individual and com­ munal goals tied to specific events and places. Like Harriet Tubman’s infamous collection of co-workers’ photographs (which she reportedly carried and displayed to “test” new ac­ quaintances’ abolitionist claims), the archives that the authors of many slave narratives created often spoke specifically to—and were usable in—the authors’ participation and circulation in the wider culture and cultural memory. Roper’s revisions, for example, are almost resume-like, and so it is easy to imagine him sending the book when soliciting invi­ tations to lecture. Similarly, as discussed in my “Face to Face,” (p. 45) Lucy Delaney’s list­ ing of the organizations she worked with (like Douglass’s) focuses on documenting pieces of broader Black communities that reached beyond (even as they remembered and docu­ mented) slavery’s evils. Literary critics’ inability to deal effectively with such texts (espe­ cially prior to Ernest’s Liberation Historiography and Chaotic Justice) have ensured that the works of Still, Roper, and Delaney, like many “eclectic narratives” lumped together as abolitionist “proof-texts,” received little critical attention. While space prohibits a full study of archival impulses in slave narratives, I want to observe that treating slave narra­ tives as archives in and of themselves allows us to attend to one of their basic functions— to remember—and to study their strategies for remembrance, recognizing that an archive need not be a burial ground, but could be as complex as any living and breathing body. Scholars trained in biographical studies of canonical authors (especially the white male authors carefully collected by the academy’s most prominent physical archives) might first be expected to study an author’s papers. A new poem by Robert Frost or a new sense of how William Faulkner used a source is thus an “event” in part because these authors’ papers have been so thoughtfully cataloged and analyzed. Students of African American experiences know myriad reasons for the dearth of such collections focused on authors of slave narratives, and they find cause for celebration in each new discovery that might form the basis of such—like the American Antiquarian Society’s acquisition of four manu­ script volumes of miscellany by Greensbury Washington Offley in 2006. Space limitations prohibit full reflection on the combination of hope and despair that marks searches for and (re)discoveries of such texts—or from giving a full bibliography of the slowly growing and diffuse collection of early Black textual artifacts. That said, a discussion of method­ ologies for beginning such “collection” and especially for broader biographical research is essential, given that, to do such work, scholars often have to wade into both the histori­ cal and the genealogical. Partnerships like that between literary scholar William Andrews and William Grimes’s de­ scendant genealogist Regina Mason, which led to the republication of Grimes’s important slave narrative, are unfortunately rare, though various collaborations between genealo­ gist Reginald Pitts and literary historians Gabrielle Foreman and DoVeanna Fulton, and between genealogist Katherine Flynn and both Foreman and Gates, offer additional mod­ els that have produced exciting revisionary biographical scholarship. (The partnership be­ tween Andrews and historian Mitch Kachun that resulted in the reissue of Julia Collins’s Curse of Caste offers another possible model for students of slave narratives.) Page 10 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research Whether working in partnership or not, though, many literary critics need a fuller grounding in both content and method in period history and historiography and should thus carefully study debates over historical method and content, consider central texts on Black genealogy (e.g., Charles Blockson’s Black Genealogy) and local history (e.g., Mark Sammons and Valerie Cunningham’s Black Portsmouth), and carefully read key works of biography on enslaved authors like Jeffrey Ruggles’s Unboxing of Henry Brown, Nell Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth, Carretta’s Equiano the African, Gretchen Gerzina’s Mr. and Mrs. Prince, key biographies of Douglass like Dickson J. Preston’s Young (p. 46) Frederick Douglass, and, of course, Jean Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs. Such a base teaches us that archival searching for traces of authors’ lives can greatly benefit our reading of their texts but also demands that we examine those texts as a specific kind of autobiographical literature—as literary texts created around, within, and sometimes in place of other his­ torical records. Per the above, the evaluation of “truth” in individual narratives—in all of the complexities discussed in Dwight McBride’s Impossible Witness—need not degenerate into the kinds of “testing” and alternate supposed-truths that dominate early proslavery responses to slave narratives—or into reliance on binaristic conceptions of authorship. Rather, archival researchers need to recognize reasons for potential errors and fictions in slave narratives and to approach such carefully when considering a broader documentary record—one that also almost always contains errors and fictions. Consider, for example, the opening of Lucy Delaney’s narrative, which places Delaney’s mother Polly Wash as a free child living in Illinois. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, a host of diverse records confirm that Wash was born enslaved in Kentucky and was en­ slaved during her brief time in Illinois. However, this certainly doesn’t “disprove” the “truth” of Delaney’s narrative—which is actually amazingly accurate on events that hap­ pened more than forty years before its publication. It also doesn’t suggest that Delaney was consciously creating a fiction—which, in itself, might be a fascinating cause for study (one thinks of Carretta’s work on Equiano). Given what we now know of Delaney’s life, it seems likely that she was relaying an account received from her mother, one in which she believed. Given Wash’s youth, the traumas she faced, and the probability that her stay in Illinois (just long enough to qualify her as “once free, always free”) brought her to eventu­ al freedom, Wash may have been deeply invested in the narrative’s account of her early life. The daily reality of her circumstances in Illinois may also have seemed enough like freedom to make her removal to Missouri resemble a kidnapping into (a very different kind of) slavery. The conflict between the narrative’s account and the broader documen­ tary record thus brings us to a more complex set of “truths”: the complexity of Wash’s perception of her status, the importance of intergenerational stories, the failure of public records to understand figures at the margins, and the rich ways conflicts and gaps may help us better understand the Black lives in and surrounding slave narratives, as well as the narratives themselves. The best of our archival scholars thus remain faithfully skepti­ cal of the slave narratives they study—never substituting skepticism for faith, but never oversimplifying faith and always carefully weighing “truth” in all its complex contexts.

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research In this vein, scholars considering the lives of slave narrative authors (like the lives of many on the margins) have to be especially creative in finding sources; indeed, the initial governing questions of many of the researchers noted above centered on considering when, how, and why a given figure might venture into (or be captured by) public records. Thus, in thinking about the standard genealogical key moments of record—birth, mar­ riage, children, death, census taking—scholars need to recognize variations on the recording of these moments shaped by biases against various races, classes, residents of specific locations, and a host of other factors including especially gender; they also need to think about other moments—those in land records, property documents (p. 47) (in which authors may be listed as property), civil and criminal court proceedings, etc. In working with such records, they must be aware of the ways bias—as well as the limita­ tions of record keepers (due to skill level, education, and diligence) and/or hesitancy on the part of authors or informants to enter such public records (or to be “truthful”)—can create errors. A formerly enslaved author encountering a federal census taker in 1860, for example, might not definitively know his/her age or (even) birthplace; she or he might lie about such out of fear of being marked a fugitive; he or she might avoid the census taker and have his or her information reported by a spouse, relative, neighbor with more limited knowledge, or simply not at all. Accurate or not, her or his information might then be “corrected” by a racist government worker’s dismissal of Black intelligence—or she or he might simply fall victim to recording or transcribing errors. To move beyond the hypothetical, consider, for example, the places Delaney occupies in the public record. Born enslaved c.1824, she was simply a hash mark on the federal census’s slave schedules for 1830 and 1840. Those census planners and takers—like the creators of local birth records—were uninterested in her existence beyond establishing her as property and tallying her for the U.S. Constitution’s three-fifths clause (which counted an enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for population statistics tied to allocating congressional representation and taxes). Her narrative, though, gives some traceable information on events in her masters’ lives—the death of Taylor Berry in a fa­ mous duel, the division of his “assets” (including her family), widow Fanny Berry’s mar­ riage to Judge Robert Wash, etc.—that allow scholars to make good guesses at the year of her birth and the circumstances of her youth beyond those hash marks. Were she actually named in Berry’s probate documents—listed as property but still named, as enslaved peo­ ple sometimes were—the record would fill in even more. In short, following the painful maxim many genealogists and historians of enslaved people realized long ago—“follow the owners, study their property”—what initially seem absences can be seen as traces. Following the probate of one of Delaney’s other childhood owners, for example, produces a detailed inventory of that owner’s library and allows speculation on the texts to which Delaney might have had limited—perhaps furtive—access. The locations of Delaney’s initial named entries in the public record remind us of how scholars must take both her status and her narrative into account. Her first named entry is not under any of the surnames scholars might expect—for example, Berry (the surname of her first master) or Wash (using Judge Wash’s surname, which her mother took) or even Turner (her first husband’s surname). The listing for her freedom suit, filed in the Page 12 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research St. Louis Circuit Court in 1842, names her “Lucy Ann Britton,” using a surname that con­ tinues to baffle scholars. Complicating matters further, the documents related to her two lawsuits—one for her freedom that she describes in her narrative and one essentially for back wages that she never mentions—are incomplete and were, until the beginning of the twenty-first century, buried. The actual case file for her first suit (her freedom suit) has not yet been found, and that suit’s progress through the St. Louis court system can be traced only through her narrative and brief notations in the St. Louis Circuit Court Record Books. Exhaustive searches for that suit’s case file—which may well have been lifted from court records by an interested “collector” in the late nineteenth (p. 48) century —have to date turned up nothing, and St. Louis newspapers of the period (ironically like antislavery newspapers) rarely mentioned freedom suits. Knowledge of Delaney’s narra­ tive allowed late twentieth-century archivists to recognize the rediscovered second suit as Delaney’s because of the circumstances of the suit, but especially because Polly Wash is named in the case file. Asking what Delaney had to do once freed in slave St. Louis led to an exhaustive search for posttrial documents and the location of the St. Louis “List of Free Negroes,” drawn from so-called free bond registrations and compiled in the 1850s to aid white people (es­ pecially law enforcement) in surveillance and domination of the city’s free Black popula­ tion. The list offers not only names—including Delaney’s—but also occupations, heights, labels tied to skin color, and notes on distinguishing physical marks. Getting to this record—the most detailed account of the young Delaney’s physical appearance—repre­ sents a journey through misinformation and misidentification and ultimately raises even more questions: how did she interface with other people on the list (and thus with St. Louis’s free Black communities), who did she know, how did she support herself, where did she live…? This combination of mazes, dead ends, and occasional glimmers—in records that painfully remind us not only of slavery but of the oppression of “free” African Americans during the period—are part and parcel of archival biographical research on authors of slave narratives. The lessons from such work—the painful bonds to white records, the need to look every­ where and to reconceive of what records might include a slave narrative author, the ne­ cessity of building from individual records and placing such in dialogue with other docu­ ments (including the archive offered in slave narratives themselves), but also the very re­ al possibility of rediscovering a life—also shape consideration of other public documents tied to Delaney: the record of her 26 November 1849 marriage to Zachariah Delaney, which was not filed in St. Louis until September 1855; her listings in the federal censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880, each of which contains minor errors; her absence from period records that list only men; her absence from the few fragmentary remnants of the 1890 census; her limited naming (and her husband’s slightly more regular naming) in city directory listings. Each trace must be assessed in concert with the others—and with the narrative.

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research Further, many of these fragments would not have been rediscovered—or even still exist— without improvements in record indexing, preservation, and accessibility, including ad­ vancements made by both state entities (e.g., Missouri’s innovative free online presenta­ tion of freedom suit case files and St. Louis probate records) and for-profit online entities like ancestry.com. Such indexes, though, are both flawed and malleable. Lucy Delaney and her husbands’ names were recorded under a stunning number of variant spellings; modern transcribers and indexers only added to that list. Thus, a researcher must search using variants, wild cards, soundex numbers, different combination of first and last names, etc., and, again, cannot trust all of what is found or assume that any given tool will yield a complete picture. Delaney’s 1910 death certificate—unavailable for public view because of a combination of archival limitations and Missouri law until the twentyfirst century—is a striking example: it actually lists (p. 49) her name as “Pollie Delaney,” mistakenly using her mother’s first name due to an error by either the informant or the government official filing the certificate and would have remained undiscovered were it not for wide and flexible search practices. Once found, though, this certificate offered a death date where none had been known and led to a search of St. Louis newspapers that produced brief obituaries. Pieced together, these records allow us to revise the “little is known” and to correct some of the errors that have dominated the few biographical resources on Delaney. We can now investigate issues ranging from the publication circumstances of her narrative—including ties to Masonic and neo-Masonic organizations—to the connections between Delaney’s story and larger national narratives, including her ties to Lincoln’s Attorney General Ed­ ward Bates (which the narrative begins to articulate) but also to Dred and Harriet Scott (through attorney Francis B. Murdoch, connections not noted in the narrative). Reading the assertion in the “List of Free Negroes” that Delaney was five-feet, three-inches tall and pairing such with what historians of women and labor have told us about the back­ breaking character of laundry allows us to reread Delaney’s description of working as a laundress—and perhaps reassess the hints Delaney offers about her senses of labor, capi­ tal, and freedom. We may not reach the level of interiority many traditional biographers prize, but we are closer to thinking about how Delaney might have engaged in rhetorical constructions of herself and her life, including her desire to create and circulate her nar­ rative. We are closer to a fuller sense of the lesson central to many slave narratives: the remembrance of individualized Black personhood. We can say that now, at least, a little more is known—and perhaps that even more can be known. For a select few authors of slave narratives—and until scholars undertake the work de­ scribed above, we will not know just how many—the next step in biographical archival re­ search will center on creating the kinds of archives of personal papers noted above and especially prominent in the study of “major” white and contemporary authors. Such col­ lections will probably not take the form of permanent installations at major repositories; because of the scattered nature of traces of nineteenth-century Black lives, alternate for­ mats—published, microformed, digitized, etc.—will be necessary to gather coherent, us­ able, accessible (and perhaps even portable) collections. To date, only Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs have reached this level of consideration, though a few others (e.g., Page 14 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, and Sojourner Truth) have had or will soon have col­ lected works or full-length biographies published that contain nods toward such. The Frederick Douglass Papers, a project begun by Blassingame, have already had a rich scholarly life and are still growing in exciting ways. Still, because of Douglass’s historical as well as literary fame (and resulting continuance in public memories), I want to con­ clude with brief attention to Jean Fagan Yellin’s creation of an archive of personal papers for Harriet Jacobs, who—until quite recently—was much closer to the margins. Published in 2008, the Harriet Jacobs Papers is a boxed, two-volume set with a companion CD that presents some 300 of the 900 documents related to Jacobs’s life and family that Yellin and her team of scholars gathered over several years. They (p. 50) carefully anno­ tated each item, and the set provides a series of introductory sections—a preface, an in­ troduction, a chronology, brief biographies of some of the figures mentioned—that place the items in context. Prioritizing information on Incidents, the collection’s selection process nonetheless attended richly to Jacobs’s biography and contexts. The collection evinces careful thinking about not only what a scholarly edition of personal papers should contain (and how such should be presented) but also how marginalized figures’ papers might shift these expectations. The clear and thoughtful section on “Editorial Principles,” for example, notes, “Although it is unusual for a documentary edition to publish material about its subject, the scarcity of texts concerning American slaves and the scarcity of texts by and to the Jacobses make these auxiliary documents critical to telling the Jacobs story….” (xxxix). Yellin also carefully describes transcription processes and lists source in­ formation, encouraging scholars to use the set as, again, a beginning rather than a culmi­ nation. Thus the Harriet Jacobs Papers offers not only a rich source of content for any stu­ dent of slave narratives but also a model of methodology for creating “new” archives fo­ cusing on authors of slave narratives. Yellin’s preface, like her earlier essays on the subject, is blunt about the difficulties in­ volved in gathering the collection, and she carefully notes the kinds of financial, institu­ tional, and collegial support necessary for such a project. But what is most telling are Yellin’s comments late in her preface: Twenty years ago, completing my edition of Incidents, I really thought I was done with Jacobs. Then, discovering her Civil War letters, I concluded that a biography was needed….Years later, finishing Harriet Jacobs: A Life, I realized that for Jacobs to become appropriately acknowledged in American literature and history, a schol­ arly edition of her papers was needed. Now with these volumes of her papers…I also offer the incentive for future work and a set of tools to do that work—both in relation to Jacobs and more generally within this rich vein of American culture. (xxiv) Yellin’s promise, then, is twofold: that with appropriate rigor, effort, and care, we can bring further archival richness to our study of slave narratives and their authors and that each new (re)discovery must push us to do even more searching.

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research This essay’s deep attention to previous scholarship and questions of methodology are echoes of that promise: we can know more, even though a host of institutions, genera­ tions of racism, and questionable critical practices have steadfastly asserted that we can’t or shouldn’t—or that the archives for slave narratives are simply lost or exhausted. Find­ ing slave narratives and reading them closely are thus only the first steps in what should be a much larger process centered on investigating what they can teach us—a process at­ tuned to not only how broader societal factors might try to stop or cloud such teaching but also where we might find traces that enrich the lessons. The additional knowledge we gain and the demands this process forces scholars to make on institutions, academic fields, and themselves all speak directly to slave narratives’ central calls: to fight injustice through understanding and communication and to always, always remember and value in­ dividual lives.

References Allen, Richard. The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen. Philadelphia: Martin & Boden, 1833. Andrews, William. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Andrews, William, ed. North American Slave Narratives. . Andrews, William, ed. North Carolina Slave Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Ashton, Susanna, ed. I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives. Colum­ bia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Blair, Norvell. Book for the People! Joliet, IL: Joliet Daily Record, 1880. Blassingame, John. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Re­ vised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Blassingame, John, ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Blassingame, John, et al., eds. Frederick Douglass Papers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–. Blockson, Charles, with Ron Fry. Black Genealogy. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1977. Bontemps, Arna, ed. Five Black Lives. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Brown, Henry “Box.” Narrative of the Life of Henry “Box” Brown, Written by Himself. Ed. John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research Brown, William Wells. The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achieve­ ments. New York: Thomas Hamilton; Boston: R.F. Wallcut, 1863. Bugg, John. “The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano’s Public Book Tour.” PM­ LA 121.5 (October 2006): 1424–1442. Bullock, Penelope L. The Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838–1909. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Carretta, Vincent. Equiano the African: A Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens: Univer­ sity of Georgia Press, 2005. Clarke, Lewis, and Martin Clarke. Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Martin Clarke. Boston: Bela Marsh, 1846. Collins, Julia C. The Curse of Caste. Eds. William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cunningham, Valerie, and Mark J. Sammons. Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African American Heritage. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004. Danky, James. African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Delaney, Lucy. “From the Darkness Cometh the Light.” 1891. Six Women’s Slave Narra­ tives. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Delany, Martin. The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Race. Philadelphia: Author, 1852. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 1845. Ed. William L. An­ drews and William S. McFeely. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861.. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. (p. 52) Foster, Frances Smith. “Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents and the ‘Careless Daughters’ (and Sons) Who Read It.” The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers. Ed. Joyce Warren. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. 92– 107. Foster, Frances Smith. “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Development of African American Print Culture.” American Literary History 17.4 (2005): 714–740.

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narratives. Westport: Greenwood, 1979. Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. Gardner, Eric. “‘Face to Face’: Localizing Lucy Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light.” Legacy 24.1 (2007): 50–71. Gardner, Eric. “Of Bottles and Books: Reconsidering the Readers of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing, and Region. Ed. Eve Raimon, Jerri­ Anne Boggis, and Barbara White. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007. 3– 26. Gardner, Eric. “‘You Have No Business to Whip Me’: The Freedom Suits of Polly Wash and Lucy Ann Delaney.” African American Review 41.1 (2007): 33–50. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Gates, Henry Louis, ed. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., Randall K. Burkett, and Nancy Hall Burkett, eds. Black Biography, 1790–1950: A Cumulative Index. Alexandria: Chadwyk-Healey, 1991. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Hollis Robbins, eds. Black Literature, 1827–1940. Alexandria: Chadwyck-Healey, 1987–1996. The Black Periodical Literature Project. Gerzina, Gretchen. Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Fami­ ly Moved out of Slavery and into Legend. New York: Amistad Books, 2008. Grimes, William. Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. Ed. William L. Andrews and Regina Mason. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hine, Darlene Clark, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993. Ito, Akiyo. “Olaudah Equiano and the New York Artisans: The First American Edition of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.” Early American Literature 32.1 (1997): 82–101. Jackson, Leon. “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian: African American Cul­ tures of Print—The State of the Discipline.” Book History 13 (2010): 251–308.

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cam­ bridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes. 1868. Ed. James Olney. New York: Oxford Universi­ ty Press, 1988. Lane, Lunsford. The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. Boston: J.G. Torrey, 1842. Logan, Rayford, and Michael Winston, eds. Dictionary of American Negro Biography. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982. McBride, Dwight. Impossible Witness: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York University Press, 2001. (p. 53) McCarthy, B. Eugene, and Thomas L. Doughton, eds. From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Meachum, John Berry. An Address to All the Colored Citizens of the United States. Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1846. Nell, William Cooper. The Colored Patriots of the Revolution. Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855. Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Penn, I. Garland. The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. Springfield: Wiley, 1891. Preston, Dickson J. Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years. Baltimore: Johns Hop­ kins University Press, 1980. Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Rawick, George, ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Westport: Green­ wood, 1972–1979. Ripley, C. Peter, and George E. Carter, et al., eds. The Black Abolitionist Papers. 5 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985–1992. Microform: Sanford, NC: Mi­ crofilming Corporation of America, 1980. Online through ProQuest. Roper, Moses. Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery. Berwick-upon-Tweed: Author, 1848. Ruggles, Jeffrey. The Unboxing of Henry Brown. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2003. Scruggs, Lawson. Women of Distinction. Raleigh: Author, 1893. Page 19 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Archival Research Sekora, John. “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative.” Callaloo 32 (Summer 1987): 482–515. Simmons, William J. Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising. Cleveland: Geo. M. Rewell, 1887. Smith, Jessie Carney, ed. Notable Black American Women. Detroit: Gale Research, 2002. Starling, Marion. “The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American Literary History.” Diss. New York University, 1946. Starling, Marion. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American Literary History. Washing­ ton, DC: Howard University Press, 1981. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: Uni­ versity of Illinois Press, 1979. Still, William. The Underground Rail Road. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853. Weld, Theodore. American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839. Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig. Ed. P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald Pitts. New York: Pen­ guin, 2005. Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Harriet Jacobs’s Family History.” American Literature 66.4 (1994): 765–767. Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative.” American Litera­ ture 53.3 (1981): 479–486. Yellin, Jean Fagan, ed. The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Yellin, Jean Fagan, and Cynthia Bond. The Pen Is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African American Women before 1910. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Zboray, Ronald, and Mary Saracino Zboray. Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Eric Gardner

Eric Gardner, Saginaw Valley State University

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding

Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding   Dickson D. Bruce Jr. The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.005

Abstract and Keywords The slave narratives have played a major role in the study of American slavery and of more general issues in antebellum American culture. They have been heavily used in ef­ forts to delineate the character of the antebellum American slave community, including internal hierarchies, the nature of family, kinship, and social networks, and cultural forms such as religion and folk traditions. They have also done much to illuminate the character of slavery as a system. The use of the narratives as evidence has not, however, been with­ out complications. Until about the middle of the twentieth century, many historians ques­ tioned the narratives’ accuracy and utility. After that time, shifting perspectives on the in­ stitution and more complex approaches to the narratives’ evidentiary use has led to their occupying an increasingly important place in slavery studies. Such more complex ap­ proaches have also led to their growing importance in the study of abolitionism, nine­ teenth-century American literary culture, and the composition of the antebellum Ameri­ can public sphere. Keywords: slavery, slave narratives, slave community, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, slave family, Solomon Northup, William Wells Brown, historiography, Ulrich B. Phillips, George Washington Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Journal of Negro History, abolitionism, s

SLAVES’ narratives have contributed significantly to an understanding of American histo­ ry. Most notable has been their role as evidence for the history of slavery. Although the authors have been rightly judged as exceptional women and men, their accounts have done much to illuminate day-to-day life under slavery, the existence and character of a functioning slave community, and the parameters of slave agency within what slave own­ ers intended to be a total institution. Above all, the slave narratives have given historians crucial insight into the operations of the system from the slaves’ point of view, leading to an increasingly complex understanding of the institution itself. The narratives are rich in detail about the lives of American slaves. Their authors provid­ ed full accounts of the nature and organization of labor, including the great variety of tasks performed by slaves. Although virtually all the narrators offered valuable descrip­ tions of the character of field labor in the plantation South, they also portrayed the lives Page 1 of 14

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding of house slaves, drivers, and of slave artisans, whose technical skills made them an in­ valuable part of the southern economy. The narrators themselves had, disproportionately, occupied such positions. Solomon Northup was a carpenter; J.W.C. Pennington a black­ smith; Charles Ball, Henry Bibb, Josiah Henson, and Jermain Loguen, along with Northup, were drivers, assigned to supervise the work of other slaves. In setting forth the diversity of slave occupations, the narratives have also illuminated in­ ternal structures and internal hierarchies within the slave community, including bases for status and authority. Some of this structure was determined by the operations of the sys­ tem itself, privileging drivers, skilled artisans, and, to some extent, house servants. But, as the narratives make clear, there were internal orderings that grew from within the community, based on such factors as literacy, strength, and resourcefulness. In addition, the narratives have revealed the range of responses slaves displayed toward the institu­ tion and have, as a result, provided important clues for understanding the effects (p. 55) of slavery on the slaves themselves. Authors of the narratives made this a central issue in their characterizations of the system, and they represented those effects as both pro­ found and widely variable. For some slaves, the power of slavery was overwhelming, shaping their personalities and perspectives in directions of submission and even a kind of fatalism. But as the narratives fully document, if some slaves were pushed in the direc­ tion of fatalism, there was also a readiness to resist on the part of others—and a festering anger on the part of still more. Such insights have been particularly relevant to historians’ efforts to understand hierar­ chies within the community. Although there have long been tendencies to view “favored” slaves—house servants and drivers, for example—as being particularly given to loyalty to­ ward the system, the narratives make clear that this was not so. Many of those who wrote the narratives, having been assigned those roles, emphasized that these were positions that demanded resistance as well as cooperation. Such writers as Solomon Northup de­ scribed how, as drivers, they were constantly commanded to whip other slaves, and how they sought to lighten the blows. Those who had worked in the house recounted that proximity to power brought its own dangers. For many, like Harriet Jacobs or Frederick Douglass, the peculiar vulnerability created by being always under the eye of a demand­ ing master or mistress helped push them toward resistance and, ultimately, toward mak­ ing an escape from the institution. The narratives also stress the importance of the slave community and of the internal insti­ tutions that held it together. Family and kinship were at the core. The narratives present a complex picture of the slave family. In general, they portray strong family values in slav­ ery, as well as clearly defined gender ideals organized around family roles. The narrative accounts show how slave men and women constructed, and sought to inculcate, ideals of male and female roles and relationships that contained many of the same elements as those of the larger antebellum American society, including ideals of male independence and female purity and of a domesticity structured around men as heads of households and

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding women as wives and nurturers. They point to the strength of family and kinship networks that even extended across plantation lines. But the narratives emphasize, too, the enormous obstacles facing slave families. Men act­ ing as husbands might seek to protect their wives, but slaveholders could violate and “punish” slave women with impunity, as few narrators failed to note. Slave mothers, how­ ever devoted to their children, were forced to work long hours, and narrators often cited their mothers’ absence as one of their more poignant memories. The narratives strongly portray slave childhood as a bleak affair, stunted and ending early as even fairly young children were set to tasks in the house or in the fields. And they underscore the vulnera­ bility to families created by the slave trade, as wives and husbands were liable to be sold away from each other, or children from their parents. Above all, the narratives call attention to the significance of sexual exploitation of female slaves by slaveholders as both a fact of daily life and as a source of crisis for gender ideals and ideals of domesticity. Such writers as Douglass and Pennington have, on the one hand, helped establish that slave breeding was practiced by at least some slave own­ ers, conducted with studied indifference to the character and feelings of enslaved (p. 56) women. On the other, the narratives both document and illuminate the significance of slave owner demands for sexual favors. That most valuable of female authored narratives, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, put sexual vulnerability at the center of the female slave experience, providing historians with a powerful representation of what seems to have been a ubiquitous element in the system. The nature of the slave family has been debated since at least the 1930s, particularly in regard to its relevance to the development of African American family forms since Eman­ cipation, and the narratives, illustrating as they do both the kinds of families in which slaves lived and the institutional pressures on those families, have occupied a major place in that debate. Historians have found differing emphases in the narratives, some focusing on the strength of family ideals, others focusing on family vulnerability, but they have ap­ preciated, nevertheless, how the evidence provided by the narratives, outlining the para­ meters within which it could develop under slavery, can be critical for understanding the historical forces shaping the formation of African American family formation. The narratives have focused historians’ attention on other internal structures and institu­ tions within the slave community, especially as they represent those communities as just that—communities. Slaves created an array of spaces for independent action within the boundaries of the institution by developing, as the narratives show, internal networks of leadership and networks for cross-plantation communication, described by such fugitives as Pennington, that made for widespread awareness of the larger American world, includ­ ing the major political developments related to slavery and anti-slavery conflicts at the national level. The narratives help reveal a strong political and community awareness among slaves, as well as efforts on the part of slave owners to keep them in political isola­ tion.

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding The narratives have shown how critical the creation of an autonomous religious identity was to community formation. They indicate how fully slaves rejected slaveholders’ at­ tempts to impose a Christianity of submission on them, how, as narrators such as Henry Bibb and Josiah Henson recounted, most slaves, subjected to sermonizing from white southern clergy, were aware of its proslavery purposes. As Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, and others recounted, most slaves recognized the hypocrisy embodied in the character of the brutal Christian slaveholder. Making clear the importance of religious gatherings held outside the purview of whites, the narratives further help indicate how hard slaves worked to carve out a space in which to create a religious community of their own. They document the power of slave preachers within that community, and the courage of those who found in Christianity a call for resistance rather than acquiescence. Conversely, they also further establish the extent to which the slaves’ religious aspira­ tions had to find fulfillment despite the frequent hostility of slaveholders to a genuine Christian commitment. But generally, the narratives do much to demonstrate the significance of a variety of cul­ tural forms developed within the slave community. Many describe the importance of folk beliefs, especially those centered around conjure. Noted conjurers, able to work with roots, herbs, and charms, received great respect within the community, and they (p. 57) were assumed to have great power. Most of the narrators were ambivalent about conjure beliefs, Frederick Douglass’s treatment of Sandy Jenkins being the most familiar case in point. Nevertheless, what they described helps indicate both the cultural autonomy to be seen in slave communities and the alternatives to plantation-owner control represented by figures whose authority rested in the community itself. Something similar may be said of the extensive folk materials documented in the narra­ tives, including, tales, customs, and, especially, religious and secular folksongs. The nar­ ratives provide important evidence not only of the content of such songs but also of their function within the community—of the occasions for their singing, of styles of perfor­ mance, and of the role of song in community life. Although most narratives contained only a few examples, few narratives failed to record them or to note their significance, and the ethnographic information the narratives provide is invaluable, illustrating, too, how song, along with other expressive forms of slave culture, played a major role in conveying cul­ tural values while creating a sense of autonomy and community identity. But perhaps most profoundly, the narratives have helped historians to identify a series of central themes that appear to have framed slaves’ perspectives on the institution. For one, as the narratives document the creation of an autonomous slave community, they al­ so demonstrate the widespread aspirations among slaves for lives other than those cir­ cumscribed by slavery. Whether these involved the preservation of family ties and family roles, a religious life independent of slaveholder supervision, the creation of autonomous social networks, determined attempts to gain literacy (so prominent in Frederick Douglass’s story, but appearing frequently in the narratives), or, ultimately, a desire for freedom (for many, an almost life-long obsession, as writers from Douglass to Henson to William Wells Brown emphasized), the narratives documented the aspirations of slaves to Page 4 of 14

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding carve out satisfying lives in the face of overwhelming oppression. Despite pressures for acquiescence, and the succumbing of some slaves to those pressures, the narrators made clear the human desires of many if not all of the institution’s victims to be something more than what the institution allowed. At the same time, the narratives show just how enormous the obstacles to those aspira­ tions were, as they described a system dedicated to the suppression of what the narrators frequently termed the slaves’ very souls. As historians have interpreted the narratives, they have learned to appreciate how that suppression worked, chiefly through an overt effort on the part of slaveholders to create an environment that inculcated submission to slave owner power through a sense of vulnerability, even fear. At the heart of that effort was violence. The narratives recount a brutal world of unbridled violence, bordering on sadism. No less crucially, they recount a highly unpredictable world in which violence could take place without cause or even pretext, a world in which the notion of “punish­ ment” lost all meaning, as slaveholders appeared to attack violently more to satisfy their own whims than to “correct” any violation of plantation rules, a point made especially strongly in Douglass’s account of the vicious treatment of the young slave woman Henny, repeatedly tied and beaten by a sadistic master simply because he could. Whether such acts occurred frequently or fairly rarely, as some historians have argued (p. 58) based on quantitative studies, the narratives suggest their enormous impact on slaves’ perceptions of slave-owner power and behavior and their relationship to it. But as the narratives indicate, violence was not the only source of vulnerability on the part of slaves. The possibilities of sale had a powerful impact; the horrors of family sepa­ ration were very real. As the narrators described the affectionate ties that held slave fam­ ilies together, they also gave voice to a sense that those ties could never be a source of true happiness in a world where they could be so easily sundered. Again, historians have debated the frequency with which such separations occurred, but the narratives empha­ size that even if separations were fairly rare, their possibility was ever present in the thinking of slaves, and the impact on slaves’ perceptions of the institution was great. The narratives have thus made an important contribution to the historical understanding of slavery, its institutions, the parameters of slave community creation and of that community’s structure, and, above all, of the meaning of slavery for those who had to live within its confines. But the use of the narratives to get at these points has not been with­ out controversy. In large part because of their provenance, because they were not only autobiographies but also polemic documents intended to serve the abolitionist cause, the narratives have required some sophisticated methods of analysis in order to serve as evi­ dence for inquiry into the history and character of slavery. For much of the history of his­ torians’ writing about slavery, the narratives tended to be neglected, if not actually dis­ dained, and the reasons for their ultimate acceptance as sources of significant insight in­ to slavery provide a framework for understanding, still more fully, the course of American history, especially from the closing years of the nineteenth century.

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding The historiography of slavery has had a complex development, reflecting no less complex developments in American social, cultural, political, and intellectual history. The use of the narratives has been an important measure of these developments, visible, especially in the shifting attitudes of historians toward the narratives’ evidentiary value. Their use has both revealed and driven a broadening perspective in historians’ thinking about the American past and a willingness and ability to use sources that had long been neglected, as well as, to some extent, a more general transformation of racial ideas and attitudes in the larger society embodied in historians’ evolving approaches to thinking about slavery itself. Serious historical research into slavery dates back to the antebellum period, even as the narratives were being written, but the most significant scholarship appeared in the after­ math of Emancipation, as historians sought to address the problem of slavery in American history and, particularly, its role in the coming of the Civil War. Although much of this his­ tory was politically oriented, focused on slavery’s role in creating the sectional divisions that led to war, there were important discussions of the institution itself, and these occa­ sionally showed the influence of the narratives, especially in regard to such topics as the slave trade and the organization of labor. Thus, for example, the businessman turned his­ torian James Ford Rhodes, in his seven volume History of the United States from the Com­ promise of 1850 (1893–1906), generally anti-slavery in its thrust, made significant use of the narratives for his fairly extensive overview of the system. (p. 59)

Still, the character of the narratives as evidence was not to be fully confronted un­

til the 1918 appearance of the historian Ulrich B. Phillips’s pioneering and influential American Negro Slavery, destined to be the standard academic work in the field for the next 40 years. Phillips was a native white southerner, scion of a slaveholding family, and his perspectives on slavery were deeply informed by a bias toward the slave South and, still more, by racial attitudes taking white superiority and African-American inferiority for granted. Phillips’s racial ideas led him to cast slaves as nonactors in a history determined by white agents and to portray them as a dependent people who benefited from the civi­ lizing influence that, Phillips argued, slavery had to offer. As Phillips told his story, slaves were generally satisfied with their lot, and the images of slave contentment he created were to retain currency, among at least some historians, for the next three to four decades. Although Phillips’s research was massive and his accounts of slavery’s economic and institutional characteristics remain of value, he relied almost completely on white-au­ thored sources, including essays on plantation management and the observations of white travelers and plantation owners, as well as a thorough assessment of quantitative data, to provide support for his views. Portrayals of slavery such as those contained in the narratives had little place in Phillips’s scheme. In 1910, Phillips had published a collection of primary documents related to slav­ ery in which he included Charles Ball’s description of a slave coffle, but in his later work he explicitly dismissed the narratives’ value as historical evidence. In a 1929 book, Life and Labor in the Old South, Phillips summarized his position by saying that the narratives “were issued with so much abolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity is doubt­ Page 6 of 14

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding ful” (219), singling out those of Henry Box Brown, Josiah Henson, and, interestingly, Charles Ball as especially unreliable (a judgment that subsequent research has not entire­ ly upheld). In fairness, it should be noted that Phillips did find Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave to have credibility, and, in Life and Labor—which tended to offer a harsher if no less racist account of slavery—he actually cited Douglass’s Narrative to suggest that slave breeding was not unknown on Southern plantations. Nevertheless, it is a measure of Phillips’s views that, despite dismissing the bulk of the narratives as biased, he seemed less troubled by any biases that might have shaped the writings of slaveholders, and he had no problem with documenting his portrayal of slave contentment through the obser­ vations of the proslavery polemicist Nehemiah Adams, a northern minister whose 1855 travelogue, A South-side View of Slavery, had put an idyllic face on the institution. In his 1918 volume, Phillips even included an 1888 poem, “Christmas on the Plantation,” by the plantation-tradition writer Irwin Russell as a faithful rendering of what he said were the pleasures of life in the slave quarter. Phillips’s work, and hence the dismissal of the narratives as historical evidence, was to set the agenda for much subsequent historical work. In what became a substantial body of more focused, generally state-level studies of slavery, the narratives were occasionally cited (an account of preparations for a slave sale drawn from William Wells Brown’s Nar­ rative became something of a historical staple) but were generally ignored. The study of slavery continued to be dominated by research into white-authored sources, and, if plan­ tation routines were closely scrutinized, there remained a tendency to pay (p. 60) little at­ tention to the possibility of an even semi-autonomous slave community or to any level of slave agency within the confines of the institution. Nevertheless, and despite the dominance of Phillips’s work in the field, there were devel­ opments in American intellectual life generally, and in the historical profession in particu­ lar, that were to undermine his perspective on slavery and, eventually, to transform histo­ rians’ attitudes toward the evidentiary value of the narratives. One, certainly, was the re­ jection of the kinds of racial ideas that informed Phillips’s studies, a process well under way even as his work was making its appearance. Increasingly, scientists were demon­ strating that racist ideas, including those informing Phillips’s studies, were without foun­ dation and could play no role in serious scholarship. Hence, it must be emphasized that even a number of historians building off Phillips’s work—if they continued to neglect pos­ sibilities for slave community and slave agency in their work—strongly rejected his racist views. This rejection of racism was accompanied, sociologically, by an increasing African Ameri­ can presence in the historical profession. African American historical scholarship can be dated to the early nineteenth century. It was to emerge fully toward the century’s end and, more significantly, in the early twentieth century, marked by such landmarks as George Washington Williams’s 1883 survey History of the Negro Race in America, the 1896 publication of W.E.B. Du Bois’s dissertation on the African slave trade by Harvard University (both cited, incidentally, by Phillips), and by the founding of Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 by Carter G. Woodson (like Du Bois, a Harvard Page 7 of 14

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding Ph.D.). The Association’s Journal of Negro History did much to establish African American history as a field, serving as an outlet for serious scholarship by African American and white historians alike, in the process encouraging professional and intellectual connec­ tions that did much to break down racial lines within the profession, thus still further un­ dermining the kinds of assumptions under which Phillips operated. The impact of these developments on the historiography of slavery was not immediate, but a few influential studies did begin to appear in the 1930s and 1940s that drew signifi­ cantly on the narratives as historical sources. Frederic Bancroft, in his 1931 book on the Southern slave trade, cited those of Ball, Northup, and William Wells Brown, among oth­ ers. More fully informed by the narratives were two pioneering essays appearing in the Journal of Negro History, one a 1930 study of the slave family by the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, the other a 1942 essay on slave resistance by social scientists Raymond and Alice Bauer. Frazier, concerned about what he saw as persistent problems in African American family organization, used the narratives’ accounts of family disruptions as fun­ damental evidence to suggest that the institution had led to difficulties, particularly ten­ dencies toward matrifocality that, he argued, continued into the twentieth century. If lat­ er readings have undermined his interpretation of the narratives, his use of the narra­ tives was path breaking. The Bauers’ essay on resistance was still more analytically innovative (1942). White ante­ bellum observers often characterized slaves as “lazy” and “incompetent”—the sort of thing Phillips liked to bring up to suggest that slavery had been a necessity for an (p. 61) “uncivilized” African American labor force. The Bauers sought to go beyond the observa­ tions to ask why slaves might have behaved as they were observed to behave, seeking their answers primarily in the narratives. Focusing on undercurrents of hostility and alienation revealed by the narratives, the Bauers explained slave behavior—especially ap­ parent laziness and incompetence—as elements in what they described as “day-to-day re­ sistance” to slavery, a measure not of failings in slave character but as decided proof of a more generalized hostility to the institution, expressed through slow work and even sabo­ tage, directly contrary to the kind of contentment that Phillips and others claimed the his­ torical record portrayed. The Bauers’ work represented a pioneering effort to create an understanding of slavery from the slaves’ point of view, but through the 1940s and into the 1950s more and more historians were calling for a reorientation in studies of slavery to take into account the slaves’ view of the institution, and even taking to task more traditional studies that failed to do so. There were a number of factors fueling this call, including not only the rejection of older racist ideas, but also, for this period, the burgeoning movement for racial equali­ ty in the United States, a movement toward which many historians, white and African American, were sympathetic. Even some of the most sympathetic historians remained skeptical of the narratives as sources—attitudes toward the narratives’ evidentiary value should never be taken as a measure of racial attitudes on the part of historians. Neverthe­ less, as historians sought to illuminate more fully how slaves had perceived the institu­

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding tion, to make slaves themselves part of the larger story, they expressed increasing inter­ est in thinking about how the narratives might be used. Such thinking was to set the background for a real turning point in the use of the narra­ tives and in the study of slavery itself, the 1956 publication of The Peculiar Institution by the historian Kenneth M. Stampp. Stampp was among those who had reservations about the use of the narratives, but he also had a strong interest in the slaves’ perceptions of the institution. To address this interest, although he mainly used the same forms of evi­ dence on which historians had long relied, he also drew on the narratives, demonstrating that brutal physical violence stood at the heart of slavery and at the center of the slave experience; he found little evidence for the kind of contentment that Phillips claimed characterized the slaves’ lives. Stampp’s book appeared during the early years of the Civ­ il Rights movement, and only about two years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Edu­ cation decision (1954) that gave the movement so much momentum. Rigorously egalitari­ an in its premises, The Peculiar Institution captured the movement’s integrationist, even assimilationist thrust, while redefining the historical understanding of slavery in ways that were to pave the way for a greater recognition of the narratives’ credibility as evi­ dence and their more extensive use in subsequent research. A turn to the narratives was still further encouraged by the 1959 appearance of Stanley Elkins’s influential Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, a work that, although not specifically engaging the narratives, similarly emphasized the op­ pressive character of slavery and argued that it had inflicted severe and persisting psy­ chological damage on its victims, thereby creating what was essentially a slave personali­ ty, submissive and fatalistic. The implications of Elkins’s work were troubling, as were elements of his argument, and his work helped inspire efforts to recover, more ful­ ly, the world the slaves had made. (p. 62)

Such efforts appeared throughout the 1960s, the narratives supplying significant evi­ dence for at least some of those who sought to look further into the issues Stampp and Elkins had raised. Among the most important, and one that explicitly confronted issues of the narratives’ value as evidence, was that of John Blassingame (1972, 1975), especially his groundbreaking 1972 study, The Slave Community. Specifically questioning Elkins’s conclusions, Blassingame’s work was a thorough account of slave community formation, and he put the narratives at the heart of his project. In both this book and in an essay on slave testimony published three years later, Blassingame systematically discussed the kinds of considerations that needed to be made in trying to use the narratives as a record of slavery. Noting the diversity of the narratives, including diverse factors in their origins, Blassingame suggested a variety of ways to address and to control for the polemical con­ ventions that framed the texts and to read the narratives for an autobiographical content independent of any abolitionist purposes. The result was to create a strong foundation for the narratives as evidence for understanding the nature of the slave community and as sources illuminating the efforts of slaves to develop cultural forms and institutions of their own, thereby leading to a more complex portrayal of slavery as a system.

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding Since Blassingame’s work, the narratives have become an established body of evidence for scholarship into the history of slavery. In general, historians have found effective ways of sorting out their historical, autobiographical content, showing an awareness of the kinds of literary, anti-slavery conventions that must be taken into account and comparing the narratives with other sources in order to discover the details most relevant to under­ standing slavery itself. This has entailed, and inspired, still further investigation into the narratives, including successful attempts to corroborate events and individuals appearing in them with other records from the era, lending further legitimacy to their use. Especially valuable along these lines has been the corroboration provided by the exten­ sive body of reminiscences collected from former slaves, published and unpublished, in the post-Emancipation period, reminiscences not clearly affected by overt literary or po­ litical purposes. Such reminiscences, informally recorded, actually informed some of the studies of slavery from Phillips’s era, but the most important were those more systemati­ cally collected, in volume, during the 1920s and 1930s, under the auspices of Fisk and Southern Universities and subsequently by the Federal Writers’ Project with the support of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Historians have been well aware of the extent to which these reminiscences, based on interviews, have problems of their own, not least of which was the age of most of those interviewed, as well as, for the WPA interviews, what were clearly tensions between African-American informants and some of the southern white interviewers employed by the Writers’ Project. If, as David T. Bailey (1980) and others have noted, such factors appear to have led to orientations and tenden­ cies in the interviews different from those characterizing the antebellum narratives, deep­ er patterns of similarity, including common conventions (p. 63) of expression, tend to tie the two bodies of evidence together, especially in regard to the nature of slavery’s brutali­ ty and to the feelings of vulnerability created by the system. Both bodies of evidence, moreover, tend to identify similar institutional and structural forms underlying semi-au­ tonomous communities. To be sure, there remain limitations to what the antebellum narratives can add to an un­ derstanding of slavery. Perhaps the greatest is that of chronology. Slavery began to take shape in what would become the United States during the middle part of the seventeenth century, and it continued to develop for another two centuries. The narratives offer little clue to most of that history, including the initial development of the institution’s most crit­ ical characteristics. Published, for the most part, beginning in the mid-1830s, the narra­ tives offer their most critical evidence for the forms slavery took during the antebellum era, with little information regarding what had come before. Still, the value of the narratives has come to outweigh drawbacks by far, as since the mid­ dle of the twentieth century historians have developed a much deeper understanding of slavery from the evidence the narratives have provided. And among the most important roles the narratives have played in the historical understanding of slavery has been a cor­ rective one. As historians have learned to appreciate the resourcefulness of slaves in ne­ gotiating lives for themselves within the confines of slavery, there have been tendencies to stress cultural creativity at the expense of a recognition of the system’s brutality. To a Page 10 of 14

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding great extent, and despite any shortcomings, Stampp’s portrayal of slavery as a system based on force and violence remains the best guide to thinking about the institution, and the narratives help to bring this home. If centering slavery’s physical and psychological cruelty served their abolitionist aims—and Stampp himself has been justifiably described as a neo-abolitionist historian of slavery—the narratives also provide an important re­ minder that the brutality of slavery should never be minimized in any attempt to under­ stand how the system worked, nor can its corrosive effects on the lives of its victims be left out of any portrayal of the efforts of slaves to carve out such spaces as they could within its confines. But the role of the narratives in the study of slavery has also been an important aspect of a series of related reorientations marking the development of history as a discipline. In general, historians have broadened their purview of historical actors, focusing on those whom the discipline so long found unworthy of interest, including women, workers, and even the American “middle class.” Such efforts to broaden the historical purview have led to a need to develop far more creative techniques to analyze forms of evidence that, for a long time, historical scholarship tended to ignore—oral traditions, literary works, forms of popular culture, for example. The desire to illuminate slave culture was, in fact, a driving force in this process, as was an appreciation for the evidentiary potential of the narra­ tives. If, for many historians, the provenance of the narratives created significant reserva­ tions about their usefulness as historical evidence, for some, it was their very provenance that made them interesting, not only for thinking about slavery but also for thinking about what forms evidence can take and the techniques that might be employed to under­ stand it. These considerations have been particularly apparent as historians have become aware not only of the evidentiary value of the narratives for the study of slavery but also (p. 64)

of the important role the narratives can play in investigations of abolitionism. Here, too, it is possible to look back to a historical tradition going back to the era of Emancipation and Reconstruction and to identify tendencies similar to those characterizing the historiogra­ phy of slavery. For the most part, histories of abolitionism written up to about the middle of the twentieth century paid little attention to the role of African Americans within the movement. There were exceptions. George Washington Williams, in his History of the Ne­ gro Race in America, not only highlighted the role of African Americans in abolitionism but also singled out the role of the narratives in shaping abolitionist opinion. Neverthe­ less, in general, historians tended to focus on such important white figures as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, or the Grimké sisters—Sarah and Angelina—while such major African-American spokespersons as William Wells Brown, Ellen Craft, or even Fred­ erick Douglass received only slight mention, and usually only as workers whose efforts supplemented the work of the movement’s white leaders. Related to this sort of neglect, explanations for the rise and attraction of abolitionism tended to focus, similarly, on the kinds of factors that could have motivated white antislavery activity and sentiment, ranging from economic causes to questions of status anxi­ ety to evangelical religious fervor. All were important, and their influence should not be Page 11 of 14

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding minimized, but all essentially marginalized people of African descent from the story’s main lines. It was not until the publication of Benjamin Quarles’s major 1969 survey, Black Abolitionists, that historical attention turned fully to African American contribu­ tions to the larger anti-slavery cause. Documenting African American involvement in every aspect of abolitionist activity from organizing and financing to political campaign­ ing and public speaking, Quarles helped underline the biracial character of the movement and the essential role of African American activity in shaping its growth and strategies. Within this framework, the narratives have increasingly occupied a critical place in the study of abolitionism, because, as historians have come to understand, the narratives played a major role in both the origins of the movement and in its subsequent develop­ ment. To an extent, historians were pointed toward this role through the work of David Brion Davis and particularly his important 1975 study, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Although Davis’s focus was on the development of anti-slavery thought pri­ or to the era of the narratives’ most significant appearance, he argued that one critical factor in the development of anti-slavery thought and action, beginning in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was a humanitarian impulse founded on a “sentimental” morali­ ty of feeling and empathy, leading to increasing sympathy for the slaves, a recognition of their common humanity, and an emotional sense of the horror of the institution. The narratives, and the role they played in the abolition movement, have helped reveal the extent to which that humanitarian spirit remained at the heart of anti-slavery activity and continued to inspire anti-slavery sentiments through the antebellum period. In (p. 65) this, their literary qualities became as crucial as the authenticity of their representations of slavery. Thus, as historians have sought to identify those elements and details most clearly related to life under slavery, so too have they sought to discover the ways in which narrators drew on literary conventions that were widely spread in antebellum American culture in order to create a portrayal of slavery that would have the greatest emotional impact. This included the ways in which the narrators, as they talked about topics such as family and gender, tended to draw on language with special resonance in an American lit­ erary culture that centered motifs of family affection. It included showing how the narra­ tors’ accounts of slavery’s physical brutality, especially the vicious beatings and murders recounted in virtually all of the narratives, along with accounts of violent sexual exploita­ tion, were framed by the era’s sensationalistic conventions, conventions that themselves reinforced sentimental moral ideals, including those related to gender. In setting forth the slaves’ aspirations, moreover, the narratives played on ideals of independence and selfdiscipline, strongly conveyed in the resourceful self-image presented by those who wrote the narratives and, it should be noted, often celebrated by contrast as narrators consis­ tently portrayed a slave-owning class given to idleness, self-indulgence, and cruelty. Again, none of this was to suggest that the stories the narrators had to tell were, in their essentials, false. But it was to suggest that as the narrators framed their stories, in the language they used, in the images they portrayed, there was an interplay between fact and convention that powerfully encoded cultural messages for a broader American audi­

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding ence. The narratives have thus helped reveal strong ties between abolitionism and broad­ er currents in American culture. There is no doubt, finally, that the narratives provide significant evidence for thinking about more general tendencies affecting the nature of the antebellum “public sphere.” The narratives were intended not only to attract new adherents to the anti-slavery cause but also to shape the ideas and even the motives of those who became involved with it, as, it should be said, many of the movement’s white activists understood at the time. The African American voice, revealed most effectively through what could be represented as first-hand accounts of the institution, was as a result central to the abolitionist effort, even as African American participants were crucial to the definition and spread of the an­ ti-slavery movement. Although, as many historians have stressed, there were strong ef­ forts by the movement’s white leaders to control that voice, these efforts were in them­ selves symptomatic of the importance they attached to it and of their understanding of its centrality to their efforts. Demanding and receiving an audience, the narratives’ authors did much to contribute to more general processes of democratization and inclusion that marked the arena of public discourse in antebellum America. The significance of the slave narratives for historical understanding thus goes beyond the confines of slavery and abolitionism, as such. Not only do they help to indicate such key cultural concerns as those involving gender and the family, but when their literary char­ acter is fully explored, they also help make clear important political and rhetorical con­ cerns in American thinking. The slave narratives have become important documents for historians of antebellum America, with a richness that continues to receive increasing ap­ preciation.

References Bailey, David Thomas. “A Divided Prism: Two Sources of Black Testimony on Slavery,” Journal of Southern History 46 (1980), 381–404. Bancroft, Frederic. Slave-Trading in the Old South. Baltimore: J. H. Furst, 1931. Bauer, R. A., and A. H. Bauer. “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery, Journal of Negro History 27 (1942), 388–419. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. ——. “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” Journal of Southern History 41 (1975), 473–492. Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chica­ go: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Page 13 of 14

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Slave Narratives and Historical Understanding Frazier, E. Franklin. “The Negro Slave Family,” Journal of Negro History 15 (1930), 198– 259. Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. Life and Labor in the Old South. Boston: Little, Brown, 1929. ——. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. 1918. Rpt. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959. ——, ed. Plantation and Frontier, 1649–1863. 2 vols. 1910. Rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969. Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. 7 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1893–1906. Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Knopf, 1956. Williams, George Washington. History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. 2 vols. 1883. Rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Dickson D. Bruce Jr.

Dickson D. Bruce Jr., UC Irvine

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History

Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History   Jeannine Marie DeLombard The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.015

Abstract and Keywords Foundational to the canons of American and African American literature, the genre of the slave narrative helps us better to understand the relationship between law and print cul­ ture in the early republic and the antebellum United States. At a time when African Amer­ icans appeared in newspapers and statute books primarily as property, the narratives of Venture Smith, Moses Grandy, and Lunsford Lane strove to show enslaved entrepreneurs’ qualification to enter the social contract through displays of black contractualism. But as this article shows by reading The Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave within the earlier gallows literature tradition and against later abolitionist appeals to popular legal consciousness, displays of black criminality may have more effectively demonstrated African Americans’ eligibility for citizenship by eliciting official acknowledgement—how­ ever punitive—of black personhood. Keywords: American literature, African American literature, slave narrative, law, print culture, early republic, an­ tebellum period, social contract, contractualism, gallows, abolitionists, crime, criminality, citizenship, personhood

ADDRESSING “The Nature of Slavery” in Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass found it imperative “first of all,” to “state, as well as I can, the legal and social relation of mas­ ter and slave” (Douglass 1855, 419). Beginning this December 1850 lecture much as he had countless other speeches, Douglass treated slavery as primarily a legal institution. “A master is one…who claims and exercises a right of property in the person of a fellowman,” he explained, elaborating: “The law gives the master absolute power over the slave. He may work him, flog him, hire him out, sell him, and, in certain contingencies, kill him, with perfect impunity. The slave is a human being, divested of all rights—reduced to the level of a brute—a mere ‘chattel’ in the eye of the law…. In law, the slave has no wife, no children, no country, and no home. He can own nothing, possess nothing, acquire nothing” (Douglass 1855, 419). Aware of his audience’s exposure to nearly two decades of abolitionist propaganda, Douglass reminded his listeners that the “unceasing stream of most revolting cruelties” depicted therein arose “from this monstrous” legal “relation”(Douglass 1855, 420).

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History The speech appears alongside several other legally oriented addresses in the appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), a revision and expansion of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). Although ini­ tially reluctant as “an unlearned fugitive slave” to “talk ‘lawyer like’ about law,” Douglass had provoked controversy when, in 1851, he challenged his mentor William Lloyd Garrison’s reading of the U.S. Constitution (Douglass 1950–1955, 1: 363). “Construed in the light of well established rules of legal interpretation,” the former Maryland slave and celebrated autodidact explained, the nation’s founding document could, in fact, “be wield­ ed in behalf of emancipation” (Douglass 1950–1955, 2:155). In an antislavery movement guided by white legal professionals like Richard Hildreth, William Jay, Wendell Phillips, William Seward, and Lysander Spooner, Douglass distinguished himself as an incisive critic of the nation’s slaveholding legal regime. If the activist editor differed from other former slaves in providing extensive analysis of landmark judicial decisions and (p. 68) legislation in his oratory and journalism, he was typical in incorporating legal commen­ tary into his first-person account of bondage. With its sustained critique of “the American slave code,” the classic antebellum slave nar­ rative joined over a century of black life-writing in tracing the impress of American law on the African American self (W. Brown 1849, 148). From the colonial period through the Civil War, when enslaved people (and especially men) of African descent entered print as individualized subjects, their first-person narratives were often occasioned by or respon­ sive to their encounters with law (Slotkin 1973; Foster 1979, 36; Andrews 1986, 33; Seko­ ra 1987, 489; Starling 1988, 196; Williams 1993; Fabian 2000, 49–116). We can discern the beginnings of this tradition in 1721, when Puritan minister Cotton Mather appended a jailhouse interview with emancipated Boston slave and condemned wife-murderer Joseph Hanno to his published execution sermon for the “Miserable African.” Seventy-six years later, in the Address of Abraham Johnstone, a Black Man (1797), another former slave seized the occasion of his hanging to link questionable legal procedure in capital cases like his with the new nation’s unacknowledged history of slavery, racism, and genocide. 1831, the year that began with Garrison’s publication of the Liberator, closed with the printing of Thomas R. Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner, which the Virginia lawyerturned-pamphleteer presented as integral to the notorious slave insurgent’s conviction and execution. Hanno, Johnstone, and Turner were among the roughly 60 black con­ demned criminals—including a significant number of “slave-born men”—who figured prominently in early America’s thriving gallows literature tradition (Andrews 1986, 41; see Slotkin 1973; Cohen 1993; DeLombard, 2012). Published in conjunction with Execu­ tion Day rituals, these black criminal confessions were largely superseded in the 1840s and the 1850s by more politicized forms of personal narrative. As the gallows tradition’s confessing malefactor gave way to the antebellum slave narrative’s testifying “eye-witness to the cruelty,” new models of black selfhood arose to accommodate more critical African American engagements with law (Douglass 1845, 80). Still appearing as the product of penality, the new black print subject exposed the brutali­ ty of private “plantation justice” in order to criticize a legal order that, in Douglass’s words, “form[ed] bulwarks around the system of slavery” (Douglass 1950–1955, 1: 366). Page 2 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History Narratives published during “the crisis decades of the antislavery movement” bristled with legal commentary and citation (Andrews 1986, 29). Nearly a tenth of the London edi­ tion of the Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849) is devoted to “EXTRACTS FROM THE AMERICAN SLAVE CODE” (W. Brown 1849, 148). Extensive references to court cases and statutes provide much-needed ballast to sensa­ tional accounts like William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) and the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (1851). The title page of James Watkins’ Struggles for Freedom (1860) promised readers both “a Graphic Account of His Extraordinary Escape from Slavery” and “Notices of the Fugitive Slave Law.” The criminal confession did not entirely disappear, however. Both streams of early black lifewriting flowed into one of the last narratives to be recorded before Emancipation. Written by British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society secretary (p. 69) Harper Twelvetrees, the Sto­ ry of the Life of John Anderson (1863) centers on the Missouri fugitive whose case precip­ itated a transatlantic diplomatic crisis when an English court blocked his extradition from Canada to face murder charges in the United States. This brief survey illustrates how, over 140 years, the slave narrative emerged in what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the shadow of the law.” Describing the popular legal con­ sciousness he observed throughout antebellum America, Tocqueville explained that “the authority which is awarded to the intervention of a court of justice by the general opinion of mankind is so surprisingly great that it clings to the mere formalities of justice, and gives a bodily influence to the shadow of the law” (Tocqueville 1835, 157). Law cast a par­ ticularly long shadow over Anglo-American literary culture. In colonial and early national America, popular crime ephemera found its counterpart in an elite “nexus” of law and let­ ters (Ferguson 1984, 6; Cohen 1993). By the nineteenth century, American fabulists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe joined English counterparts like Charles Dickens in attaining an “unofficial yet undeniable” authority regarding social issues with their “authoritative” if not “authorized” appropriations of legal discourse (Rodensky 2003, 4, 5). At once artic­ ulating and shaping popular opinion, print publications exerted a reciprocal influence on American law in its formative period. This article examines the terms by which the enslaved conventionally entered legal histo­ ry: as civil nonentity or criminally responsible person. In an “[a]ntislavery print culture [that] was invested in the manufacture of acceptable forms of slave agency,” the doctrine of the slave’s “mixed character” posed a formidable challenge to abolitionist efforts to fashion a civil African American self eminently qualified for citizenship (Wong 2009, 93; Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1788, 332). Readings of the Narrative of the Life and Adven­ tures of Venture, A Native of Africa (1798), the Narrative of Lunsford Lane (1842), and the Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy (1843) illustrate the difficulties the genre en­ countered in its efforts to extricate black selves that were simultaneously virtuous, indus­ trious, and civil from slavery’s web of commoditizing property relations. Nowhere, per­ haps, are these difficulties more frankly explored than in The Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1825, 1855), a pivotal text in the transition from the early American crim­ inal confession to the antebellum slave narrative. Often (and probably erroneously) cele­ brated as the first fugitive slave narrative (see Life, and Dying Speech), Grimes’s Life Page 3 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History explicitly rejects any sharp distinction between southern slavery and northern freedom. In Grimes’s account bondage is merely one end of the spectrum of racialized legal op­ pression. A ubiquitous legal player—and frequent legal target—Grimes struggles, both in and out of court, to fashion a self that exceeds the slave’s mixed character as civilly dead property and culpable person. With his narrative attempt to assert a black legal person­ hood, civil standing, and civic authority untainted by criminality, Grimes anticipated the antislavery propaganda that would soon pour from the nation’s presses. But however much he may have viewed print publication as an alternative forum in which to claim racial justice, the litigious Grimes did not share his abolitionist successors’ tendency for making figurative as well as practical appeals to law. Inconsistent though these may have been, it was through such invocations of law (p. 70) that the antebellum slave narrative most powerfully presented its speaking subjects as model black protocitizens.

Human Property and Legal Persons Central to “the birth of the black literary tradition,” as recounted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was the notion that “the recording of an authentic black voice…was the millennial in­ strument of transformation through which…the slave [would] become the ex-slave, brute animal become the human being” (Gates 1985, 11–12). In light of this assumption, “it is telling,” critic Markman Ellis suggests, “that the late-eighteenth-century slave narrative is”—and was—“considered a form of biography or life-writing, and not an itnarrative” (Ellis 2007, 96). A popular fiction genre of the period, the it-narrative told the history and experiences of a nonhuman protagonist such as a coat or (more aptly) a guinea, as those inanimate objects circulated through society. Ellis’s observation prompts a fruitful legal-literary thought experiment: How is it that, as a kind of life-writing, the slave narrative became proof of the spiritual kinship and political equality of its first-per­ son black subject? What kept it from instead reinforcing, as a kind of it-narrative, the commodity status of its enslaved protagonist? The answer lies in a clearer understanding of slaves’ “mixed character of persons and of property” (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1788, 332). Justifying the U.S. Constitution’s (im­ plicit) adoption of this doctrine in the already notorious three-fifths clause, “Publius” in Federalist 54 explains that “in being compelled to labor, not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master; and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another—the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank, and classed with those irrational animals which fall under the legal denomination of property” (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1788, 332). But, Publius continues, under criminal law—and especially “in being punish­ able himself for all violence committed against others—the slave is no less evidently re­ garded by the law as a member of the society, not as a part of the irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property” (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1788, 332). However much the denial of slaves’ personhood in civil law contexts made them “appear to be degraded from human rank,” few Americans seriously questioned slaves’ humanity. Slaveholders purchased, mortgaged, willed, and speculated on men and women, boys and Page 4 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History girls, cooks and carpenters, field hands and fancy girls—not an assortment of dehuman­ ized “its.” Far from dismissing blacks’ affective ties on purely ideological grounds, mas­ ters and mistresses manipulated these human relationships so as to maximize slaves’ tractability and profitability. Indeed, the chattel principle depended for its maximum ef­ fectiveness upon the coordination of owners’ exploitation of slaves’ humanity with legal authorities’ occasional, partial recognition of their personhood (Hartman 1997; Gross 2000; Wong 2009). Simultaneously invoking the (acknowledged) humanity and (“retractable”) person­ hood of the enslaved, a passage from the Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa illustrates how slavery’s legal logic precluded the literary conflation of slave narrative and it-narrative (Dayan 2002, 80). Recounting how he and others “kept for market” were told by their master “to appear to the best possible advantage for sale,” Venture Smith recalls being “bought…by one Robertson Mumford, steward…, for four gal­ lons of rum, and a piece of calico, and called VENTURE, on account of his having pur­ chased me with his own private venture” (Narrative 1798, 13). The commoditization of the youth born as Broteer, son of “Saungm Furro, Prince of the Tribe of Dukandarra” is complete when he is exchanged for a quantity of cloth and alcohol and stripped of his per­ (p. 71)

sonal, familial, and cultural identities (Narrative 1798, 5). In the very act of depriving the newly enslaved boy and his fellow Africans of their personhood, however, the slaveholder enlists their humanity in his efforts to enhance their property value. If Marx’s famous prosopopeia (“Could commodities themselves speak, they would say…”) betrays his own susceptibility to the fictive ascription of human qualities to these particular objects of property, Smith’s account of being instructed “to appear to the best possible advantage for sale” confirms the commensurability of slaves’ humanity with their commodity status (Marx quoted in Johnson 2008, 140; Narrative 1798, 13). Circulating in a print culture suffused with sentimentalism and sensationalism, slave nar­ ratives unquestionably played up disregard for black humanity in an attempt to politicize sympathetic or horrified white readers. But the real challenge facing literary activists was not to depict the slave as the human being he was widely acknowledged to be, but to present him as a responsible, competent person with the potential for political member­ ship. Where the protagonist of the slave narrative resembles that of the it-narrative is in the denial, not of his humanity, but of what Immanuel Kant called his “civil personality” (Kant 1797, 92). If slaves’ status as human property kept their published life stories from degenerating into a form of it-narrative, the enslaved narrators’ correspond­ ing civil incapacity as fractional legal persons likewise prevented their accounts from at­ taining the rank of autobiography (Olney 1985, 154, 168; Sekora 1987, 502). As the “ob­ jective correlate” for the individualist self, critic Michael Mascuch argues, modern autobi­ ography presented “the person as his own author, cultivating and nurturing the develop­ ment of his unique ‘character,’ or self-identity, and who is therefore perceived in his social relations as being individually responsible for his life” (Mascuch 1996, 23, 206).

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History What better way to undermine what Yale-educated Maryland fugitive Rev. James W. C. Pennington termed “the chattel principle…the property principle, the bill of sale princi­ ple” than to portray bondspeople as competent civil actors (Pennington 1849, iv)? Many slave narratives depict the enslaved hiring themselves out through labor agreements made in the shadow of slave law. Going even further, the Narrative of Lunsford Lane and the Narrative of Moses Grandy show their subjects initiating complex financial dealings that mimic contractual relations. The ambitious Lane describes how, capitalizing on his father’s invention of a popular method of tobacco preparation, “I opened a regular place of business, labeled my tobacco in a conspicuous manner with the names of ‘Edward and Lunsford Lane,’” and “established agencies for the sale in various parts of (p. 72) the State” (Andrews 2003, 106). For his part, Grandy, seeking to profit from the rerouting of commerce during the Chesapeake blockade in the War of 1812, “took some canal boats on shares,” which required him in turn “to victual and man the boats” (Andrews 2003, 161). Departing from conventional portrayals of the field slave laboring under the overseer’s lash, these entrepreneurial narratives questioned the legal fiction of the slave’s mixed character by offering alternative—and distinctly civil—models of black in­ come-generating activity. In a Western culture that understood itself, in Sir Henry Maine’s famous formulation, to be undergoing an epochal transition “from Status to Contract,” depictions of black con­ tractualism spoke to much more than African Americans’ business acumen (Maine 1861, 174). Evoking the enduring Enlightenment myth wherein individuals in the state of na­ ture compact together to form a law-bound polity, Maine’s thesis also reflected assump­ tions of nineteenth-century contract law. Contract’s millennial “promise” was to usher in an era of consensualism that would extinguish not only hereditary status but the coer­ cion, sentimentalism, and paternalism that accompanied it, introducing in its place transi­ tory exchange relationships characterized by volition, consent, and, above all, self-owner­ ship (Thomas 1997, 1–52). If enslaved “black Ben Franklin[s]” like Lunsford Lane and Moses Grandy could accumulate significant personal wealth through their conscientious fulfillment of their economic commitments, then surely, as free men, they would be quali­ fied to sign onto the larger social contract (Gould 2003, 145). From the Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture onward, entrepreneurial slave narratives’ portrayals of black contractualism almost inevitably culminate in, and are thus belied by, what we might call the trope of the self-purchase fraud. Grandy, lauded by Cam­ den County whites as “one of their old war captains,” who “had never lost a single thing of the property entrusted to me,” receives “receipts” from his master for each payment he makes toward self-purchase, eagerly awaiting the “court day” when he will receive his “free papers” (Andrews 2003, 163, 162, 163). When, as Grandy recounts, his master “tore up all the receipts” upon receiving the final payment, the man’s outraged “sister…sued him in my name for my liberty,” only to lose “the cause” when the “court maintained that I, and all I could do, belonged to him, and that he had a right to do as he pleased with me and all my earnings, as his own property, until he had taken me to the Court House, and given me my free papers” (Andrews 2003, 163, 164). Capping the court’s decisive rejec­ tion of his civil standing, the enslaved entrepreneur soon discovers that he has been sold Page 6 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History to—and mortgaged by—one of the white men with whom he transacts canal business. Blocking the narrative trajectory wherein slave becomes free man through virtuous indus­ try, the self-purchase fraud exposes what Edlie Wong has identified as “the hermeneutic limit of an emergent liberal discourse of contract premised on universalized notions of will and free choice in a partially free world” (Wong 2009, 100). In mounting such a critique, however, the trope effectively affirms the civil incapacity of the slave and, by extension, his ineligibility to join the larger social compact as an au­ tonomous legal person. For, beyond cruelly depriving the slave of his hard-earned funds and viciously exploiting his hopes for freedom, the fraud exposes the false (p. 73) premise underlying all the preceding transactions. Due to the enslaved businessmen’s lack of civil standing, their agreements with whites are grounded not in self-interested mutual con­ sent but in the latter’s honor, pity, or deceit. Rather than demonstrations of the slave’s competence to enter into contractual relations, these subsidiary agreements turn out to be status relations in disguise. However illusory, such “contracts” sometimes achieved their purported ends. Like Smith, both Grandy and Lane were eventually able to purchase their own freedom, as well as that of family members. But even successful contractualism tended to perpetuate rather than terminate the black subject’s identification with property. Analyzing what Philip Gould has characterized as the “epistemological trap” of liberalism, scholars have noted the conundrum posed by a free status acquired through contractual relations that, even as they liberate the quondam slave, reinforce the freedman’s prior (and thus ongoing) equivalency with the consideration exchanged for his or her manumission (Gould 2003, 148; Baker 1984, 35; Gates 1987, 11–25; Fichtelberg 1993; Hinds 1998; see also Kaplan 1993). From Olaudah Equiano, John Marrant, and Venture Smith to Grandy and Lane, when the slave narrative’s entrepreneurial first-person subject “tries to convert himself from property” into full personhood, he “encounters the inextricably ideological connec­ tion between” the two and thus “never fully narrates his life out of it” (Gould 2003, 149). By the same token, the contractual exchange of slavery for freedom barred as much as it enabled freedpeople’s belated entry into the polity by identifying the manumitted self with the objects exchanged for emancipation (Gould 2003, 143). This trace element of materiality, David Kazanjian finds in readings of personal narratives by Equiano and Smith as well as by fellow black mariners Briton Hammon, John Jea, Boston King, and George Henry, is what ensured the civic exclusion of even free blacks in a world where citizens, not unlike commodities, were defined by their abstract interchangeability (Kazanjian 2003, 50, 88). Having been once exchangeable for actual commodities, blacks emancipated on such terms could never quite lay claim to the dematerialized political fungibility attributed to citizens. Nowhere, perhaps, is African American exclusion from the social compact more closely linked to the denial of black civil competence than in the Narrative of Lunsford Lane, whose subtitle highlights “His Banishment from the Place of His Birth for the Crime of Wearing a Colored Skin.” With Lane’s self-purchase accomplished early in the work, the narrative focus shifts from slavery to the legal mechanisms that, by blocking the Page 7 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History freedman’s political membership, prevent him from attaining full personhood. Once emancipated, Lane continues and diversifies the business transactions he had conducted while enslaved, only to find himself, along with other Raleigh free blacks, subjected to le­ gal harassment and “warned out” of North Carolina (Andrews 2003, 113). No longer property, Lane still lacks the standing to make the “queer and joyous feeling” of freedom a reality (Andrews 2003, 107). Having “no redress” to petty theft, much less legal prose­ cution and mob violence, Lane must once again deferentially appeal to the informal white patronage network that had protected him while a slave (Andrews 2003, 124nIV). His fi­ nancial autonomy nullified by his political dependency, Lane abandons his successful to­ bacco enterprise to flee north to “the cradle of Liberty,” (p. 74) where abolitionist contri­ butions toward the purchase of his family once again place him “under the greatest oblig­ ations” (Andrews 2003, 126). Lane concludes his Narrative by presenting “the Bills of Sale, by which I have attained the right to my wife and children” (Andrews 2003, 126– 127). Grounding Lane’s “right” as husband and father in commercial contracts rather than in the social compact, these legal facsimiles vividly document that success with the former did not guarantee entry into the latter. In their ongoing efforts to understand how print enabled African Americans collectively to reject their legal status as chattel and assert their eligibility to join the national polity, scholars have devoted considerable attention to literary performances of civic and moral virtue by black Ben Franklins like Equiano, Marrant, and Smith or “Black Founders” such as Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Phillis Wheatley, and Jupiter Hammon (Newman and Finkenbine 2007). With the First and Second Great Awakening, critic Jon Cruz has sug­ gested, “the extension of the religious franchise, as it culminated in the nineteenth-centu­ ry slave narratives, was transformed into a cultural license authorizing black authors to practice as modern selves and to present critical observations based on their lives” (Cruz 1999, 88). Yet however much “conversion,” along with other performances of black virtue, may have “provided an avenue for admission into subjecthood,” Cruz notes, it was “irrelevant to the legal force of slavery. Converted or not, slaves by civil law were proper­ ty; they were objects, not subjects” (Cruz 1999, 89). A documentary genre, the slave nar­ rative recorded the very real effects of this legal fiction. The criminal law was an entirely different matter. Because the limited personhood as­ cribed to blacks under slavery was literally and definitively uncivil, it could not, with emancipation, be enlarged into the civil personality upon which political qualification for citizenship was based. First-person criminal confessions provided a more viable avenue for admission to subjecthood than the well-worn path of virtue charted by spiritual autobi­ ographies, adventure narratives, and other genres of eighteenth-century Afro-diasporic life-writing. Indeed, when blacks appeared in print as persons rather than property in early America, it was more likely to be in sensationalized crime publications or in the criminal code than in the belletristic works or exemplary accounts of piety, adventure and enterprise on which we focus our teaching and research. Next to the human chattel, it was the black malefactor—not the African picaro, the “pious Negro,” or the sable entre­ preneur—who would have been most familiar to colonial and early national audiences (Bruce 2001, 115). And, at least since Locke opened his Second Treatise on Government Page 8 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History (1689) by glossing “political power” as the “right of making laws with penalties of death… and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws,” legally sanc­ tioned punishment had offered a kind of perverse affirmation of political membership in both law and political philosophy (Locke 1689, 4). Under this contractarian logic the criminous slave, hitherto considered property for the purposes of civil law, attained recognition as a responsible human actor and thus legal person through his or her arrest, indictment, conviction, and sentencing. Juridically authorized punishment of the enslaved implied a tacit, retroactive, albeit purely punitive, acknowledgment of their prior inclu­ sion in the polity. The participation of the black condemned in the civic realm of print cul­ ture—however mediated, ventriloquized, or downright (p. 75) fictive—effectively expand­ ed the black malefactor’s recognized legal personhood beyond law’s punitive purposes. Preoccupied with property offenses, gallows narratives sharply distinguished the crimi­ nous slave from the chattels he so fulsomely confessed to stealing. (No danger of a crimi­ nal confession being confused for an it-narrative!) Having thus entered print as an ac­ countable, individualized legal person, the confessing black felon attained a degree of civic presence that transcended mere culpability. The handoff from the criminal confession to the abolitionist slave narrative occurred in the 1820s and 1830s. Transitional first-person accounts published in this period and at­ tributed to Isabella Van Wagenen (Sojourner Truth), William Grimes, Nat Turner, and James Williams provide glimpses of black life-writing’s shifting relationship to American law. (These glimpses also affirm the blurriness of generic boundaries.) The Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave recounts how Grimes escapes bondage to a succession of Southern masters only to find himself “put under bonds” to a series of Northern courts (Grimes 1825, 59; see also Lane’s Narrative: Andrews 2003, 111, 114). Subject to con­ stant surveillance, frequent apprehension, and occasional incarceration, Grimes is in no position to oppose his bondage to his freedom. His less romantic goal of transforming himself from property into a legal person with civil standing is figured in the Life with Bunyanesque transparency: having escaped slavery by placing himself “in the centre of the cotton bales on deck” of a northbound ship, Grimes targets Litchfield, Connecticut, “where the celebrated Law school…was kept,” as “a good place for me” (Grimes 1825, 51, 58). The frequently cheated runaway-cum-entrepreneur quickly assimilates, tirelessly initiat­ ing lawsuits “to get restitution” (Grimes 1825, 58). (Once “ignorant of the law,” Grimes can knowingly claim to “understand the law now, pretty well, at least that part which con­ sists in paying fees” [Grimes 1825, 60]). But the standing Grimes is able to assert in Con­ necticut courtrooms evaporates in the streets of Litchfield and New Haven. In a revealing anecdote concerning a financial dispute with a Yale College steward, Grimes recounts how, when threatened with a lawsuit, the man, “being a lawyer,” capitulated, knowing not only that “I could recover,” but that, “if I sued him it would make a great noise and laugh about town” (Grimes 1825, 63). Yet, however comical a figure Grimes cut as a civil legal actor, he was utterly unremarkable in criminal proceedings. Even this most litigious of fugitives could not entirely shake off the slave’s mixed character as civil nonentity and culpable person. For, whereas Grimes the plaintiff could jeopardize one white lawyer’s ca­ Page 9 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History reer, Grimes the defendant could launch another’s. When one of the debtors he had sued “out of revenge went to a Grand-Juror, and made complaint against me for keeping a bad girl at my house,” the sitting judges ask Grimes, as a matter of course, “if I had a lawyer” (Grimes 1825, 59). Despite his initial intention to “plead my own case, as I was sure they had nothing against me,” the savvy Grimes “told one of Judge G.’s son’s [sic] that he might answer for me if he was a mind to” (Grimes 1825, 59). Outraged by proce­ dural laxity on the part of both his attorney-in-training and the court—“being a negro, I suppose they thought no one would ever notice it”—Grimes drily observes that “if I had plead my own case, I could have done better than any lawyer or rather student” (Grimes 1825, 59). As “a black man” who is “industrious and honest” yet “poor, and in a situation to be imposed upon,” Grimes concludes from his experience of being “cheated, insulted, abused and injured” that “there is no inducement for a slave to leave his master, and be set free in the northern states” (Grimes 1825, 67). Bound servitude, after all, only marks the beginning of his legal tale of woe. Seeking to dispel the insidious myth that “that the poor and friendless are entirely free from oppression where slavery does not exist,” Grimes hopes to further this end “in a future Edition” by publishing, without restraint, (p. 76)

“all the particulars of my life, since I have been in Connecticut” (Grimes 1825, 58). Hav­ ing once been hired out to Savannah printer Phillip David Woolhopter, Grimes was at­ tuned to the residual justice attainable through publication (Ashton, 2012, 136–137). He was also aware of the attendant dangers of libel: his determination to exact full literary retribution is restrained only by a “delicacy about mentioning names” in print (Grimes 1825, 58). Tellingly, however, this transitional text is less concerned with promoting re­ form of America’s slave code than enjoining closer adherence to the rule of law. “It is very mean and cruel, to drive a man out of town because he is suspected of some crime, or breach of law,” Grimes protests in his pamphlet’s closing pages, demanding: “If he is guilty, punish him, but not set him adrift on suspicion, or from mere tyranny, because his poverty exposes him to it. If I was a pimp why not punish me for it, not warn a man out of town, because his enemies accuse him of crime” (Grimes 1825, 65). As Grimes knew all too well, extrajudicial methods of social control did not grant the honest and industrious yet poor and friendless black man even the limited form of due process guaranteed to the criminous slave under the legal fiction of mixed character. “Convicted of keeping a bad house” and twice acquitted on assault-related charges, Grimes had also been warned out of town and searched on suspicion of breaking and entering (Grimes 1825, 59). However oppressive, the judicially mandated punishment Grimes repeatedly calls for here repre­ sented a valued alternative to tyrannous supervision and regulation in that it required for­ mal, public recognition of the offender’s personhood. A residue of this configuration of law, print, and black personhood is discernible in Douglass’s account of his decision to write My Bondage and My Freedom, which ap­ peared the same year as the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Brought Down to the Present Time (1855). “Not only is slavery on trial,” the abolitionist editor observed, “but…the enslaved people are also on trial. It is alleged, that they are, naturally, inferior; that they are so low in the scale of humanity, and so utterly stupid, that they are uncon­ Page 10 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History scious of their wrongs, and do not apprehend their rights” (Douglass 1855, 106). Douglass’s juridical figure was, we shall see, very much in keeping with abolitionist rhetoric (as was his identification of authentic black authorship as a rebuttal to increas­ ingly virulent allegations of racial inferiority). But as Douglass knew all too well, “en­ slaved people” were seldom “on trial” in courts of law. Denied even perfunctory due process, most slaves were subject either to private plantation justice or its extension, the summary police power (Wagner 2009, 18). When read alongside Grimes’s call to ensure “the black man” a legal hearing, Douglass’s acknowledgment of the perennially defensive posture of the enslaved in American print culture registers the historic importance of publicized criminality to antebellum African Americans’ concerted efforts to (p. 77) “ap­ prehend their rights”—whether philosophically, politically, or legally—through the medi­ um of print. Still featured in newspaper advertisements and civil statutes as property, African Ameri­ cans had appeared most prominently as responsible legal persons and thus members of the polity in published crime accounts. Ultimately, it was this punitive recognition of the slave’s legal responsibility (the gallows confession’s raison d’être), rather than the shad­ owy print performance of consent, that made it rhetorically possible for the protocitizen of the antebellum slave narrative to lay claim to more a comprehensive black political membership. In order to do so effectively, however, the burden of guilt had to shift from the slave to the slaveholder.

At the Bar of Public Opinion “Heretofore the wrong-doer alone has introduced all the testimony in his case—or, he has been, himself, the only witness,” Executive Committee members James Gillespie Birney and Lewis Tappan observed regarding the American Anti-Slavery Society’s publication of the Narrative of James Williams (1838; “Alabama”). It is precisely because “the slave has had no forum at which he could implead the wrong doer,” they explained, that “the aboli­ tionists have at length instituted one” by publishing the fugitive’s firsthand account of slavery (“Alabama”). With the slave narrative, Birney and Tappan maintained, abolition­ ists established print publication as “the only tribunal before which the slave can bring his cause against him from whom he has suffered the mightiest trespass that one human being can commit against the property, the life, the liberty, the happiness of the other” (“Alabama”). The preface to My Bondage and My Freedom, published 17 years lat­ er, proclaims the literary and rhetorical (if not political) success of their endeavor. “This system is now at the bar of public opinion—not only of this country, but of the whole civi­ lized world—for judgment,” Douglass could now plausibly claim, adding “its friends have made for it the usual plea—‘not guilty;’ the case must, therefore, proceed. Any facts, ei­ ther from slaves, slaveholders, or by-standers, calculated to enlighten the public mind, by revealing the true nature, character, and tendency of the slave system, are in order, and can scarcely be innocently withheld” (Douglass 1855, 106).

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History Of course, William Grimes had no more needed the slave’s white advocates to institute a tribunal on his behalf than he did a Litchfield law student to represent him in court. But in at least one instance, the antebellum slave narrative provided a legal as well as a liter­ ary forum for the former captive to implead the wrong doer. In March 1841, Solomon Northup was decoyed away from his Saratoga Springs home to the District of Columbia, where he was drugged and sold into slavery. Rescued from Louisiana 12 years later, Northup stopped in Washington D.C., en route to his reunion with his family, to prosecute the slave traders who had sold him into bound servitude. The case fell apart when, ac­ cording to Northup, “the court decided my evidence inadmiss[i]ble…solely on the ground that I was a colored man—the fact of my being a free citizen of New-York (p. 78) not being disputed” (Northup 1853, 247). Soon afterward, his case having been covered by the New York Times, Northup collaborated with local lawyer David Wilson to publish Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River, in Louisiana (1853). “[C]orroborated by abundant evidence,” the Narrative gave Northup the hearing at the bar of public opinion he had been denied in the court of law (Northup 1853, xxxvii). Addressing this more expansive tribunal, Northup goes beyond merely ac­ cusing his kidnappers. Testifying that “the institution that tolerates such wrong and inhu­ manity as I have witnessed, is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one,” the restored Citizen of New-York speaks on behalf of those “daily witnesses of human suffering” silenced by slave law (Northup 1853, 158, 157). Following its publication, Twelve Years a Slave almost closed the gap between literary trope and legal reality when one of its (purported­ ly) over 30,000 antebellum copies fell into the hands of New York judge Thaddeus St. John. Realizing that he had unwittingly witnessed Northup’s abduction, Judge St. John provided information leading to the arrest and trial of the original kidnappers, only to have the protracted prosecution fizzle in legal technicalities (Eakin and Logsdon, intro­ duction to Northup 1853, xvii–xxii). Northup ultimately found in print a more reliable re­ course to injustice than law. Notwithstanding the D.C. court’s ruling, Northup was unusual in being in a legal position to prosecute his enslavers in a court of law. Rare—and emotionally powerful—as first-per­ son narratives of free blacks abducted into bound servitude were, they also exposed a central contradiction in the abolitionist attempt to present the slave narrative as Exhibit A in their case before the court of public opinion. Depicting an actual occurrence of the “man-stealing” so frequently invoked in the era’s heated “Bible politics,” such anomalous accounts risked affirming the legitimacy of American slavery (Mailloux 1998, 75; Wong 2009, 143). The danger was that the reader might adopt the view of the Louisiana “legal gentleman of distinction” who facilitated Northup’s liberation (Northup 1853, 228). Learning of the kidnapped black man’s predicament, Judge John P. Waddill’s “emotions of indignation” were “aroused by such an instance of injustice,” not due to any principled opposition to slavery but, conversely, out of an abiding respect for “the title of his fellow parishioners and clients to the property which constituted the larger proportion of their wealth,” and which in turn “depended upon the good faith in which slave sales were transacted” (Northup 1853, 228). The judge’s scrupulous concern for upholding slavery’s Page 12 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History legal viability points to the central contradiction in abolitionists’ appeals to popular legal consciousness: seeking to reveal “the intense criminality of the slaveholder,” reformers leveled their charges not at the comparatively few Americans who held slaves illegally, but at the legions who did so under the very laws abolitionists so insistently cited (Dou­ glass 1855, 420). From the Constitution to local statutes, and from the Supreme Court to Justice of the Peace proceedings, abolitionist propaganda centered on legal citation and analysis. “In the southern part of the United States,” Douglass wrote in a letter to the Liberator republished in My Bondage and My Freedom, “I was a slave, thought of and spoken of as property; in the language of the LAW, ‘held, taken, reputed, and adjudged to be a chattel in the (p. 79) hands of my owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever.’ (Brev. Digest, 224.)” (Douglass 1855, 373–74). What Douglass’s ostentatious legal citation to Joseph Brevard’s Alphabetical Digest of the Public Statute Law of South Carolina (1814) ob­ scures, however, is the inaptness of his source. Enslaved in Maryland, not South Carolina, Douglass displays here less a concern for legal accuracy than conformity to antislavery practice. Brevard’s Digest was ubiquitous in abolitionist invocations of slave law, from le­ gal treatises such as George M. Stroud’s Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America (1827, 1856) and William C. Goodell’s The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by Its Statutes, Judicial Decisions, and Illustrative Facts (1853), to fact books like Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story Is Founded. Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (1853). Like Douglass, neither William Wells Brown nor William and Ellen Craft were enslaved in South Carolina, but their narratives both cite Brevard’s Digest. Douglass’s discrepancy returns us to the larger contradiction in abolitionist appropria­ tions of “the language of LAW.” Because slavery was legal in the United States and be­ cause law, especially republican law, was held to be both neutral and authoritative, ac­ tivists directed legal discourse to their own rhetorical as well as political ends. “What, then, are the facts?” Douglass asked his audience in another speech reprinted in My Bondage and My Freedom, continuing: “Here I will not quote my own experience in slav­ ery; for this you might call one-sided testimony. I will not cite the declarations of aboli­ tionists; for these you might pronounce exaggerations. I will not rely upon advertisements cut from newspapers; for these you might call isolated cases. But I will refer you to the laws adopted by the legislatures of the slave states. I give you such evidence, because it cannot be invalidated nor denied. I hold in my hand sundry extracts from the slave codes of our country, from which I will quote” (Douglass 1855, 425). The contradiction arose when reformers employed legal terminology not simply to define or to expose but to criti­ cize slavery—as here, when Douglass promiscuously combines reference to actual laws with figurative legal language. Offering state statutes themselves as a more probative form of “evidence” than his “one-sided testimony,” Douglass participated in the same ju­ Page 13 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History ridical rhetoric that led Weld to compile his journalistic “testimony of a thousand witness­ es” and Stowe to publish “corroborative statements” in support of her antislavery fiction. Emphasizing or disregarding slavery’s legality as circumstances demanded, abolitionists consistently used legal language inconsistently. Their rhetorical imprecision was strategic. When antislavery activists maintained, in the words of the AASS’s Declaration of Sentiments (1833), that “SLAVERY IS A CRIME,” they blurred the boundaries between the laws of God and the laws of man, much as they had between literary trope and legal fact. More than merely revealing the harsh realities of the slaveholding regime, abolitionist adaptations of legal discourse prompted American audiences to meditate on the source of law’s authority (Crane 2002). Calling their read­ ers’ attention to the chasm between positive law (where slavery (p. 80) was legal) and higher law (where it was an offense against God and man), abolitionists effectively con­ structed a third tribunal, the court of public opinion. Figuring the slavery debate as a prolonged criminal proceeding where “the perpetrators of slaveholding villainy” were indicted alongside their “Northern, abettors” antislavery writers and activists exploited the persistent American fascination with what legal schol­ ar Mark S. Weiner calls “black trials” (Douglass 1855, 362; “Organization”; Weiner 2004, xi). As “legal events that figure symbolically and dramatically in American culture by making public certain basic ideological conflicts about race and civic life,” black trials be­ came referenda not simply on African American civic inclusion, but on the meaning of American citizenship itself (Weiner 2004, xi). Legal crises such as Congress’ “Gag Rule” on abolitionist petitions and censorship of antislavery mailings alerted white Americans to slavery’s encroachment upon their own civil and political rights. But it was “black trials” that repeatedly dramatized the specifically legal underpinnings of historian Edmund Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom” dyad. As terrifying as initial reports of slave uprisings may have been, print coverage of the ensuing legal proceedings were what familiarized readers with the New York Conspiracy of 1741; the revolts led by Den­ mark Vesey, Nat Turner, and John Brown; and the rebellions aboard the Amistad, the Cre­ ole, and the Pearl. Press reports of British lawsuits over the routine imprisonment of black mariners in slaveholding U.S. ports prompted debate over the Negro Seamen Acts across the Atlantic, throughout the United States, and within the South itself (Wong 2009, 183–239). Resistance to enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws reached its peak through the celebrated trials—or jailhouse and courthouse rescues—of individual run­ aways like George Latimer, James Hamlet, Jane Johnson, Shadrach Minkins, Anthony Burns, Joshua Glover, John Price, and Margaret Garner. “The slave child Med” and Dred Scott came to personify questions of interstate comity through press coverage of Com­ monwealth v. Aves (1836) and Sandford v. Scott (1857). Investing a large proportion of their movement’s resources to publicize these and related legal crises and deploying juridical rhetoric to contrast the judgment administered by the corrupt courts of men with that dispensed by God, antislavery propagandists urged Amer­ icans to consider their own responsibility, as citizens, for slavery. A centerpiece of this propaganda, the slave narrative also focused attention on the specific question of African Page 14 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History American civic belonging. Rather than being excluded from American society or con­ signed to second-class citizenship, African Americans since slavery have been relegated to a kind of “inclusive exclusion”—their exceptional status within the polity constitutive of the sovereignty of white American citizens (Agamben 1998, 7). Far from denoting citizen­ ship, “American identity means the capacity, as a racial subject, to be a representative body—figuratively and materially—for the nation” (Carbado 2005, 638). With its subtitu­ lar designation of Douglass as “an American Slave,” the 1845 Narrative encapsulates the contradictory phenomenon by which “exclusion is precisely what makes” the black sub­ ject “intelligible as an American” (Carbado 2005, 652–653). With the slave occupying “a place—a social position—in the political and constitutional order of the nation” as “non­ foreign-noncitizen,” it was citizenship, not (p. 81) national identity, that proved most elu­ sive to African Americans as a collective (Carbado 2005, 645). In order successfully to link citizenship to American identity, “groups seeking full civic membership” need “to be widely perceived as being ‘a people of law’” and thus “to overcome a perception of their legal incapacity” (Weiner 2004, 9, 11). The black legal competence so firmly established by colonial and early national criminal confessions provided a platform upon which subsequent slave narratives could model a more comprehensive African American political belonging. Few former slaves could, like Douglass, “talk ‘lawyer like’ about law,” perhaps. But well over a century of gallows liter­ ature had accustomed the American reading public to seeing black men like Joseph Han­ no and Nat Turner talk “defendant like” about law in print. Some, like Abraham John­ stone and William Grimes, even had occasion to talk “plaintiff like” about law in their per­ sonal narratives. The latter works, of course, most forcefully exposed the fictive nature of the slave’s mixed character with seemingly authentic portrayals of black civil standing. But even the most formulaic, ventriloquized narratives attributed to the black condemned dramatized their membership, as responsible persons, in the polity. Continuing this longer tradition, the antebellum slave narrative joined other forms of abolitionist propa­ ganda in promiscuously mingling legal citation and analysis with figurative juridical rhetoric. “I entered the world a slave—in the midst of a country whose most honoured writings declare that all men have a right to liberty,” reflected Henry Box Brown, the man famous for having “Escaped from Slavery, Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide,” in the opening lines of his second Narrative. “I was a slave,” he continued, “because my countrymen had made it lawful, in utter contempt of the declared will of heaven, for the strong to lay hold of the weak and to buy and to sell them as marketable goods. […] Yes, they robbed me of myself […]—until I forcibly wrenched myself from their hands—did they retain their stolen property” (H. Brown 1851, 51). Seeking to reclaim their Lockean right to property in the person, fugitives like Brown “took possession” of themselves through flight—so long, at least, as they could avoid recapture as fugitives from service (Brown and Stearns 1849, 15). But shipping oneself North in a box, like contracting for self-purchase, risked reaffirming one’s commodity status. By contrast, it was by knowl­ edgably incorporating such legal rhetoric into their published life stories that exemplary black protocitizens like Brown, Douglass, Pennington, Wells Brown, and Craft demon­ strated their eligibility for full membership in the polity. Building on the gallows tradition, Page 15 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History the antebellum slave narrative created a forum for the enslaved to talk “citizen like” about law.

References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. “Alabama Beacon versus James Williams.” Emancipator. August 30, 1838. Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiogra­ phy, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. (p. 82) ——, gen. ed. North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Ashton, Susanna. “Slavery, Imprinted: The Life and Narrative of William Grimes.” In Early African American Print Culture, edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 127–139. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Brown, Henry Box. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. 1851. Edited by John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. ——, and Charles Stearns. Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery, En­ closed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Him­ self. 1849. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http:// docsouth.unc.edu/neh/boxbrown/boxbrown.html Brown, William Wells. Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave. Written by Him­ self. 1849. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http:// docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/brownw/brown.html Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865. Char­ lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Carbado, Devon W. “Racial Naturalization.” American Quarterly 57.3 (September 2005): 633–658. Cohen, Daniel A. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History Craft, William. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. 1860. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/craft/craft.html Crane, Gregg D. Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2002. Cruz, Jon. Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1999. Dayan, Joan. “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies.” In Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revi­ talized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, 53–94. “Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention.” Liberator. December 14, 1833. DeLombard, Jeannine Marie. In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Edited by Philip S. Fon­ er. 5 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1950–1955. ——. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. In Autobiographies, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Library of America, 1994, 103–452. ——. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. Edited by Houston A. Baker. New York: Penguin, 1982. Ellis, Markman. “Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility.” In The Se­ cret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007, 92–113. Fabian, Ann. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Ferguson, Robert A. Law and Letters in American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard Universi­ ty Press, 1984. (p. 83) Fichtelberg, Joseph. “Word between Worlds: The Economy of Equiano’s Narrative.” Amer­ ican Literary History 5.3 (Fall 1993): 459–480. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narra­ tives. Westport: Greenwood, 1979. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ——, “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 1–20. Page 17 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History Gould, Philip. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth Century At­ lantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Gray, Thomas R. The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. 1831. In The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, edited by Kenneth S. Greenberg. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1996, 38–58. ——. Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. 1855. Edited by William L. Andrews and Regina E. Mason. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Grimes, William. Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. Written by Himself. 1825. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/ neh/grimes25/grimes25.html Gross, Ariela J. Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Court­ room. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “The Spirit of Trade: Olaudah Equiano’s Conversion, Legal­ ism, and the Merchant’s Life.” African American Review 32.4 (Winter 1998): 635–647. Johnson, Barbara. Persons and Things. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Johnstone, Abraham. Address of Abraham Johnstone, A Black Man, Who Was Hanged at Woodbury, in the County of Glo[u]cester, and State of New Jersey, on Saturday the the [sic] 8th Day of July Last; To the People of Colour. 1797. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/johnstone/johnstone.html Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. 1797. Translated and edited by Mary Gre­ gor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kaplan, Carla. “Narrative Contracts and Emancipatory Readers: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.1 (1993): 93–119. Kazanjian, David. The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Ear­ ly America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man; Who Was Executed at Worcester, Oc­ tober 10, 1768. For a Rape Committed on the Body of One Deborah Metcalfe. 1768. Docu­ menting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/ arthur/arthur.html Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. Edited by Thomas P. Peardon. 1689. Up­ per Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1997. Madison, James, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. 1788. New York: Penguin, 1988. Page 18 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History Mailloux, Stephen. Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Maine, Sir Henry Sumner. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. 1861. London: J. Murray, 1920. (p. 84) Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiographical Practice and SelfIdentity in England, 1591-1791. Stanford University Press, 1996. Mather, Cotton. Tremenda. The Dreadful Sound with which the Wicked Are To Be Thun­ derstruck. In a Sermon Delivered unto a Great Assembly, in which Was Present, a Miser­ able African, Just Going to be Executed for a most Inhumane and Uncommon Murder. 1721. Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 2251. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Vir­ ginia. 1975. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa. But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America. Related by Himself. 1798. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/venture/ venture.html Newman, Richard S., and Roy E. Finkenbine. “Forum: Black Founders.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd Series, 64.1 (January 2007): 83–166. Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. 1853. Edited by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Liter­ ature.” In The Slave’s Narrative, edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 148–175. “Organization.” Liberator. February 21, 1845. Pennington, James W. C. The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in the State of Maryland, United States. 1849. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/penning49/penning49.html Rodensky, Lisa. The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sekora, John. “Black Message/ White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative.” Callaloo 32 (Summer 1987): 482–515. Slotkin, Richard. “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800.” American Quarterly 25.1 (March 1973): 3–31.

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. Suggs, Jon-Christian. Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African-American Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Thomas, Brook. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve. 1835. New York: Bantam-Random House, 2000. Twelvetrees, Harper, ed. The Story of the Life of John Anderson, the Fugitive Slave. 1863. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/ neh/twelvetr/twelvetr.html Wagner, Bryan. Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Watkins, James. Struggles for Freedom; or The Life of James Watkins, Formerly a Slave in Maryland, U. S.; in Which is Detailed a Graphic Account of His Extraordinary Escape from Slavery, Notices of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Sentiments of American Divines on the Subject of Slavery, etc., etc. 1860. Documenting the American South. Accessed July 12, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/watkins/watkins.html Weiner, Mark S. Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

(p. 85)

Williams, Daniel E., comp. Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narra­ tives. Madison: Madison House, 1993. Wong, Edlie L. Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Further Reading Best, Stephen M. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. DeLombard, Jeannine Marie. Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Ferguson, Robert A. The Trial in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gross, Ariela J. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. (p. 86)

Page 20 of 21

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Slave Narratives and U.S. Legal History

Jeannine Marie DeLombard

Jeannine Marie DeLombard is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her most recent study, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (2012) serves as a prequel to her first book, Slavery on Trial: Law, Print, and Abolitionism (2007).

Page 21 of 21

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources

The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources   Marie Jenkins Schwartz The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.007

Abstract and Keywords More than 2000 interviews of former slaves were conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration in the years 1936–1938. In recognition that the last generation of Americans who had experienced slavery firsthand was rapidly dy­ ing off, government officials arranged for folklorists, historians, and other writers to in­ terview the former slaves, who were then in their sixties, seventies, and beyond. Armed with pencils, pens, and paper (some with cameras and recording devices) the federally funded WPA agents fanned out to locate and let the freed people and their descendants tell stories about slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and the changes that occurred thereafter. The WPA slave narratives can be daunting for readers who first encounter them. The informants speak with many different voices about very different topics, but herein lies their value. The diverse voices of former slaves compel historians to think in complex ways about slaves, slaveholders, and slavery. Disparities in their memories of for­ mer slaves force the reader to see the people who were held in bondage as complicated human beings, more than a slave and more than the stereotype that has so often stood in for the men, women, and children who lived in bondage. Because the WPA narratives have been carefully scrutinized by scholars, it may be easier to ferret out problems with these narratives than with other types of sources, and historians who bother to unlayer the voices of the former slaves, their interrogators, and their editors may learn quite a lot about slavery and its aftermath, as well as about historical methodology. Keywords: Works Progress Administration, slaves, slavery, slave narratives, African Americans, history, memory, historical methodology

FOR two decades I have been reading WPA narratives alongside other sources to learn about African American life and culture in the antebellum South. By WPA narratives I mean the interviews with ex-slaves that agents associated with the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration undertook in the years 1936–1938. In recognition that the last generation of Americans who had experienced slavery firsthand was rapidly dying off, government officials arranged for folklorists, historians, and other writers to interview the former slaves, who were then in their sixties, seventies, and be­ Page 1 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources yond. Armed with pencils, pens, and paper (some with cameras and recording devices) the federally funded WPA agents fanned out to locate and let the freed people tell their stories. The reminiscences were typed, sent to headquarters, and housed in federal and state repositories. Part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal intended to lead the country out of the Great Depression, the Writers’ Project was about creating jobs as well as col­ lecting American memories. More than 3000 interviews were conducted in which former slaves and their descendants reflected on slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and the changes that occurred there­ after. The collection remained largely unexplored until the early 1970s when scholars be­ gan listening in earnest to the voices of ordinary Americans. Earlier generations of histo­ rians had focused on elites, but a cosmic shift in the attention of historians now made everyone the subject of historical inquiry. The emergence of civil rights and black power movements had furthered interest in race relations and racism, which led in turn to a growing interest in the voices of black people. Responding to increased curiosity about the African American experience, Greenwood Press decided to publish the WPA narra­ tives, under the editorship of George P. Rawick, as The American Slave: A Composite Au­ tobiography. Nineteen volumes appeared in 1972, 22 more in the years 1977 and 1979. After the narratives appeared in print, scholars began probing them to understand their value for telling American history. At first they focused on weaknesses rather than (p. 90) strengths. Critics maintained that the former slaves represented in the collection were at once disproportionately too old, too young, too diverse, or not diverse enough. They com­ plained that the former slaves were too elderly at the time of the interviews to recall slav­ ery accurately, that too many of them had been children at emancipation and thus had not experienced the full weight of slavery, that ex-slaves from certain states (such as Arkansas) were overly represented in the collection while former slaves from other areas were nearly absent, and that certain subjects came up so infrequently as to render any quantitative analysis on the subject suspect. Well meaning and talented scholars employed considerable skills to identify these and other problems. Their efforts coincided with the emergence of a postmodernist movement that insisted on deconstructing (decoding) documents to uncover the hidden meaning be­ hind the words. The literature produced by postmodernists and scholars who scrutinized the WPA narratives together forms a cautionary tale about the challenges of interpreting literary evidence of any type. Concerns raised by this literature include, in addition to those already listed, the number of years between the end of slavery and the time the in­ terviews were recorded (about 70); cultural barriers that existed between the writers and the former slaves (class and race especially); the unwillingness or inability of writers to ask all of the questions formulated by officials of the Writers’ Project (or conversely the willingness of writers to mindlessly stick to these questions); the largely unsuccessful at­ tempt of the writers to record the narratives in a dialect that did not so much reflect the speech of the informants as expectations about their speech on the part of the writers and officials overseeing the project; the willingness of writers and other officials to edit, censure, or change the stories told by the former slaves; the brevity of most interviews; Page 2 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources and the difficult or confusing circumstances under which the narratives were recorded. (Many of the people interviewed during the Great Depression were suffering from impov­ erishment; some believed the WPA agents were there to give them a helping hand in ex­ change for their cooperation.) When presented together, the rich literature about the WPA narratives and the oral histo­ ries themselves offer a way to understand historical methodology, as well as slave life and culture. When I introduce the criticism to students, inevitably one of them asks why other types of documentary evidence (i.e., slaveholders’ correspondence, memoirs, diaries) have not been met with an equal amount of skepticism on the part of historians. I, of course, point out that all types of historical evidence should be scrutinized carefully by historians and other scholars who use them. One shelf in my office, as a matter of fact, is full of books with such titles as After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, A Student’s Guide to History, and Historians’ Fallacies, all of which have in common discussions on evaluating the authenticity of and interpreting historical documents. Still, the question persists: Why have the WPA narratives been singled out for what seems like special scrutiny? At least part of the answer lies in the reluctance of historians to allow black voices to enter the historical record. Attention to the WPA narratives (even questions about their authenticity) both reflected and reinforced the scholarly interest in black life and culture that corresponded with the development and evolution of the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth (p. 91) centu­ ry. For many Americans, activism to combat racial prejudice and end discrimination led to questions about the past. Where had injustice originated? The answer pointed to the nation’s historical embrace of slavery. Historians from an earlier era had rejected the idea of slavery as a problem in American history. During the early twentieth century, scholars like Ulrich B. Phillips wrote about en­ slaved people as happy but irresponsible dependents of kind and responsible owners. W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, and Carter Woodson contested this way of thinking in the pages of The Journal of Negro History and elsewhere, but before the civil rights era few historians were prepared to listen to them. Mainstream historians were reluctant not only to hear the views of black scholars but also the voices of the black Americans who had felt the full weight of bondage. It was as though “for many, the memory of slavery in the United States was too important to be left to the black men and women who experi­ enced it directly,” according to the editors of Remembering Slavery, a collection of select­ ed WPA interviews (Berlin, Fauvreau, and Miller, xiii). It wasn’t solely the WPA narratives that were ignored. Mainstream historians were also leaving unexamined other documentary evidence that reflected a black perspective. For decades investigators of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings gave more credence to the testimony of Jefferson’s white descendants than to his black ones. DNA tests have proven that neither Peter nor Samuel Carr (Jefferson’s nephews) fathered Eston Hemings, as two of Jefferson’s white grandchildren claimed. Yet Jefferson scholars long disputed Jefferson’s paternity of Sally Hemings’s son by citing the Page 3 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources white testimony. These same scholars dismissed testimony by the slaves of Monticello as unreliable. At first, interest in the African American experience reflected a desire on the part of his­ torians to help the nation come to terms with what had been done to people held in bondage. Social justice seemed to demand an acknowledgment of the pathology of slav­ ery. Kenneth M. Stampp and Stanley M. Elkins both wrote path-breaking histories about how the institution had damaged African Americans. Neither consulted sources created from the perspective of slaves. As the viewpoint of historians widened gradually to include slaves and other nonelites, they began to perceive of slaves not only as victims but also as actors or agents of change. John W. Blassingame and others argued that there were limits to the slaveholder’s power and that enslaved people had found ways to form communities and shape their lives out of the sight and without the direction of slaveholders. The new histo­ ries they wrote cited sources created from the perspective of slaves, but not necessarily the WPA narratives. Despite his commitment to using slave sources, Blassingame thought the WPA interviews were tainted by problems inherent in their collection. Blassingame and other scholars writing from slave sources didn’t ask so much whether slaves had shaped their own history but rather to what extent they had done so. The world the slaves had made for themselves suddenly became the center of an extended de­ bate between Eugene D. Genovese, Herbert G. Gutman, and their followers. For Gen­ ovese, the relationship between slaveholders and slaves was best understood in familial terms. He argued that the two were caught up in a complex association that did (p. 92) not allow one to act without effect on the other. Slaveholders spoke of slaves as members of the family and promised protection and direction, along with food, clothing, and shel­ ter. In return, slaves owed labor and loyalty. Slaves, Genovese said, were so closely bond­ ed with owners that they bought into the idea of mutual rights as a way of achieving a level of material support necessary for survival and family security. Although these were never assured, enslaved people signaled acceptance of the slaveholder’s authority to ex­ tract some advantages for themselves. Their accommodation to the system prevented them from mounting a meaningful or successful resistance to their fate. Gutman dis­ agreed: Cultural space existed wherein slaves could form a critique not only of the condi­ tions of slavery but also of slave society and its power relations. The family in particular, whether biological or foster, offered a space where young slaves could learn about the limits of the owners’ power and establish relationships apart from owners. The WPA nar­ ratives were cited by historians on both sides of the debate. The dispute between Genovese and Gutman invigorated the study of slave life and cul­ ture. Some historians defended or refuted Genovese’s concept of paternalism while oth­ ers explored the structure and function of the slave household and community and the cultural practices of Africans and African Americans. Of the latter, none has been more in­ fluential than Ira Berlin, who took issue with the debate’s static view of slavery and its emphasis on the antebellum era. For Berlin, enslaved people did not stand outside of the Page 4 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources arc of history but rather shaped and experienced historical forces. First in an article in the American Historical Review and later in Many Thousands Gone, Berlin demonstrated the importance of time and place and demography for the evolution of African and African American culture. Berlin’s scholarship spawned work by others on the nature and mean­ ing of the African American experience. Interest in the WPA narratives proliferated among historians working in the antebellum and Civil War eras. To be sure, the voices of former slaves were filtered through the pens and pencils, type­ writers, and recording devices of others, but scholars worked hard to tease authentic voices out of the narratives using the same methodology applied to other documentary evidence. Lawrence W. Levine, Jacqueline Jones, Deborah Gray White, Peter Kolchin, Ann Patton Malone, Stephanie J. Shaw, Leslie A. Schwalm, Sharla M. Fett, Stephanie M.E. Camp, Daina Ramey Berry, and others searched the narratives and pushed scholarship on slave life and culture in new directions. I, too, joined in the effort. This essay is not in­ tended as a defense of my own scholarship or that of anyone else. The literature that has resulted from consultation of the narratives speaks for itself.

Value of the WPA Narratives One value of the WPA narratives is that they have permitted scholars to listen to a greater number of voices than would otherwise have been the case. Historians depend on written records, which privileges the viewpoint of the literate, particularly the elite literate, whose families have had both the means and the will to preserve family letters and other (p. 93) documents. Given the paucity of sources written from other perspectives, histori­ ans can ill afford to ignore any. Instead they need to scrutinize each document to ensure an interpretation consistent with the author’s mentalité and to convey clearly to the read­ er whose view is reflected in the resulting scholarship. Earlier historians failed to do this and instead accepted white sources at face value and presented the bias contained there­ in as truth. The so-called Dunning school of reconstruction history, for example, followed the lead of Columbia University professor William A. Dunning, who sympathized with the thinking of former slaveholders: Blacks were inferior to whites and therefore should not be allowed to vote or otherwise participate in civic life. Dunning’s thinking predominated throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The lesson to be learned from this isn’t that historians should abandon white sources in writing about race or race relations, or any other subject, but rather that they should identify the perspective of the sources consulted. Historians have a professional obliga­ tion to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of their research, including their choice to include or exclude particular voices. Documents created by white people of the antebellum and Civil War eras reflect the prejudices of the day. Standing alone, they can do little more than express the biases of the people who created them and reinforce nega­ tive stereotyping.

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources In researching the nature of relationships between enslaved men and women in antebel­ lum South Carolina, Emily West found the WPA narratives to be of “vital importance in moving beyond the stereotypical conceptions of [slaves] found in white manuscript mate­ rials.” Through the interviews, she also uncovered information “that would otherwise be almost completely hidden from view” because documents created by white people did not address particular events or circumstances of concern to enslaved couples. The WPA nar­ ratives enlarged her understanding of slaves’ lives in ways that slaveholders did not fath­ om (West, 5, 7). Because the WPA narratives have been scrutinized so carefully, it may be easier to ferret out problems with these sources than with others. Slaveholder accounts are rife with tales of slaves who murdered their masters, poisoned children, or displayed ignorance so great that they could not learn to use a wheelbarrow. Historians know that while some of these stories might be true, others are a product of slaveholder imagination. As with slave sources, slaveholder accounts must be unlayered to understand what social or cultural circumstances prompted slave owners to make such claims, but scholars have not created a specific literature about how to decipher documents created by slaveholders. No one source or type of source gives a complete picture of the past on its own, and his­ torians do best when they recognize that all sources are problematic and need to be inter­ preted carefully. The WPA narratives are unexceptional in this regard. The methods histo­ rians have developed for interrogating other sources work equally well with the WPA nar­ ratives. Historians routinely compare one source to another and look for internal incon­ sistencies within a single document as well as contradictions in different types of docu­ ments. When inconsistencies are found, they do not necessarily dismiss a source or sources out of hand. If they did, they might end up with few, if any, left. Instead they look for ways to explain the discrepancies and tease out those parts of a document that (p. 94) can withstand careful examination. When confronted with conflicting sources, historians can find new evidence to resolve the conflict, present both points of view, or identify the bias of particular sources, keeping in mind that understanding bias, or point-of-view, is important to understanding the past. When it comes to the WPA narratives, have historians been too zealous in their criticism? Clearly fine histories have been written without them. But the implication of rejecting these sources and accepting others is that somehow the others are more legitimate. His­ torians who have complained about the way in which the WPA narratives were gathered, for example, seldom acknowledge that other types of sources suffer from similar, even identical, problems. Take one type of source commonly consulted by historians writing about the Old South: the correspondence of an elite woman. Someone first decides whether to save her letters. The decision to save them may be accompanied by another decision about which letters (or parts of letters) to preserve. At times it is the author or a family member who makes the decision and selects certain letters or parts of letters (but not others) for preservation. When portions are ripped or blacked out, it is not always ap­ parent that the action was deliberate, but it might have been. Even when a full set of cor­ respondence survives, self-censorship occurs on the part of the letter writer who decides Page 6 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources what goes in and what stays out. Self-censorship helps ensure that the writer’s thoughts and behavior appear in the best possible light. The omission of information is particularly difficult for historians to discover, and conventions of letter writing further obscure the truth of the record of correspondence. Slave mistress and first lady Martha Dandridge Custis Washington famously burned her correspondence with George, letters that must have numbered in the hundreds. The re­ sult has been a deficiency of evidence about how Martha got along with George and how she interacted with her household slaves day-to-day. Historians for the most part have as­ sumed that the nation’s first first-couple got along well, and that Martha was an exem­ plary slave mistress. Yet all historians know for sure is that there is a dearth of informa­ tion on either subject. The collection known as the WPA narratives suffers from problems associated with compi­ lations of letters. Interviewers decided which questions to ask and which answers to record. The former slaves also exercised self-censorship, either by omitting information, answering part of a query, or veering off topic, sometimes with seemingly nonsensical asides. Conventions associated with interactions between people, including people of dif­ ferent race or class, ensured censorship of topics deemed too private, too dangerous, or too inconsequential to broach. Yet I know of no historian who would turn down a chance to examine a newly discovered cache of Martha Washington’s letters, should one be found, on the grounds that she had selected only certain ones for preservation and en­ gaged in self-censorship and conventions of etiquette as she wrote them. Scholars using the WPA narratives have tended to read them along with other sources, in­ cluding slaveholder correspondence, plantation records, farm journals, medical journals, physician’s accounts, contemporary fiction, agricultural journals, and court documents. Each of these other sources has its own set of problems, but none has fostered a peculiar literature warning of pitfalls in using the source. “For all of the problems of (p. 95) planta­ tion records and legal sources,” Stephanie M.H. Camp says, “historians of slavery tend to focus their methodological critiques on the interviews of ex-slaves.” When she wrote about enslaved women’s everyday lives, she built “a story out of…agreements and com­ mon accounts” from the interviews and other types of sources, “as well as from the in­ sights offered by their differences” (Camp, 8). When I was writing Born in Bondage, I had the luxury of choosing many different types of sources to uncover the way in which slaves and slaveholders in three regions of the South tried to shape the lives of enslaved children. In addition to the WPA narratives and sets of plantation records that included diaries, farm journals, recipe books, and correspon­ dence, I was fortunate to have access to interviews conducted with former slaveholders of Alabama and their family members. Overseen by H. C. Nixon in 1912–1913, these inter­ views had much in common with the WPA interviews, although the slaveholders’ memo­ ries were gathered through a written questionnaire rather than through face-to-face con­ tact. Nixon’s survey questions, designed to elicit information about slavery, were similar to those that would be posed by WPA officials a little more than two decades later. Both Page 7 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources surveys inquired about material conditions of living (housing, clothing, and food), work, child care, family relationship, including courtship and marriage, religion, and leisure ac­ tivities. Responses on these and other topics reflected the racial prejudices of the time in which they were recorded, but former slaveholders and former slaves tended to agree on the details concerning the day-to-day activities of slaves and their conditions of living. Both sets of respondents talked about slaves working from sun up to sun down, for exam­ ple. Both sets of respondents spoke of slaveholders who interfered with family life by sell­ ing slaves or by recognizing or refusing to recognize unions between enslaved men and women as marriages. The two sets of respondents differed mainly in their interpretations of such agreed upon facts. Former slaveholders and their descendants described the slaves’ hours of work as light or nontaxing, but former slaves recalled that adults worked hard. Former slaveholders described slaves as emotionally unattached to family members and unaffected by separation, while former slaves described time in slavery as difficult, made especially sorrowful by the parting of family members. By considering both sets of data, I was able to understand better both sets of actors in the paternalistic drama that characterized antebellum slavery. As a writer, I needed to understand the perspectives of both—to be sympathetic not in the sense of approving the workings of the slave system or commiserating with the plight of the slaves but in the sense of telling the story from both points of view. Although sources were different in the other regions of the South that I studied (central Virginia and the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia), I made a concerted effort to uncover sources from the perspectives of slaveholders and slaves in those places as well. I like to think my work is richer for it. The WPA narratives have proven to be particularly important for studying the lives of black women. Deborah Gray White relied heavily on the narratives in completing her pio­ neering study, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. For her, the scarcity of other resources available for the study of enslaved women rendered the narra­ tives of crucial importance. They were “the richest, indeed almost the only black (p. 96) female source dealing with female slavery,” she wrote in the introduction to the book (White, 24). Dorothy Sterling found reading the WPA interviews to be a revelation: “In folk idiom rich in metaphor, they recall the minutiae of a slave woman’s life: her work in field and kitchen, child care and child loss, sexual assault and loving family life” (Sterling, 4). Amrita Chakrabarti Myers used the WPA narratives to demonstrate that enslaved women had been wrongly excluded from discussions about resistance to slavery. Enslaved women, she found, embedded acts of resistance to slavery within “the fabric of everyday life.” For Myers, the issue wasn’t solely about what women did but also what they thought. The WPA narratives exposed, in her words, “slave women’s consciousness” (My­ ers, 145). Sharla M. Fett, whose attention to black women’s work as healers has altered the way historians think about medical practice in the South, has labeled the WPA collections “in­ valuable” for the study of African American life and culture. Fett did not use the narra­ tives indiscriminately in writing her award-winning study of healing, health, and power in the slave South. She found them of little help, for example, in understanding antebellum attitudes toward conjure because of the rapid change that occurred between the antebel­ Page 8 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources lum era and the time the interviews were collected in the twentieth century (Fett, 209n68, 226n52). Fett’s extensive knowledge gained from the WPA narratives and other sources allowed her to render such a judgment and use the narratives to unearth features of healing in the slave quarter that otherwise might have remained unknown and un­ knowable. The WPA narratives have given voice to people who otherwise would not be heard, en­ slaved children as well as women. In doing so, they have expanded our historical con­ sciousness. By enlarging knowledge beyond the perspective of one person, one group, historians help to ensure that America’s history is inclusive of all people. Historians don’t replicate the past but rather represent it. The way we represent it matters. By incorporat­ ing all Americans into our history, we gain a broader understanding that “lifts us above the familiar” and makes us richer for the experience, according to John Lewis Gaddis in The Landscape of History (Gaddis, 5). Scholars who tap the WPA narratives for information on slavery and its aftermath will find them particularly rich for uncovering the emotional content of slave life and culture. No other sources adequately describe slavery as a lived experience. Slave trading records, farm journals, and letters of slave owners mention slave sales, even from time to time make note of protests on the part of slaves who, to avoid sale, ran away when they could or wept and begged to be kept near a loved one when they could not. But slaveholder pa­ pers do not convey how individuals and families experienced the ordeal. “It’s hard to be­ lieve dat dese things did happen, but dey did,” Carolina Hunter once told a WPA inter­ viewer after she had recounted some of slavery’s worst hardships from the perspective of one who lived them (Perdue Jr., Barden, and Phillips, eds., 149–151). Abolitionists, includ­ ing former slaves who penned memoirs of their time in slavery with or without the help of others, attempted to convey the emotional terrain of slave life during the decades prior to emancipation, but it is the voices recounted in the WPA narratives that let the modern reader glimpse the meaning of slavery for the multitude of persons held in captivity. Former slaves express more than pain in the WPA narratives. The comfort of know­ ing that someone cared for them is there as well, particularly in the narratives of those who were held captive in childhood. What gave enslaved children (or anyone else in bondage) the strength to endure slavery’s worst features? For children it was often par­ ents, particularly mothers, who might cite a poem or prayer or teach a lesson about sur­ vival through example. Assistance also came from people who acted as foster parents or lent a hand to parents. Most of these people were enslaved themselves, but occasionally owners took time to reassure children that they would be safe. Looking back, it’s clear that one adult could make a difference in a child’s life. Relationships mattered. People in bondage were more than master’s slave in the field or mistress’s cook in the kitchen. En­ slaved people held identities as mother, father, sister, brother, friend, and teacher. The WPA narratives help us know how slaves defined roles of kinship and friendship and how they carried out tasks of daily living. (p. 97)

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources The WPA narratives, like other sources, can be read for purposes other than that intend­ ed by either the officials who oversaw the project or the people who asked and answered questions. Neither the interviewers nor the respondents can restrict the way historians use testimony. WPA agents were not advised to ask point blank how enslaved people viewed particular actions of owners, but by reading between the lines historians can draw inferences from the narratives on this subject and others, including relationships between slaves and others in the neighborhood. Former slaves interviewed by WPA agents talked not only about their own lives but also commented on the actions of others: owners and their families, visitors, slave traders, neighbors, physicians, peddlers and other itinerates who came and went, and (during the Civil War) soldiers and their followers. Historians can use the WPA interviews to learn about how enslaved people understood the actions of these people and their place in the social network that made up southern society. For ex­ ample, historians have long talked about the treatment of slaves by their owners and tac­ tics (punishments and rewards) used to keep them in line. They have poured over planta­ tion records to learn how many whippings occurred and how often they had to occur to make the slave system work. The slave narratives offer a different way to learn how and whether enslaved people internalized these lessons. How did slaves understand their own punishments? What motivated owners and others to punish (or reward for that matter), according to the slaves? Unfortunately, few historians have ventured so far as to allow slaves to comment on specific slaveholder behavior beyond a few generalities from the narratives or observations about particular owners. The WPA narratives are valuable for what they do not say as well as what is included. Be­ fore delving into the narratives, a researcher can review the questions that agents were supposed to ask. It’s clear that certain narratives were shaped by directives from the main office, which limited the subject matter deemed appropriate for discussion. Other narratives veer quite a bit from the expected norm. A careful reading of the narratives demonstrates which questions were seldom explored, either because the interviewer wasn’t comfortable asking or because the former slave didn’t want to respond. These si­ lences can be analyzed. For example, interviewers were expected to ask ex-slaves about their use of alcohol, yet few narratives mention its use. Those interview subjects who talk about alcohol do so in (p. 98) different ways, including its medicinal use (mostly by women), its recreational use (mostly by men), and its incorporation into holiday obser­ vances. Many planters assumed (and subsequently many historians have assumed) that enslaved people who got their hands on a little money spent it on alcohol, but little evi­ dence of this exists in the slave narratives. Instead, the narratives reveal men and women working beyond the expectations of owners to earn a bit of cash or credit that could be spent on items needed by family members. Readers of the slave narratives will quickly encounter fanciful elements inserted by slaves into their recollections. A number of interviewees claimed to have met Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis in person, for example. Still others talked about the intervention of spirits into the daily lives of owners or slaves or discussed impossible feats like walking across the ocean. Perhaps the most interesting fact about these stories is the refusal of the story teller to concede to the interviewer the right to shape the person’s own narra­ Page 10 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources tive. This is what WPA officials tried to do when they designed the survey and what inter­ viewers aimed for when they selected specific questions to ask from the list provided by headquarters. Some fanciful stories are just that. (After all, WPA agents wanted to know about folktales.) Other inventive stories represent deliberate attempts on the part of the former slaves to reshape the WPA project. Perhaps the individual didn’t want to answer certain questions, didn’t want to participate in the interview, or simply enjoyed telling a good story. This is one facet of the narratives that requires further investigation: Some of the fanciful stories told by former slaves might have been symbolic, some might have rep­ resented diversions, and some might have been told in jest or to get the better of govern­ ment-paid agents. No one knows because the advice of many historians has been to dis­ card these interviews as unreliable. The WPA slave narratives can be daunting for readers who first encounter them. The in­ formants, as Robin D.G. Kelley explains, “do not all speak in one voice, nor do they share one big collective memory” (Berlin, Faureau, and Miller, eds., xlvii). Former slave James Lucas phrased the idea this way: “All had diffe’nt ways o’ thinkin’ ‘bout” freedom (David­ son and Lytle, 201). Herein lies their value. Rather than to detract from their worth, the different ways of thinking enumerated in the narratives aids understanding of the past. The diverse voices of former slaves compel historians to think in complex ways about slaves, slaveholders, and slavery. Disparities in the memories of former slaves force the reader to see the people who were held in bondage as complicated human beings, more than a slave and more than the stereotype that has so often stood in for the men, women, and children who lived in bondage.

References Greenwood Press (Westwood, CT) has published the WPA narratives under the title The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, ed. George P. Rawick, as four sets of vol­ umes: Series 1, Vols. 1–7, 1972; Series 2, Vols. 8–19, 1972; Supplement, Series 1, Vols. 1– 12, 1977; and Supplement, Series 2, Vols. 1–10, 1979 . Narratives from Virginia were published separately under the title Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia ExSlaves, ed. Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips (Char­ lottesville: University Press

(p. 99)

of Virginia, 1976) . The WPA narratives are widely ac­

cessible. Many are available online through the Library of Congress. The LOC’s collection is free for those who have access to the Internet: http://memor.loc.gov/ammem/ snhtml/. Some of the WPA narratives have been gathered and published under other ti­ tles, for example T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker have edited a volume called The WPA Oklahoma Narratives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996) . Selected narra­ tives were edited and first published in 1945 by folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin under the ti­ tle Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press) . Sound recordings of interviews with former slaves (both original recordings and actors reading WPA narratives) are available. See Ira Berlin, Marc Faureau, and Steven F. Miller, eds. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences (New York: The New Press, 1998) . The federal project to conduct interviews with exPage 11 of 13

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources slaves began in 1934 under the auspices of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the predecessor agency to the WPA. Responses by former slaveholders to the H.C. Nixon Questionnaire on Slavery are located in the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery. The literature about the WPA narratives includes Paul D. Escott, “The Art and Science of Reading WPA Slave Narratives,” C. Vann Woodward, “History from Slave Sources,” and John W. Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” in Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, eds., The Slave Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) ; “Introduction,” in Perdue Jr., Barden, and Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat; Rawick, ed., The American Slave, Series 1, Vol. 1: From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, pp. xviii–xix ; Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twen­ tieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970): 6– 17 ; David Thomas Bailey, “A Divided Prism: Two Sources on Black Testimony on Slav­ ery,” Journal of Southern History 46 (August 1980): 381–404 ; and Donna J. Spindel, “As­ sessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsidered,” Journal of Interdis­ ciplinary History 27 (Autumn 1996): 247–261 . For a list of questions that WPA interview­ ers were expected to ask informants, see the appendix of Perdue Jr., Barden, and Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat. The literature about interpreting documentary evidence includes James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005) ; Jules R. Benjamin, A Student’s Guide to HistoryA Student’s Guide to History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010) , David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fal­ lacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1970) ; and John Lewis Gaddis, Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Ox­ ford University Press, 2002) . On historians’ use of black and white testimony regarding the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, see Francis D. Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson: Reputa­ tion and Legacy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), pp. 172, 186

and

Clarence E. Walker, Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sal­ ly Hemings (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2009) . I do not intend this piece to be a critique of scholars who have chosen not to use the WPA narratives. These include Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage, 1956) ; Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) ; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) ; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), see espe­ cially p. 226n24 .

(p. 100)

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The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources Histories that have cited the WPA narratives include: Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Fami­ ly in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976) ; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974) ; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)

and Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Mi­

grations (New York: Viking, 2010) ; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Con­ sciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1977) ; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1985) ; Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985) ; Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belnap Press, 1987) ; Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Fam­ ily and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) ; Stephanie J. Shaw, “Mothering under Slavery in the Ante­ bellum South, in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Renine Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994)

and Shaw, “Using

the WPA Narratives to Study the Impact of the Great Depression,” Journal of Southern History 69 (August 2003), 623–658 ; Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997) ; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)

and Schwartz,

Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006) ; Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) ; Stephanie M.H. Camp, Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) ; Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007) ; Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004) ; Dorothy Ster­ ling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth-Century (New York: W.W. Nor­ ton, 1984) ; Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, “‘Sisters in Arms’: Slave Women’s Resistance to Slavery in the United States,” Past Imperfect 5 (1996): 141–174 .

Marie Jenkins Schwartz

Marie Jenkins Schwartz is professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston. Her research focuses on the history of slavery and its legacy, especially the experiences of women and children. Schwartz is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and numerous other awards.

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews

The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Ad­ ministration Interviews   Sharon Ann Musher The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.004

Abstract and Keywords Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a subset of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), recorded thousands of interviews with exslaves. The Slave Narrative Collection that emerged consists of autobiographical memories that are indispensable in reconstructing the world that slaves—especially illiterate ones—made apart from their masters. Like all sources, however, the narratives are complicated. Most of the exslaves were octogenarians or older when interviewed and children when en­ slaved. They told their stories to relief workers who were primarily out-of-work, southern, Caucasian writers, librarians, and office clerks in the context of the Jim Crow South. This essay examines the origins and development of the oral-history collection to reveal some of the competing agendas shaping its formation. It offers specific techniques to overcome its problems of authenticity, bias, memory, and candor. And it suggests avenues for future research. Keywords: slave narrative, slave interview, Federal Writers’ Project, FWP interview, Works Progress Administra­ tion, WPA interview, John Lomax, Benjamin Botkin, Sterling Brown, George Rawick, oral history, autobiographical memory, memory studies

IN a wave of experimental programs during the Great Depression, the federal govern­ ment paid relief workers to interview former slaves. Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers’ Project, a subset of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), recorded thou­ sands of ex-slaves’ reflections about bondage and freedom. The WPA interviews document the experiences of ex-slaves, most of whom were octogenarians or older when inter­ viewed and children when enslaved. They told their stories to relief workers who were primarily out-of-work, southern, Caucasian writers, librarians, and office clerks. The cli­ mate of race relations in the South, the rules of racial etiquette, and the financial con­ straints of an elderly poor population enduring hard times shaped the narratives pro­ duced by this initiative. Not surprising, problems of authenticity, memory, and candor haunt the accounts.

Page 1 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews Nevertheless, the Slave Narrative Collection preserves the memories of thousands of illit­ erate and otherwise undocumented former slaves in something that approximates their own words and offers invaluable insights into their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The interviews are diverse and wide ranging, portraying everything from the growing self-consciousness and cultural development of a people who resisted their enslavement to the acquiescence of a seemingly contented lot. Like all sources, they must be analyzed closely; however, they are indispensible in reconstructing the world that slaves made apart from their masters and illustrating the ways they resisted white domination. The WPA collection stands out from other slave narratives because of its size. Although the exact number of interviews with ex-slaves is difficult to ascertain because of the mul­ tiple places where state editors deposited them following the project’s conclusion, rough­ ly 4,000 WPA slave narratives have been documented, and more than (p. 102) 3,500 of those have been published.1 The WPA ex-slave interviews constitute the bulk of all record­ ed commentaries, autobiographies, narratives and interviews with former slaves. They al­ so incorporate almost 4% of the still-surviving freed-slave population in the mid-1930s (an adjusted estimate based on Yetman 1967, 534). Although the WPA slave narratives are voluminous, they are not necessarily representa­ tive of the former slave population. Federal writers did not scientifically sample ex-slaves. Instead, they frequently interviewed those they knew, who knew someone they knew, or who lived relatively near to them. According to historian Norman Yetman, the collection overrepresents urban areas, although most elderly blacks were rural (1984, 188). The ex­ treme longevity of the former slaves interviewed also suggests that the WPA ex-slaves were atypical and perhaps received better treatment than their enslaved peers. While slaves born in 1850 typically lived fewer than 50 years, scholar John Blassingame points out that almost two-thirds of the WPA interviewees were 80 or older (1977, li). Still, the WPA ex-slave interviews are more representative than many other published slave narratives. The collection includes narratives of slaves from wide-ranging occupa­ tions, plantation size, and type of master. Rather than being limited to fugitive slaves from the upper South, as is the case in many written slave narratives, the WPA collection includes the memories and perceptions of individuals who had been enslaved or originally lived in 17 former slave states, eight free states, three sections of the territories that would later become states, and Great Britain. Like most African Americans prior to Eman­ cipation, the vast majority of them had lived in the Deep South. The WPA interviews also distinguish themselves based on their incorporation of the illiter­ ate and working class. This discrepancy not only draws attention to a previously under­ documented population but also uncovers narratives that differ from what the literary scholar Charles J. Heglar describes as classical male “narratives of transformation” em­ bodied in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography (2001 1–19). Instead of emphasizing an in­ dividual and linear ascent from slavery to freedom, the WPA narratives highlight the com­ plicated relationship between bondage and freedom that many former slaves experi­ enced. The interviewees tend to situate their experiences within the context of their Page 2 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews friends’ and family’s accounts, as well as accentuating the role that community and cul­ ture played in preserving their identity during slavery. They also recount their current economic troubles and question how free they are as largely elderly southern blacks en­ during the depths of the Great Depression. In addition to emphasizing new narrative structures, the WPA slave collection further sets itself apart through its gender inclusivity. Roughly half of the collection records women’s voices. In contrast, Blassingame contended that black women penned less than 12% of written slave accounts (xli). A widely accepted opposition to women speaking in public and an assumption that women were submissive and domestic meant that most abolition­ ists pursued male fugitive slaves, encouraging them to speak on the lecture circuit and then to write and publish their recollections of slavery’s hardships. By interviewing for­ mer slaves regardless of their literacy or abolitionist tendencies, the federal writers creat­ ed a richer record than other published slave narratives. This essay proposes a tentative framework for analyzing the Slave Narrative Col­ lection, with the aim of maximizing its rich potential while lessening its complications. It examines the origins and development of the collection to reveal some of the competing agendas shaping the collection. It then analyzes the WPA narratives according to four (p. 103)

problems they pose to researchers—authenticity, bias, memory, and candor—offering techniques to overcome such challenges. Finally, it suggests avenues for future research on the collection.

History of the Slave Narrative Collection By the late 1920s and 1930s, when efforts to interview former slaves began in earnest, a racist narrative of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction had become paradigmatic under the influence of southern historian U. B. Phillips. Relying on sources created by slave owners and aristocrats, Phillips argued that slavery was a benign institution that civilized blacks. To counter his interpretation, scholars working at all-black colleges and universities in the South turned to former slaves. Collectively, Yetman reported that they gathered 550 interviews (1967, 540–541). In 1934, historian Lawrence Reddick, who had interviewed ex-slaves as a student at Fisk University, approached one of the first agencies that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established to address unemployment, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and proposed hiring black college graduates to interview the remaining ex-slave population. Between September and July, Reddick hired twelve black interviewers in Indi­ ana and Kentucky who interviewed 250 former slaves. But FERA cut funding to the project after less than a year because, as Yetman concluded, of problems with its train­ ing, administration, and finances (Yetman 1967, 540–541). The prospect of interviewing the dwindling population of freed slaves nevertheless re­ mained compelling. In 1936, without prompting from the national office of the Writers’ Project, federal writers in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Page 3 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews and Virginia spontaneously began to interview ex-slaves. The narratives they submitted to Washington, D.C., especially those collected by federal writer Zora Neale Hurston in Florida, captured the attention and enthusiasm of national administrators. That April, folklorist John Lomax formally initiated the Slave Narrative Collection when he sent a 20question interview script to the Writers’ Project’s state directors to “get the Negro inter­ ested in talking about the days of slavery” (Yetman 1967, 548). Lomax asked federal writ­ ers to gather information about the slave world, in terms of their treatment by masters, their religious experiences, and their memories of the Civil War and Emancipation. As a folklorist, he was particularly interested in recording the former slaves’ folkways, stories, and songs. In his interview script he wrote: “Can you tell a funny story you have heard or something funny that happened to you? Tell about the ghosts you have seen” (Musher 2001, 8). The difference in tone and content is marked between Lomax’s initial question­ naire and two others that appear to have been written by director of the Negro Affairs Committee Sterling Brown and folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin while Lomax was on a 90day furlough. On July 30, three months after Lomax distributed his interview script, direc­ tor of the Writers’ Project Henry Alsberg sent a new version to regional directors. It pref­ (p. 104)

aced Lomax’s questions with ten additional ones focused on former slaves’ awareness, or­ ganization of, and response to slave rebellions, Reconstruction, black suffrage, political office holding, and secret societies (Musher 2001, 9–10). An even more detailed and polit­ ically assertive interview script was distributed shortly thereafter. This one contained 333 questions intended to serve as a guide for interviewing ex-slaves. Queries addressed the punishment and sale of slaves; their experiences of sexual intercourse (among slaves, with masters, conjugal and nonconjugal), marriage, childbirth (including abortion, mis­ carriage, and contraception), divorce, and death; the treatment of “mulatto or near-white babies” and those “thought to be the master’s”; education, religion, songs, and dances; interactions with Native Americans, Creoles, and slaves born in the West Indies or Africa; responses to southern racial etiquette; intraracial distinctions based on gender, pigmenta­ tion, and occupation; distinctions concerning the work and punishment of men versus women; and experiences with the Ku Klux Klan, suffrage, education, and religion after emancipation (Perdue et al. 1976, 367–376). A close reading of the interviews with ex-slaves conducted in Mississippi reveals that most interviewers used only Lomax’s initial interview script. Some interviewers used both that script and also Brown and Botkin’s addendum, at times returning to the same former slaves to ask them the second set of questions. None of the narratives, however, appears to have used the extensive third interview script (Musher 2001, 12). Even the all-black unit of federal writers in Virginia does not appear to have drawn questions from the longer questionnaire, which was found among the papers of the unit’s director, Roscoe Lewis, a chemistry professor at the all-black Hampton Institute. Instead, those under Lewis’s supervision probed the former slaves’ feelings regarding slavery and freedom, asking them how slavery helped or hindered them after Emancipation (Perdue et al. 1976, xxxvi). Page 4 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews New Deal administrators always intended to publish the Slave Narrative Collection. The Federal Writers’ Project needed to prove its productivity to justify its existence. In fact, historian Jerrold Hirsch argues that federal writers largely stopped collecting interviews with ex-slaves by 1939 because budget cuts and political turmoil forced them to focus on the publication of state guides over more potentially controversial and less immediately publishable projects (2003, 138–139). In 1941, Botkin collected and organized the rough­ ly 2,300 interviews that federal writers had sent to Washington, D.C. and deposited them in the Library of Congress’ Manuscript Division. Four years later, he edited a volume of the narratives aimed to popularize the collection (1945). But until the 1970s, scholars rarely approached the interviews. Because of their quest for objectivity, academics remained uncomfortable with oral history. They feared that the in­ terviews were unreliable because of the nostalgia that peppered them and the loss of memory by the aging former slaves interviewed. Advances in social, oral, and (p. 105) women’s history in the 1970s, however, led researchers to reconsider the Slave Narrative Collection. If scholars began collecting interviews with former slaves to counter U. B. Phillips’s inter­ pretation of slavery at the beginning of the twentieth century, they rediscovered and be­ gan to mine those interviews later in the century in response to another scholar’s concep­ tion of slavery: Stanley Elkins. According to Elkins (1959), slavery was so individually and socially debilitating that the enslaved literally could not rebel. In order to disprove Elkins’s thesis, scholars turned to the Slave Narrative Collection to reveal slaves’ per­ spectives on their bondage and resistance. Historian and activist George Rawick played a pioneering role both in the recovery of the Slave Narrative Collection and in countering Elkins’s thesis by reconstructing slave life, as he put it, from “sundown to sunup.” In 1972, Rawick oversaw the publication of The American Slave, which included the 16 volumes worth of the material Botkin had placed in the Library of Congress, plus an introductory volume by Rawick, and an additional vol­ ume containing interviews with ex-slaves that black scholars at Fisk University collected in the 1920s and 1930s. Rawick then published two supplementary series, the first one in 1977 included materials and interviews deposited in the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Song and its WPA storage unit. The second series published in 1979 included records that government employees had left in state repositories and archives rather than submitting to national headquarters in Washington, D.C. When it was completed, the en­ tire series included 40 volumes and approximately 3,300 interviews with ex-slaves. Rawick’s The American Slave included the vast majority of the WPA interviews, but it ex­ cluded three critical sets of interviews: those conducted by all-black units in Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida (Louisiana Writers’ Project 1945; Clayton 1990; and Perdue et al. 1976). In addition, he did not incorporate transcripts of tape-recorded interviews with former slaves gathered by John and his wife Ruby Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, Stetson Kennedy, or Roscoe Lewis (for evidence of these, see Mormino 1988, 399–419, and White and White 2001). Despite the shortcomings of Rawick’s collection of WPA former slave Page 5 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews narratives, his project—and the two scholarly indexes that supplement it—have markedly enhanced the interviews’ availability to scholars (Jacobs 1981). Since the early 1990s, historians, folklorists, and lay writers have revised, reorganized, and republished the WPA interviews, simplifying dialects and narratives to make them at­ tractive for lay readers (for examples, see Howell 1995 and Berlin, Favreau, and Miller 1998). In the twenty-first century, the WPA interviews have moved even farther into popu­ lar consciousness through the Library of Congress’s creation in 2001 of “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938.” This is a searchable on­ line version of the 2,300 narratives that Botkin deposited with them in 1941. It includes the interviews published in Rawick’s initial volumes but not the supplementary materials. An HBO documentary released two years later, Unchained Memories, with Whoopi Gold­ berg, Oprah Winfrey, and other renowned actors further brought the narratives to life (Bell and Lennon 2003). The proliferation of works focused on the WPA’s interviews fulfill New Deal administrators’ goal of widely circulating the interviews.

(p. 106)

Avoiding the Collection’s Pitfalls

The popularization of the Slave Narrative Collection makes assessing its strengths and weaknesses all the more important. The WPA slave narratives raise four primary prob­ lems: authenticity, bias, memory, and candor. How closely do the interviews replicate the actual words spoken by the former slaves? How do the biases of ex-slaves, federal writ­ ers, state editors, and Washington, D.C. based bureaucrats color the narratives? How reli­ able are the memories of the elderly about their childhood experiences? And, finally, how should scholars interpret former slaves’ use of irony and distortion in responding to the federal writers’ questions? To understand how to avoid the collections’ weaknesses, re­ searchers will want to look closely at who the former slaves and interviewers were, how their identities and biases affected the content and structure of the narratives, and how the editors at both the state and federal levels further shaped those accounts.

Authenticity The WPA interviews might appear to have come literally out of the mouths of ex-slaves, but they do not represent unmediated reality. Instead, it might be more accurate to con­ sider them third-hand or even fourth-hand accounts. Federal writers took notes either while interviewing former slaves or immediately afterward. They passed those drafts onto typists who interpreted the federal writers’ handwriting and then gave them to state edi­ tors. Such officials, a number of whom were women with literary aspirations, made fur­ ther modifications to the manuscripts before generally sending them to national head­ quarters in Washington, D.C. National administrators then evaluated and organized the interviews. Finally, scholars and folklorists selected, reorganized, and frequently further altered the interviews before publishing them in edited volumes. Even though national administrators warned federal writers not to alter the text of their original interviews, the Page 6 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews note-taking process encouraged revision. Thus, at least some of the WPA interviews may represent interviewers’ biases and editors’ agendas more than the ex-slaves’ actual mem­ ories. The WPA collection is not alone in confronting an authenticity problem. Even antebellum slave narratives—the classics—were influenced by abolitionists, who used fugitive slaves’ accounts to counter benevolent descriptions of slavery and descriptions of slaves’ passivi­ ty. However, the documentation surrounding the WPA interviews allows careful scholars to investigate the authenticity of their multiple authors. Using the interview scripts, cor­ respondence, and multiple drafts of WPA interviews, researchers can uncover the interac­ tions among former slaves, interviewers, and state and national interviewers. By recon­ structing the interviews’ production, they can determine the authenticity of individual WPA narratives and, at times, glimpse more genuine sentiments underneath the original documents. To select the WPA narratives that most closely approximate the former slaves’ words and experiences, researchers should use the earliest drafts of interviews, typically those submitted to state offices. Scholars should not begin with the interviews that were sent to national headquarters, since fourteen state editors did not submit all of their in­ (p. 107)

terviews to Washington, D.C. despite multiple requests for them to do so, and at least five state editors revised the manuscripts before sending them to the national offices (Rawick 1977, xxxvi–xxviii). Special care should be taken with interviews from Mississippi and Texas, where state editors altered the narratives to downplay masters’ abuse of their slaves and racial violence following Emancipation and, instead, to suggest a paternalistic relationship existed between slaves and their benign masters (Musher 2001, 9–10). To find the earliest versions of WPA interviews, researchers should consult one of the two indexes to Rawick’s multivolume work. There, they will find information regarding how many times individual ex-slaves were interviewed and where in Rawick those interviews can be found. In general, scholars should rely on Rawick’s Second Supplementary Series containing the interviews that remained in states’ files and archives rather than the origi­ nal series, which includes those deposited in Washington, D.C. If readers consult the Library of Congress’s American Memory site, Born in Slavery, they should be aware that those include the most revised drafts of interviews. They should al­ so recognize that they do not include many of the most reliable interviews, such as those gathered by all-black units in Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia. Thus, scholars should not use the website alone, but instead ought at least to double check their work against one of the indexes to determine whether earlier versions of interviews exist. If they do exist, researchers should review them to avoid unwittingly attributing editors’ comments and revisions to the former slaves. Readers should also avoid using the slave narratives to study the former slaves’ speech. Three factors raise serious questions regarding their linguistic authenticity: First, most of the interviews were translated too many times—from the former slaves, to interviewers’ notes, to typists’ accounts—to accurately represent nuances in dialect. Second, New Deal Page 7 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews administrators, including the black poet Sterling Brown, deterred federal writers from di­ rectly documenting the ex-slaves’ language. Instead, they encouraged them to simplify lo­ cal dialects to create uniform, accessible, and readable narratives suitable for publication in a single volume (Musher 2001, 19–20). Finally, dialects were a politically sensitive subject that many upwardly mobile African Americans considered demeaning. While some black interviewers, such as Florida-based Zora Neale Hurston, carefully recorded local cadences, others, including Arkansas’ Sa­ muel S. Taylor, erased black dialect, even if the former slave spoke with one, to highlight racial progress. White interviewers both recorded the dialects they heard and also im­ posed them on former slaves to suggest their inferiority. The range of spellings and pro­ nunciation in the WPA interviews makes the collection appear to represent a wide range of dialects. But with the exception of the few audiorecorded interviews or those written by federal writers, such as Hurston, who were well attuned to preserve local dialects, the collection does not accurately reflect the former slaves’ speech patterns. The organization of the WPA collection also shapes its content. When Botkin arranged the interviews before depositing them in the Library of Congress, he filed them according to the state where former slaves lived when they were interviewed rather than (p. 108)

the place where they had been held in bondage. Thus, if you are looking for interviews with individuals who were enslaved in Arkansas, you should not turn to Rawick’s volumes on Arkansas or click on the map of Arkansas in the Library of Congress’ Born in Slavery section, where the American Memory editors suggest you “browse by state”; instead you should consult researcher Howard E. Potts’s index (1997), which is listed according to the state where the former slaves were enslaved. In the rare case of Arkansas, you might also pick up Bearing Witness, an edited volume by folklorist and local historian George E. Lankford (2003), who reviewed Rawick’s collection and published an assortment of inter­ views with former slaves who had been held in bondage in Arkansas as opposed to those who moved there once free. Because so many intermediaries shaped the WPA’s slave narratives, scholars should not view them as the unadulterated words of former slaves. Instead, they should recognize the multiple dialogues and encounters that formed them, trying as much as possible to re­ cover the initial encounter(s) between federal writers and former slaves, decode the in­ terpersonal dynamics between the two, and identify the ways in which editors might have further shaped the final narrative.

Bias Given the context of racial relations in the Jim Crow South, the average age of the former slaves interviewed, and the fact that most of their interviewers were white, it goes with­ out saying that the WPA slave narratives are biased. But how did the biases of the various players—the former slaves, federal writers, state and national editors—shape the narra­

Page 8 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews tives? And how might scholars work around, against, and with such subjectivities to draw reliable conclusions from the interviews? For most of the former slaves, the practical struggles for daily survival were more salient than the abstract goal of recording memories of their past. When federal writers showed up on their doorstep asking to hear about slave days, many of the former slaves assumed that they were social workers who could help them apply for old-age pensions. They did not want to alienate potential allies who, they believed, might be able to alleviate their poverty. Thus, they framed their accounts, particularly those told to white interviewers, by descriptions of their current need, illustrations of their worthiness for government as­ sistance, and often expressions of gratitude toward their former masters and mistresses for providing them with some of the basic necessities that they now struggle to obtain as freed people. The federal writers’ attitudes toward former slaves differed based on their race, gender, and geographical location. Black federal writers tended to view the interviews as oppor­ tunities to set the record straight regarding the challenges slaves faced and the (p. 109) achievements they made following emancipation. According to Paul Escott, black inter­ viewers were more likely than Caucasians to elicit from former slaves “negative feelings about their treatment and masters and their willingness to act upon those feel­ ings” (1979, 9–10). Several states had at least one black interviewer. All or predominantly black units in Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana collected many of the most revealing slave narratives. Particularly noteworthy are the 150 interviews gathered by black federal writer Susie R.C. Byrd, who collected almost half of Virginia’s collection. Unlike most fed­ eral writers, Byrd’s technique was impressive, including “numerous visits to the same in­ formants, ingratiate[ing] herself with them,…[gathering] them together at one time to create a more spontaneous situation, and then [taking] notes and sometimes [making] phonograph recordings” (Perdue et al. 1976, xlii). Black federal writers working in other states, especially Arkansas and Oklahoma, gathered similarly rich collections. The sheer number of interviews gathered by Arkansas’s Samuel Taylor and Pernella Anderson, who jointly recorded 416 interviews, make that selection particularly appealing (Cantrell 2004, 49). For white federal writers, those who held the bulk of the relief jobs, interviewing exslaves may have been a way to pay the bills, learn about a world different from their own, recall nostalgically the black “mammy” who had raised them or their parents, prove that their ancestors did not mistreat their slaves, or a combination of these. White women tended to be more sympathetic toward the former slaves than Caucasian men, and they gathered strong interviews with former slaves, particularly in Georgia, North Carolina, and Arkansas. In contrast, states with federal writers who were primarily white and male, such as South Carolina, gathered weak collections, in which former slaves clearly told federal writers what they believed they wanted to hear about the good ol’ slave days (Blassingame 1977, liii).

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews Editors on both the state and national levels also brought their biases to the Slave Narra­ tive Collection. Southern state editors, particularly those in the Deep South, tended to want to record folk traditions that they believed modernity, industrialization, and the northern migration of a younger generation were erasing. The southern folklorist John Lomax, who initially directed the collection of WPA slave narratives, largely echoed that nostalgia as he sought to capture the folkways and songs of a world that was rapidly fad­ ing away. In contrast, the other national editors tended to view interviewing ex-slaves as activist more than sentimental. They sought to diversify American culture and traditions by drawing attention to previously forgotten individuals, especially the working class and those from racial and ethnic minorities. Director of the Negro Affairs division of the Writ­ ers’ Project Sterling Brown further saw the project as an opportunity to employ out-of– work, college-educated blacks, preserve former slaves’ stories and language, and use their accounts to challenge racist interpretations of slave days (Hirsch 2003, 24–29). Close readings of the WPA narratives reveal some of the biases of their creators. Intro­ ductions to each interview provide particularly rich clues as to the relationship between federal writers and former slaves. Despite requests by administrators in Washington, D.C. to avoid editorializing, federal writers prefaced their interviews with (p. 110) introduc­ tions that evaluated the former slaves, replicating the authenticating documents that oth­ er slave narratives used to verify their author’s credibility and the interviews’ facts. For example, such introductions indicate whether the federal writer knew the former slave prior to the interview. Their language, especially demeaning references, such as “auntie,” “darkie,” or “nigger,” further reveals the interviewer’s racial attitudes and indicates the power-dynamic between federal writer and former slave. Questions embedded within the WPA narratives also offer hints regarding the sources’ creators. Here, again, it is important to analyze the earliest drafts of the interviews, since federal writers, typists, and editors routinely removed such questions from final narra­ tives. When they remain in the text, the phrasing of questions, particularly leading ones, can indicate what federal administrators and locally placed federal writers wanted to hear. For example, in his initial interview script, Lomax prompted federal writers to ask former slaves to “[t]ell why you joined a church. And why you think all people should be religious” (Questionnaire). As Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter argues, leading questions encourage answers that confirm interviewers’ suppositions (2001, 40). Thus, identifying leading questions will help scholars judge the reliability of particular inter­ views. In addition to reading individual interviews closely, scholars should read across the col­ lection. Indexes created by Potts and Donald M. Jacobs help researchers to identify com­ mon patterns of behavior, events, or sentiments. Scholars might, for example, analyze in­ terviews that discuss a similar theme, such as slave punishment, miscegenation, or the Freedman’s Bureau. As they identify empirical trends, researchers should trace similari­ ties and differences based on characteristics among the former slaves, such as the size of their plantation, their occupation, gender, and geographical location. They might also want to compare the findings among ex-slaves who were interviewed by the same federal Page 10 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews writers or who had the same masters. An additional approach would be to compare the patterns they find in the slave narratives to those in other similar sources, such as inter­ views with former slaves that journalists, teachers, missionaries, and the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission collected during and immediately after the Civil War. As scholars research the interviews, they should keep in mind the various players that helped form them and consider how their biases shaped the narratives. They can do this by carefully analyzing the interviews, comparing them to other WPA interviews, and analogizing them to other sources. In addition, to increase the reliability of the sources, scholars should concentrate on interviews with former slaves recorded primarily by African Americans. Concerns regarding the age of the former slaves when they were interviewed and when they were in bondage raise legitimate questions regarding the reliability of the WPA nar­ ratives. Two-thirds of the ex-slaves interviewed were over 80 years old and 6% of them were older than 100, with some reporting their age to be as old as 130. Without birth cer­ tificates, it is difficult to verify age, and as many as 17% of those interviewed reported that they were unsure of their exact age. In order for former slaves to have been at least ten at the time of emancipation, they would have had to have been 82 or older when in­ terviewed. (p. 111)

To control for memory problems, scholars should select interviews with former

slaves who were neither too young to remember enslavement nor too old at the time of the interview to recall it. The ages of those interviewed would have affected their experi­ ences of slavery, since youth would have been more likely to have served as house slaves rather than as field slaves. Researchers might consider setting cut off dates for the inter­ views they analyze, possibly between eighty two and ninety eight years old, which would have made the interviewees between 10 and 26 years old at Emancipation. Before deter­ mining such dates, scholars might want to compare some of the interviews with former slaves who are older than a certain age, say 95, with those who are in their mid to late 70s. Even if scholars control for age, Donna J. Spindel argues advanced years will still affect the memories of former slaves (1996, 260). Researchers should familiarize themselves with the scholarship on memory to understand what the former slaves were likely to have remembered and what they were prone to forgetting. Psychologists argue that over time the vividness and unique details of significant personal events (episodic memory or auto­ biographical events) lessen. Cognitive aging research confirms that older adults have dif­ ficulty recalling “contextually specific episodic details…reflecting happenings, locations, perceptions, and thoughts” (B. Levine et al. 2002, 677). Thus, it would be surprising if former slaves did not have difficulty remembering names, dates, and the details of specif­ ic events. They might have misremembered the names of some of the places where they lived, the people they worked for, or the jobs they performed at specific times. Similarly, they might not have been able to recall exactly how many acres were in their former master’s plantation, how many slaves were on it, and what time their day began. Page 11 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews Such difficulties in recalling factual information illustrate the problems inherent in quan­ titative analysis of WPA slave narratives. Empirical analysis on a collection as large and as variable as the WPA interviews is tempting. Researchers seeking to verify impressions with numbers frequently turn to quantitative analysis. The draw toward statistical analy­ sis is even greater now that so much of the collection has been digitized and put online. But before empirically investigating the collection, researchers need to reflect on the ver­ ifiability, reliability, validity, and representation of individual interviews. The narratives are not all equally reliable. Many of them overemphasize the positive experiences of slav­ ery, such as corn shucking and holidays, and underemphasize controversial topics, such as rape. In addition, the easiest body of sources for analyzing quantitative data on the Slave Narrative Collection, the Library of Congresses’ digitally searchable Born in Slav­ ery site, is also incomplete, since it neither contains the interviews left in state archives nor those produced by all-black units. Despite such shortcomings, quantification remains an important vehicle for assessing the collection. Statistical analysis of WPA interviews is probably best on fairly objective data, such as identifying ranges of occupations, types of food, and kinds of punishments. When forgetting interferes with data collection or when scholars want to verify the reliability of former slaves’ assertions, they should consult other sources, such as city directories, cen­ suses, newspapers, court records, and the diaries and letters written by (p. 112) whites. Ideally, one would triangulate such information, verifying it in three, preferably different, types of sources. Although research indicates that older adults can rarely recall epic memories or refer to specific events, they maintain throughout their lives social and semantic memories: nonepisodic information that is disassociated from particular times and places (B. Levine 677; Piolino et al. 2002, 239). Instead of remembering specific autobiographical mo­ ments, older folks remember what the husband and wife team of oral historian Alice M. Hoffman and psychologist Howard S. Hoffman refer to as the “gist of what happened, or what usually happens.” The Hoffmans find that mature people reconstruct specific events based on their general knowledge combined with “inference and even sheer guess­ work” (2008, 42). They retain “those memories that have been derived from what has been taught about the collective experience and the social structure of the members of various groups, including the members of one’s own group” (51). In other words, they hold onto the stories that have been transmitted to them that continue to make sense of their contemporary world. If we think of the WPA slave narratives as oral traditions, stories transmitted from gener­ ation to generation that reflect cultural assumptions about what happened in the past and what it meant to participants, then the exact age of interviewees and the authenticity of their memories are less important than the social or collective memories they recount. Al­ though such accounts might not be precisely accurate, they reveal familial and communal folklore. They further illustrate how contemporaries internalized slavery and freedom through the lens of popular consciousness and social expectations in ways that justified Page 12 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews or helped them understand their current troubles. Such knowledge expands our under­ standing of the former slaves’ thoughts and feelings—if not their actual experiences— from slavery days through the Great Depression. Rather than reflecting reality, social memories incorporate the imagination. They reveal the perceptions, legends, myths, fears, hopes, resistance, and aspirations of the former slaves. How did they cope with slavery and come to understand themselves in relation to their bondage? The slave narratives illustrate the ex-slaves’ self-perceptions and subjec­ tive understanding of their own experiences. They indicate what the former slaves be­ lieved, wanted, or wished had happened. They suggest the ex-slaves’ past and present emotional and material desires. Oral history, as Alessandro Portelli argues, is particularly potent at uncovering such knowledge. “The importance of oral testimony,” he explained, “may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge” (qtd. in Hoffman and Hoffman 2008, 52). Memory studies thus suggest that researchers focus less on factual data and quantifiable observations and more on interpreting recurring imagery and stereotypes. Paul Escott il­ lustrates well this approach when he discovers commonalities in slaves’ perceptions of bondage and attitudes toward their masters despite distinctions among the former slaves in terms of geography, occupation, and size of plantation (1979, 45). Similarly, indepen­ dent writers Herbert C. Covey and Dwight Eisnach (2009) usefully examine the WPA col­ lection to study the relationship between food and slave culture. They investigated mas­ ters’ uses of food to control, punish, and reward slaves and slaves’ efforts to (p. 113) use food to develop their own independent culture. By drawing on social and semantic memo­ ry, such research capitalized on the strengths of the WPA collection. Rather than dismissing the WPA narratives because of the former slaves’ mature age and their youth prior to Emancipation, scholars should draw on memory studies to interpret former slaves’ stories. Although ex-slaves might have forgotten or misremembered impor­ tant factual information, they probably maintained general or semantic memories. Thus, researchers should seek to identify recurring stories and symbols and trace patterns among them.

The Candor Problem Even if former slaves could recount specific memories of their bondage, they might have chosen not to recall their experiences accurately to federal writers. A number of them feared violating the South’s racial etiquette. “Many of the black informants,” explained Blassingame, “lived in areas where labor contracts were negotiated in jails, debt was per­ petual, travel was restricted, and the threat of violence made peonage a living hell.’ Oth­ er former slaves did not want to alienate government officials whom they believed could provide them with much needed relief. This was particularly true of ex-slaves who re­ mained in areas where they had been enslaved and depended on whites to collect old-age pensions (xliv). Page 13 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews Within this context, it is not surprising that many of the interviewees were, as Blassingame put it, “guarded (and often misleading) in their responses to certain questions” (xlv). The former slaves frequently engaged in what Mark Twain called “corn pone”—telling whites what they wanted to hear rather than what they honestly experi­ enced. As Martin Jackson, a former slave interviewed in Texas, put it: “Lots of old slaves closes the door before they tell the truth about their days of slavery. When the door is open, they tell how kind their masters was and how rosy it all was. You can’t blame them for this, because they had plenty of early discipline, making them cautious about saying anything uncomplimentary about their masters. I, myself,” the ex-slave continued in what might have been his own act of corn pone, “was in a little different position than most slaves and, as a consequence have no grudges or resentment. However, I can tell you the life of the average slave was not rosy” (qtd. in Blassingame 1977, xlv). How can scholars know if former slaves were being truthful or just telling interviewers what they thought they wanted to hear? Sometimes, corn pone is obvious because of its clear exaggeration. For example, the former slaves interviewed in South Carolinian by an all-white and largely male troupe of federal writers routinely described themselves as longing to return to slave days when their masters fed and clothed them well and rarely overworked them (Blassingame 1977, liii). But corn pone is seldom that evident. Another way to identify it is to look for internal inconsistencies within the narratives and to com­ pare the events and actions the interviewers described against the meaning they attrib­ uted to them. In fact, one of the literary devices ex-slaves used to minimize (p. 114) the controversies of slavery was to offer sweeping generalizations at the beginning of their interviews attesting to the goodness of their master and slave days, but then recall expe­ riences (either their own or others’) that appear to contradict those earlier assertions. For example, a former slave might insist that his master never mistreated him, but then describe the abuse several of his fellow slaves faced. Scholars should separate unsupport­ ed statements designed, as Escott put it, “to satisfy the racial etiquette of the day” from the former slaves’ descriptions of their experiences and those of their peers (1979, 43). Researchers should focus on the former slaves’ stories rather than their general asser­ tions. The racial climate of the 1930s discouraged former slaves from honestly answering their interviewers about slave days. Instead, ex-slaves frequently volunteered the information they believed white interviewers sought. Internal inconsistencies within the WPA slave narratives, however, illustrate that many former slaves told their interviewers what they wanted to hear and also gave more truthful assessments.

Future Scholarship Future research should capitalize on the unique attributes of the Slave Narrative Collec­ tion. The collection raises the voices of women and children, who tend to be marginalized by other types of slave narratives. It provides insight into the hopes, fears, and aspira­ tions of former slaves. It illustrates the sensory and particularly the auditory world of Page 14 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews what researchers Shane and Graham White described as having formerly been a “largely soundless world.” And it provides provocative tools for investigating the southern racial etiquette of the 1930s. New scholarship would do well to investigate all of these fronts. The WPA slave narratives offer important opportunities for future research into the other­ wise underdocumented story of the experiences of children, women, and families during slavery. Research on childhood using the WPA collection might investigate childrearing practices in terms of who nursed, cared for, trained, educated, and disciplined slave chil­ dren. It might further ask how children related to their masters, mistresses, parents, and the other children on the plantation. Since a number of the former slaves discussed mis­ cegenation in a matter of fact manner (i.e., my mother’s father was a former master) in the slave narratives, answers should provide insights into domestic politics. What was the nature of multiracial (black-white-Native American) mating, rape, and unions? How did courting, marriage, and family bonds function without legal protections during slavery? The WPA interviews allow researchers to investigate domestic politics and a personal realm that most antebellum slave narratives ignore. They also reveal women’s experi­ ences and provide opportunities for making gender-based comparisons. Researchers might investigate how men and women differed from one another in terms of their experi­ ences of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, and old age during the Great Depression. They might also search the narratives to identify gender-based (p. 115) patterns in terms of how female and male African Americans both resisted and accommodated themselves to racial discrimination during slavery and afterward. Understanding the distinction between epic and social or semantic memories also reveals new research opportunities using the WPA collection. Scholars in the past have tended to analyze the slave narratives for empirical data regarding slavery. Memory studies, howev­ er, indicate the difficulties that older people have in recalling such information. Instead (or at least in addition), researchers might focus on the type of information that older people find easier to retain: social/semantic memories or nonepisodic memories that de­ scribe the former slaves’ self perceptions and ideals. They might use such memories to recreate what historian Mary Chamberlain referred to as the “imaginative structures” of former slaves’ social minds, identifying the legends, myths, and symbols that made and continue to make meaningful the former slaves’ world (2008, 157). To capture former slaves’ fears and desires, scholars might look to the routine and habitu­ al happenings and discrete stories and slave-time songs, games, and anecdotes that have become embedded in the former slaves’ long-term memory through frequent repetition. Building on cultural historian Lawrence Levine’s important work, researchers might fur­ ther investigate the religious and secular songs that abound in the collection (1993, 35– 58). Such works are especially valuable because the narratives at times provide the con­ text in which people sang songs and describe the meanings they held for the former slaves, including when they used songs as calls for secret meetings and to warn slaves of approaching patrollers. The songs also reveal an auditory world that might shed light on the borrowing and continuation of traditions from Africa, as well as the continuing devel­ opment of black music in the United States. Investigations of religious songs might exam­ Page 15 of 19

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews ine slaves’ hopes and fears by studying their interpretations of Christianity, God, Jesus, the biblical heroes and heroines, and the chosen people. Scholars might also use the col­ lection to further their analysis of devil and trickster tales in which weaker individuals outsmart stronger opponents in David and Goliath type confrontations to understand how they coped with their bondage and continued discrimination. Finally, researchers might analyze the WPA narratives to learn more about the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. This approach builds on Stephanie Shaw’s (2003) intriguing research using the WPA narratives to study old age during the 1930s. Shaw’s research should be expanded to examine the southern racial etiquette of the time based on the stories interviewers told and those they suppressed. How did the stories that for­ mer slaves told black and white federal writers compare to one another? What did they tell each especially about controversial topics, such as sexual intimacy, miscegenation, and violence? Special attention should be paid to the former slaves’ silences. Which sto­ ries were too scandalous to tell? What made one story acceptable while another over­ stepped boundaries? In addition, researchers should examine the alterations that editors made in the slave narratives before submitting them to national headquarters in Washing­ ton, D.C. How did the editors modify stories to make them more socially acceptable? Like many primary sources, the WPA slave narratives are complex, and they re­ quire nuanced interpretation. But they are well worth the work. At its best, the Slave Nar­ (p. 116)

rative Collection offers insight into the world the slaves made, largely through the eyes of former slaves. Despite their biases and shortcomings, the interviews succeed in uncover­ ing a “bottom-up” account of slaves’ bondage, culture, and lives. Special thanks are due to Eric Foner for introducing me to the Slave Narrative Collection; Jackson Hoover for research assistance; Dr. Dara Musher-Eizenman for insight into mem­ ory studies; Lydia Musher for statistical advice; and Daniel Eisenstadt for mathematical shortcuts and so much more.

References Bell, Ed, and Thomas Lennon, Dir. Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narra­ tives, HBO Home Video, 2003. DVD. Berlin, Ira, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds. Remembering Slavery: African Ameri­ cans Talk about their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. NY: The New Press, 1998. Blassingame, John W. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1977 . Note that quota­ tions in this essay come from the introduction to Slave Testimony, which represents an expanded version of Blassingame’s article “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” The Journal of Southern History 41.4 (November 1975): 473–492.

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project. Library of Congress. March 23, 2001. Web. September 22, 2011. Botkin, Benjamin. Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945. Cantrell, Andrea. “WPA Sources for African-American Oral History in Arkansas: Ex-Slave Narratives and Early Settlers’ Personal Histories,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 63.1 (Spring 2004): 44–67. (p. 117) Chamberlain, Mary. “Narrative Theory” in Thinking about Oral History, Thinking about Oral History: Theories and Applications. NY: Altamira Press, Rowman and Littlefield Pub­ lishers, Inc., 2008. Clayton, Ronnie W., ed. Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers’ Project. NY: Peter Lang, 1990. Covey, Herbert C. and Dwight Eisnach. What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives. Denver: ABC-Clio, 2009. Davis, Charles T. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave’s Narrative. NY: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1985. Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chica­ go: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Escott, Paul D. Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth Century Slave Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Heglar, Charles J. Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America: a Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Hoffman, Alice M. and Howard S. Hoffman, “Memory Theory: Personal and Social” in Thinking about Oral History, 2008. Howell, Donna Wyant. I Was a Slave: True Life Stories Told By Former American Slaves in the 1930's. Washington, DC: American Legacy Books, 1995. Jacobs, Donald M. ed. Index to the American Slave. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981. Lankford, George E. Bearing Witness Memories of Arkansas Slavery Narratives from the 1930s WPA Collections. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Levine, Brian, et al. “Aging and Autobiographical Memory: Dissociating Episodic from Se­ mantic Retrieval.” Psychology and Aging 17:4 (2002): 677.

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews Levine, Lawrence. The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, ch. 3. Louisiana Writers’ Project. Gumbo Ya-Ya. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1945. Mormino, Gary R. “Florida Slave Narratives.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 66:4 (April 1988): 399–419. Musher, Sharon Ann. “Contesting the ‘Way the Almighty Wants it’: Crafting Memories of Ex-Slaves in the Slave Narrative Collection.” American Quarterly 53:1 (2001): 1–31. Pascale Piolino et al. “Episodic and Semantic Remote Autobiographical Memory in Age­ ing.” Memory 10:4 (2002): 239–257. Perdue, Charles L. Jr., Thomas E Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: The University Press of Vir­ ginia, 1976. Potts, Howard E. ed. A Comprehensive Name Index for the American Slave. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. “Questionnaire: Stories from Ex-Slaves.” Miscellaneous Correspondences Pertaining to Ex-Slaves. Records of the Writers’ Project. Records of the WPA, RG 69. NAB II. College Park. Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Conn.: Green­ wood Press Pub. Co., 1972, 1977, and 1979. Schacter, Daniel L. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. (p. 118) Shaw, Stephanie. “Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives to Study the Impact of the Great Depression.” The Journal of Southern History 69:3 (August, 2003): 623–658. Spindel, Donna J. “Assessing Memory: Twentieth Century Slave Narratives Reconsid­ ered.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27:2 (Autumn, 1996): 247–261. White, Shane and Graham White, “Representing Slavery: Recovering the Role of Sound in African American Slave Culture,” Common-Place 1:4 (July 2001). Yetman, Norman R. “The Background of the Slave Narrative Collection.” American Quar­ terly 19:3 (Autumn, 1967): 540–541. ——. “Ex-Slave Interviews and the Historiography of Slavery.” American Quarterly 36:2 (Summer, 1984): 181–210.

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The Other Slave Narratives: The Works Progress Administration Interviews

Notes: (1) . Many previous scholars have described the WPA collection as consisting of “more than 2,300 interviews.” They have underestimated the collection’s size by counting only the interviews found in Rawick, 1972. My assessment is based on this volume plus Rawick’s two supplementary series edited in 1977 and 1979. In addition, I count inter­ views recorded in Louisiana and Virginia that Rawick did not include (see Louisiana Writ­ ers’ Project 1945; Clayton 1990; and Perdue, Barden, and Phillips 1976). Finally, I incor­ porated additional unpublished but documented WPA ex-slave materials that were at least once located in the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Song, Florida’s Historical Soci­ ety, and the University of South Florida’s Library in Tampa. Unless otherwise indicated, calculations related to the WPA collections in this essay reflect the almost 3300 inter­ views published in Rawick’s complete collection and were determined using the name in­ dex section of Jacobs 1981.

Sharon Ann Musher

Sharon Ann Musher, Columbia University

Page 19 of 19

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files

Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files   Elizabeth Regosin The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.008

Abstract and Keywords This article considers African American Civil War Pension Bureau files as slave narratives. It argues for an understanding of the slave narrative (or autobiography) as both individu­ ally and collectively produced, as in the case of Civil War pension claims. The author ex­ plores this concept by examining Civil War pension files of veterans of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and their families, focusing on such topics as slave marriage, slave families, separation of slave families, emancipation, relationships with former own­ ers, and the economic and social situation of exslaves. Keywords: African American, Civil War, pension, Pension Bureau, USCT, slave narrative, slave, exslave, slave fami­ ly

ROXANNA Allen’s effort to get a Civil War pension began with a story, a first-person nar­ rative account of what she remembered about her early life as the child of slaves, about her parents’ marriage, and about the circumstances of her father’s enlistment in the Unit­ ed States Colored Cavalry (USCC). Born a slave herself and thus lacking any record evi­ dence to corroborate her story, Roxanna turned to family members and former fellow slaves to help fill in the gaps of her memory. Soon, like a nineteenth-century Shahrazad, Roxanna’s pursuit engendered more stories as each witness in her claim introduced him­ self or herself and offered new perspectives on Roxanna’s life and the lives of those around her. Emerging from the pages of her pension file are the stories recounted by and about such people as Rachel Johnson, who was born on the same plantation as Roxanna’s parents, served as the master’s “house girl” as a child, and “called the master to the door” when Roxanna’s father asked permission to marry her mother (Dabney file March 2, 1889). Witnesses in the claim also included Roxanna’s paternal aunt, Mary Ann Hop­ kins, who related that Roxanna’s father “ran away and went to Suffolk, Va the second year of the war, he stole back home and took his wife, Mary Jane and their child Roxanna and went to Suffolk, Va with them.” About herself, Hopkins explained that she “belonged to Squire Gadling also” and that when the others ran away, she “staid at old master’s a month,” then ran away to Suffolk and lived “not over 20 yards” from Roxanna and her parents (Dabney file August 20, 1889). Page 1 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files For over a century, Roxanna’s story, and the stories that surfaced in her pension file of her parents, relatives, former fellow slaves, and even her former owners have remained buried among the hundreds of thousands of Civil War pension files amassed by the United States government since the time of the war itself. Theirs are not slave narratives in the “classic” sense as scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. or William L. Andrews might de­ fine them. Gates notes that classic slave narratives “testify…in formal literary language against human bondage and oppression and on behalf of their own will to be free, black, and human” (Gates 1987, xviii). In his examination of slave narratives as (p. 120) African American autobiography, Andrews points to the public purpose and nature of the genre: “Autobiography became a very public way of declaring oneself free, of redefining freedom and then assigning it to oneself in defiance of one’s bonds to the past or to the social, po­ litical, and sometimes even the moral exigencies of the present” (Andrews 1988, xi). Civil War pension narratives were not literary in intent; they were not designed to contribute to a concerted effort to end slavery or to help whites better understand the circum­ stances of slavery and the experience of freedom for the formerly enslaved; they were not explicitly created as a means of positing the author’s humanity; they were not public doc­ uments in the sense that they were not intended to be read by anyone other than pension officials. And yet Roxanna’s poignant story and those of some 100,000, maybe more, former slaves whose experiences have been captured in Civil War pension files warrant inclusion in the larger body of slave narratives precisely because they don’t fit nicely into the traditional category of African American slave narratives. In the first-person narrative of a young woman seeking a pension for her father’s service is also a third-person narrative about her father and her mother. Her story is then retold in the third person by her witnesses, and in their telling the witnesses recount as well their own first-person narratives. The complex interplay between first- and third-person narratives offers a multiplicity of per­ spectives on the life of the claimant and those around him or her. It both complements and complicates the idea of autobiography as it is traditionally understood. No one’s story stands alone. But rather than undermining the establishment of the self so central to the idea of the slave narrative as autobiography, the collective nature of the narratives in the pension files offers us a different understanding of the self as simultaneously individual and collective, a manifestation of community that was derived of the experience of bondage wherein human connection was a crucial source of survival. Housed in the Na­ tional Archives, this voluminous yet understudied collection documents the lives of free and freed African Americans from the last decades of slavery to well into the nineteenth century. It provides researchers insight into a number of subjects, including slavery, African Americans’ experiences during the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and life under Jim Crow. The rich profusion of narratives bursting from the pension files offers readers new ways to consider the subjects that affect our understanding of the institution of slavery and the lives of those who lived within its bounds. The subjects examined here include personal identity, family identity (including marriage and separation of families), community and collective identity, human resilience, ownership, citizenship, and slavery’s lasting impact on the lives of African Americans. Page 2 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files The Civil War pension records of former slaves underscore the inclusive nature of the concept of citizenship as it emerged during the war. Congress established the Civil War pension system in 1862 with the aim of providing material relief for United States veter­ ans who had been disabled during the war. In the event of a soldier’s death (either during the war or because of war-related injury or illness after), this relief extended to soldiers’ families, primarily to widows, minor children, mothers, fathers, and minor siblings, in that order of eligibility. In the same spirit that was to inform the Thirteenth, (p. 121) Four­ teenth, and Fifteenth Amendments that decisively ended slavery, incorporated African Americans into the definition of citizenship, and protected the right of African American men to vote, designers of the Civil War pension system believed that African Americans, too, should be eligible to apply for a pension precisely because they had taken up the citizen’s duty and fought in defense of the nation. Among the millions of Americans who applied to the United States Pension Bureau for pensions were African Americans, apply­ ing in connection with the Civil War service of almost 200,000 African American soldiers and sailors. The pension process itself produced the first- and third-person narratives of the kind that emerged from Roxanna Allen’s pension file. Citizens who claimed their due from the gov­ ernment underwent intensive scrutiny as Pension Bureau agents assessed the merits of their claims. A successful pension claimant had to prove that he was the soldier in ques­ tion, or that she was the widow or the mother of the soldier, or that a disability was the result of service, for example, by providing pension officials with documentation or by producing witnesses who might attest to the facts of the case. The institution of slavery— with its denial of education to slaves and its treatment of slaves as property rather than human beings—assured that most former slave applicants did not possess the documen­ tary evidence that was preferred by the pension bureau. Recognizing this reality, the Pen­ sion Bureau solicited “parole,” or oral, evidence in the form of first-person narratives by claimants, who were asked to tell their stories and make their case. Because the Pension Bureau questioned the veracity of many claims, it instituted a process of “special examination” that also solicited evidence in the form of third-person narratives by witnesses—relatives, former fellow slaves, former owners, neighbors—all of whom were asked simultaneously to corroborate the claimant’s story and situate them­ selves within it. Typically an agent would go into a community to interview people con­ nected to the case and examine public and private records Almost one half of all African Americans’ pension claims underwent special examination in contrast to about one quar­ ter of white Southern Unionists’ claims. It seems likely that the suspicions of white pen­ sion officials that African Americans were either corrupt or easily corruptible explains the large number of cases subject to special examination (Shaffer 2004, 129). The context within which they were created shapes the narratives in the pension records. We must examine them through the lens of former slaves’ interaction with a government bureaucracy where the express purpose was to secure a pension. We must read them with the knowledge that government agents asked specific questions to find information that would satisfy requirements for pension and in that way influenced the narratives. Page 3 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files The agents did not ask former slaves outright to tell their stories of life under slavery. Questions posed to former slaves included such queries as “What were the circumstances under which you were married or born?” “How did you come to know the soldier?” “What is your current material situation?” “How is it that your name today differs from the name by which you were known prior to your enlistment?” The legal nature of the procedure re­ quired that responses were recorded accurately, but the nature of the interview process itself means that we cannot be absolutely certain if they were. Much of the testimony ap­ pears to have been recorded verbatim, but much may well have (p. 122) been summarized, thus it’s not always clear whether these are stories in former slaves’ very own words or have been transposed, or translated, that is, mediated by the recording agent. It is rea­ sonable to assume that the agents’ individual attitudes and prejudices often made their way into the records (Shaffer 2000, 144–145). The cultural dynamics by which the pension narratives enter the public record—the government’s invitation to submit claims, the solicitation of personal statements, the in­ terviewing of witnesses—does not diminish the historical value of these documents or their importance as personal records of slavery and its aftermath. Rather, it means that readers must approach them discerningly, recognizing that the narratives have their own aims and devices, as would any text, be it historical or literary. The narratives are born of the government’s initiative, but each narrative has its own specific motivation as it seeks to move or to persuade its readers of the validity of the claim to a pension. What must al­ ways be taken into account as we confront these texts is the means by which those aims are articulated, the often-conscious rhetorical strategies former slaves employed in order to convince pension officials of the veracity or legitimacy of their assertions. Within the context of traditionally acknowledged slave narratives, one might compare Civil War pension narratives to the interviews conducted in the 1930s by workers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Historians have long turned to the WPA records as a source of information about slavery. A persuasive case perhaps should be made that the pension narratives are an equally valuable source, since they are more contemporaneous to slavery, the bulk of the special examinations having been conducted between 1880 and 1910 (Regosin and Shaffer 2008, 4). The authenticity of the WPA narratives has been called into question especially because of interviewers asking leading questions, liberal editing of the interviews, and the racial dynamics of mostly white interviewers question­ ing black informants in the setting of the Jim Crow South (Blassingame 1977, xliii–lv; Es­ cott 1979, 7–9). Unlike the WPA interviews, which sought to elicit specific information about slavery, the pension files allow aspects of slavery to emerge more spontaneously from the personal histories of their subjects. This spontaneity may make the pension nar­ ratives less contrived and therefore more significant as historical documentation. The pension files offer the opportunity to hear an unprecedented number of new African American voices from varying backgrounds, levels of education, and material circum­ stances. As much as they might reveal about slavery, former slaves’ pension narratives al­ so chronicle their lives after slavery; they provide a living record of any given moment in a claimant’s or a witness’s lifecycle. The records show us claimants wrestling with the bu­ Page 4 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files reaucracy of the Pension Bureau, managing the intrusiveness of a process that often asks for intimate details of their lives, and striving to make the system work in their favor. In essence, the records provide an early performance of ex-slaves exercising their newly won citizenship. What also emerges from these records are the challenges to that citizen­ ship, the profound social, political, and economic difficulties that constantly compromised life after emancipation. The pension narratives from the Upper South examined in this essay provide us with a sense of their scope and the richness of their implications for the study of slavery. This (p. 123) sample of pension files is not meant to be exhaustive; rather it is designed to sug­ gest to scholars and interested readers the abundant possibilities for study contained within the pension files. These records offer numerous approaches for systematic exami­ nation, by region, by state, by era, by regiment, for example. At the same time, the records are rife with the possibility of accidental discovery. One has only to open up a file and begin to read the weathered documents inside to initiate that process of discovery. If autobiography is the story of the self, then pension narratives are clearly autobiograph­ ical in nature in that the quest for a pension is ultimately a positing of the self. At its core is an effort to establish an identity, often resulting in the same kind of confirmation of subjectivity or humanity associated with the classic forms of slave narrative. Since African Americans were generally unaccounted for in public records under slavery, the of­ fer of a pension reflected federal recognition of a former slave as a citizen of the United States. More literally, where the institution of slavery ignored and denied slaves’ family history, the pension process often provided the means whereby the reality of slaves’ fami­ lies was written into the public record. In their efforts to establish their identity as the soldiers in question or to prove their con­ nection to a soldier, former slave claimants usually traced out their lineage for pension of­ ficials. A former member of the 1st USCC, Alonzo Hodges reported to pension officials, “I was born at Portsmouth, Va, but I can’t give you the year. Was born a slave to David Grif­ fith (dcsd) my father’s name was Caleb Hodges and he was a slave to Abscom Manning and he set him free. He died in 1861. My mother was named Deana Hodges and she be­ longed to my master. My full and correct name is Alonzo Hodges…I derived my name, Hodges, from my father” (Hodges file January 2, 1901). Whether Hodges had always had his father’s name is unclear. Upon emancipation, many former slaves seized upon the op­ portunity to forge formal ties to their paternal line. Since the laws of the South that de­ fined the institution denied them any legal ties to family members and determined that slave children inherited their status from their mothers, former slaves often signified their freedom by changing their names to that of their fathers. Maria Hopper explained, “My husbands right name, or the name he had before he come free, was Jack Brown, but his fathers name was Hopper, and as soon as my husband became free he called himself Hopper…. My husband belonged to Samuel Brown, deceased, and was called Brown after his master” (Brown file April 4, 1890).

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files The tracing of lineage highlighted slave marriages, which also had been ignored and de­ nied in Southern society, since the law neither recognized nor protected them. After emancipation, opportunities to legalize existing or new marriages abounded in the legis­ lation of the specific states and in the practices of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the United States Colored Troops (USCT). However, the pension process entered into the public record those marriages lost to separation or death under slavery. Certainly the aim of a pension claim was to establish legitimate relationships in order to earn a (p. 124) pension (as a widow, as the lawful child of a soldier, for example). In doing so, however, former slaves also restored their relationships to their proper place in history by assigning to them a legitimacy born of the practices of slaves themselves. The Pension Bureau rejected former slave Cooper Wood’s claim for a father’s pension on the grounds that he was not legally married to the soldier’s mother and thus could not claim a lawful relationship to him. In 1877 Wood appealed, arguing: “I was a slave; also [the soldier’s] mother was a slave and no negro had no higher authority then to go to their master ask him the permission to marry of which I married by the consent of my owners and was recognized as man and wife by all who know me and we lived and cohab­ ited under the slavery custom….”(Henry file June 1, 1877).Wood himself rejected the bureau’s notion that his marriage was neither legal nor legitimate, asserting instead that “slavery custom” was authority enough to make the marriage valid. Witnesses in Barbara Eason’s widow’s claim defended the validity of her marriage to Isaac Eason by pointing out that they had obtained “the mutual consent of their owners and the said marriage ceremony consisted of taking hold of each others hand and promising to live together as man and wife….” (Eason file July 14, 1871). Former slaves’ pension narratives poignantly testify to the existence and vibrancy of slave marriages and demonstrate how in slavery and after, African Americans pushed back against the confines of slavery and the narrow conception of family in free society that attempted to ignore and limit their family lives. In 1891, Norfolk, Virginia resident Charley Jarvis told pension officials that he had been married abroad, or married to a woman belonging to a different owner, and thus had lived apart from her and their son, Charley, Jr. He explained “that he being a slave he kept no record of dates as he was unable to read or write…that there are many persons living who knew him and his wife but cannot testify to marriage but can testify to the cohabita­ tion [the fact that the two lived as man and wife]….” (Jarvis file January 5, 1891). Here Jarvis reveals what was a unique social aspect of former slaves’ pension narratives. Mem­ ory filled the void left by illiteracy, not only the memory of the claimant, but a collective memory shared by others who had lived in intimate circumstances. If the writing of autobiography affirms the existence of the individual self, pension narra­ tives ask us to consider a shared aspect of selfhood and, in doing so, complicate the tradi­ tional understanding of autobiography. The collaborative nature of the narratives, rooted in the problematic lack of documentary evidence, is instructive. Pension narratives help us to better understand beyond family ties to the relationship between the community and the individual slave. That former slaves corroborated each others’ stories and often filled in the gaps of memory did not weaken the reality of individual existence or the Page 6 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files sense of self. Former slaves lived in the stories of their relatives and neighbors, in the rec­ ollections of those with whom they shared a life of enslavement. Here we see individuals as integral elements in a network of relationships. While perpetrators of the peculiar in­ stitution tried to diminish or deny the human connections between and among slaves, pension narratives highlight the deeply interconnected and communal nature of slaves’ lives and illustrate the persistence of personal and family relations in freedom. Witnesses in Sarah Hopper’s claim for a mother’s pension described the nature of their acquaintance with her and her son, illuminating for readers a sense of the character and scope of slave communities. Samuel Hall deposed, “I was reared in this neighborhood where resided the claimant Sarah Hopper and her children prior to 1862. Her son Sandy and I were playmates up until he left home in 1862” (Hopper file February 1, 1889). Charles Cartwright explained that he and Sarah had “lived as neighbors while slaves,” likely meaning that they had lived on adjoining plantations or farms (Hopper file January 16, 1889). Cartwright also noted that he and Sarah lived near each other after they be­ came free. John Hostead’s explanation of his relationship to Sarah underscores how deeply such relationships ran: “I was owned prior to the late war, by Samuel Wilson, a brother of Willoughby Wilson who owned Sarah Hopper, the [claimant]. I was raised in (p. 125)

the same immediate neighborhood where she resided while a slave…. I have known her from my earliest recollection, and in my early boyhood played with her boy Sandy….” (Hopper file January 16, 1889). In its explanation of the relationship between their owners, Hostead’s testimony also il­ lustrates the ways in which slaves’ family and community lives were bound up with those of their owners. In many instances, pension officials asked former slaves about their for­ mer owners; in many others, former slaves raised the issue themselves. Regardless of im­ petus, the recounting of ownership in former slaves’ stories reflects how it intruded into their lives and shaped their relationships. Testifying in support of his mother’s claim to his brother’s pension in 1889, Daniel H. Hopper of Norfolk, Virginia explained why his mother ended up relying upon his brother for extra material support during slavery: My father Owen Hopper and my said mother and my brother [soldier] and sisters belonged to Willoughby Wilson and his wife Anne Matilda Wilson prior to the late war. However, my father was sold a short time before the war to a Mr. James Seguine, now dead, and he was living on his estate at the time he became free… and did not live with my mother…. My mother had another son [the eldest], who was sold and sent way from her some years before the war, so that my brother Sandy…and myself were the only sons remaining with my mother…. (Hopper file January 16, 1889). If pension officials questioned the claim that the soldier, a younger son, had earlier pro­ vided for his mother (a requirement for a mother’s pension prior to 1890), Hopper’s story revealed how the institution of slavery impinged on both personal and economic relation­ ships. Hopper further detailed how a slave might actually provide for his mother: “Prior to the date of leaving home, in June 1862 my brother Sandy worked on Saturdays a part Page 7 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files of which was given to him by his owners and raised crops of corn and the same was given to my mother and was by her disposed of for her own use” (Hopper file January 16, 1889). Conversely, in her mother’s claim, Priscilla Gough of Mary’s County, Maryland attempted to account for the reason that her son, the soldier, had not supported her during slavery. She reported that “she and her son the late John (p. 126) Gough…were owned by the same owner, but did not work on the same farm as he was hired out by his owner; that her son did not contribute to her support because he was not allowed to do so” (Gough file date unknown). Taken collectively, pension narratives reaffirm a pattern of separation by sale and other means that pervaded the lives of slaves and determined the opportunities and the limits of personal interaction. This information in itself is not new; slaves and ex-slaves had long reported that a key feature of slavery’s cruelty was family separation. However, in their efforts to explain the circumstances of their lives that might account for a son either help­ ing or failing to support his parents, for example, former slaves’ pension narratives show readers the consequences of such separations and the ways they played out over time. We see that families who endured such separations, temporary and permanent, were often in a state of constant reconstitution, both in terms of family structure and the roles and rela­ tions within. Much like sales, the practice of “hiring out” slaves to other farms, a practice common in the Upper South, separated family members, even if those separations were not perma­ nent. Testimony by Samuel Gordon, whose owner hired him out as a teenager, illustrates the long-term, cyclical nature of such separations. Gordon testified in 1883 that he and his brother, Miles, had been hired out: Q. Do you know where [your brother] worked previous to going into the army? A. He was hired out to a colored woman by the name of Nancy Williams 1 year next year to Mr. Cox of Western Branch where he staid till he went into the army. Q. How often did you go home while you were hired out? A. Once a year at Christmas Holidays. Q. Did Miles come home at the same time? A. Yes sir we were all home at that time? Q. How many times did Miles come home A. As near as I can reckon 6 times (Gordon file March 29, 1883). Mahala Larence’s story illustrates the persistence of family separation and its conse­ quences well into the era of Reconstruction. In 1881, Larence testified in her widow’s claim for pension that she had been married abroad. The couple had three children: the Page 8 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files first child died in infancy, the second, Ellen, was born around 1860 and the third, William, was born sometime in 1862. When William was an infant, Larence’s owner sent her from Isle of Wight County, Virginia to Warrenton, North Carolina with a group of his slaves, probably as a means of protecting his property from the threat of emancipation as the Union army drew near. Larence recounted that “she never saw her said husband after leaving Virginia” and that “William went to North Carolina with her, Ellen remained with [her owner’s son-in-law] until about eight years ago [1873], when [Larence] came to Vir­ ginia and took her to North Carolina” (Larence file July 13, 1881). The deposition of Planey Womble, the owner’s son-in-law, sheds light on what happened when Larence and her baby daughter, Ellen, were separated: “The youngest was a Baby boy, in arms, when she went to NC. She took the (p. 127) boy with her but…the girl (Ellen) remained with [Womble] until about eight years ago, when said Mahala came and claimed her, and car­ ried her away. He had had no communication with Mahala after the war, and had heard she was dead and in consequence had been appointed the legal guardian of Ellen, but gave her up on her mother’s demand” (Larence file July 15, 1881). For some eleven years, then, Womble kept Larence’s daughter. Since his term of legal guardianship coincided with the advent of apprenticeship laws under the Black Codes, it is not difficult to imag­ ine that Womble maintained her in some capacity of servitude during that time. For her part, Ellen testified to pension authorities that her first recollection of her mother was when Larence came to Virginia to claim her. Resilience is a key element of former slaves’ pension narratives. It is not something that claimants talk about openly or necessarily even recognize in themselves. Yet their stories are often a testament to the dogged persistence to move forward, to keep on living in spite of all the challenges of slavery and the material, social, and political circumstances of life afterward. Julia Jackson of Loudon County, Virginia applied for a mother’s pension in the 1890s. Her son Jerome Grason was one of five children that Jackson had with Tol­ liver Grayson, her first husband in slavery. In a deposition dated 1893, Jackson describes how her family was divided up during slavery: I had five children by Tolliver Grayson—to wit: Mary Jane, Anna Maria, John Arm­ stead, Jerome Bonaparte (the soldier) and Herbert Upton. Mary Jane and Anna Maria were sold away in slavery before the war. John A. was a slave with me and never lived with me after the war. Jerome (the soldier) was also a slave of my mas­ ter and he lived with me in slavery until he went to the war. Herbert was also a slave and he staid with me until he grew up and married. He died in 1875…. My Husband, Tolliver Grayson, was sold in slavery times before the war…. After Grayson was sold away I took up with Henry Jackson and we lived together as man and wife all the time since. I took up with him before the war and had children by him, Alverna, who now lives with me and a child that died (Grason file August 14, 1893). Jackson’s point was not to draw attention to her perseverance or tenacity. And yet, that is precisely what emerges in her recounting of the circumstances of her life. Her story, the Page 9 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files stories of countless others in her situation, reflects the desire to continue on, to recreate the family by remarriage, by having more children, or by taking in new members. One finds a surprising number of former owners making appearances in former slaves’ pension files. Unlike the violently cruel slave owners who dominate traditional slave nar­ ratives, slave owners appear in the pension records in a less overtly critical light. In story telling focused on the acquisition of a pension, slave owners emerge not as hideous mon­ sters but as rational actors whose economic interests shaped the ways in which they made decisions about slave family life. We see little mention of punishment or explicit cruelty in pension narratives, perhaps because of a fear of reprisal, perhaps because of the nature of the narrative itself that comes at the issue of slavery from an alternate per­ spective and sheds different light than the traditional slave narrative. This (p. 128) is an interesting point for the scholar and researcher. Nonetheless, pension narratives invari­ ably feature owners’ callous disregard for slaves’ family life, as the stories of separation already recounted suggest and those relayed next lay bare. Such is the story of Eliza Hayden of St. Mary’s County, Maryland, who applied for a widow’s pension on account of her husband, Clem Hayden, who died of smallpox in 1866. In 1882, Hayden testified to having been married to Clem by her owners’ consent in a Catholic church at Meadows Neck, Virginia. She related that she followed her husband to Norfolk, where he was stationed with his regiment in the USCT and she worked on a “government farm.” When asked what prompted her to go to Norfolk, Hayden replied, “Some soldiers came to Leonardtown and said there was a Government farm down there, where soldiers wives and children would be taken care of. I went down there and took the three youngest children, who were then home with me, the two oldest children were liv­ ing with Mr. French Greenwell, brother of my owner” (Hayden file, August 4, 1882). What is not evident in Hayden’s testimony is the reason for which her children lived apart from her. An affidavit by French V. Greenwell himself fills in the gap of information and reveals the economic nature of the separation. Greenwell told Special Examiner James H. Clements the following story: He and his brother Gustavus Greenwell, bought her and her oldest child (Susan) from Henry Carroll, who got them from Mrs. Rachel Thomas. [Eliza] at that time had a husband named Clement Hayden who belonged to Joseph Ford or his wife. Deponent and brother continued to own claimant jointly until she had two more children by said Clement Hayden, Henry and Clem. We then divided estates, [Eliza] and Clem went with my brother Gustavus Greenwell, I retained the chil­ dren Susan and Henry. [Eliza] afterwards had two more children while she be­ longed to said brother…. (Hayden file August 5, 1882). The routine manner by which Greenwell recounts the story, as a series of transactions and divisions of estates rather than a wrenching apart of mother and children, illuminates

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files precisely the mundane decision making that led ordinary people to perpetuate profound atrocities against others. Unthinking cruelty, too, lies in the decision on the part of former slave Peter Parker’s for­ mer mistress to grant him “the priviledge…of working for himself long before the war” (Parker file August 13, year unknown). One white neighbor recalled that “old Uncle Peter” was able to do “chores around the neighborhood he being old having no restraint as usual upon slaves….” (Parker file date unknown). Although this neighbor painted the act as one of generosity designed to give Parker his independence, Parker’s situation be­ lied that characterization. Parker had not been manumitted and certainly was not in a po­ sition to earn a living for himself. He described himself as “much afflicted with fitts.” Con­ sequently, he noted, his “mistress had turned him [out] as of no use…was unable to earn a support by manual labor being almost totally blind four or five years before the war of 1861” (Parker file August 3, 1883). Slavery’s imprint is evident also in the effects of illiteracy that left former slaves dependent upon their former owners for information about the basic facts of their lives. Eliza Hayden told pension officials that she did not know her children’s birth dates; she requested that the commissioner of pensions “apply to my late owners should he need (p. 129)

more evidence in regards to the ages of my children” (Hayden file date unknown). What is puzzling and interesting is that when pension officials could locate former owners, the former owners often willingly obliged requests for information. For example, in addition to the testimony from French V. Greenwell, who took Hayden’s children in the division of estates with his brother, both Greenwell’s brother, Augustus, and Augustus’s wife testi­ fied for Hayden, corroborating the details of her marriage and giving dates of birth when they could remember them. So too did Margaret A. Wise, a woman whose father had hired Hayden from the Greenwells. It is impossible to know what motivated such efforts on behalf of their former slaves. Guilt, paternalism, monetary compensation, care—no sin­ gle factor stands out as primary. In many cases, this help was cloaked in a concern that may or may not have been genuine. The case of North Carolina former slave, Nelly Roberts, underscores the difficulty of iden­ tifying the motives of former owners. Roberts applied for a mother’s pension with her for­ mer owner, William E. Bond, acting as a kind of agent on her behalf. Of her situation, Roberts testified, “I raised four soldiers for the Union Army—two sons (John and Fred Sawyer) and two stepsons (Anderson and Solomon Roberts) all of whom with the excep­ tion of the first are quietly sleeping in their graves” (Sawyer file January 15, 1884). Bond wrote to the Commissioner of Pensions in 1878 explaining this situation precisely and ar­ guing that it “certainly increases the strength and meritoriousness of her claim very much I think” (Sawyer file February 27, 1878). Bond concluded by pleading, “may I beg in behalf of this poor old claimant an early and favorable decision and settlement as the sheriff is threatening to sell some of her little property for taxes.” In another document, addressing a question concerning the reason for his financial contributions to Roberts’s survival, Bond responded, “because she was my nurse in my infancy (over sixty years ago), and endeared to me as an old and faithful family servant…. [I] have no interest or Page 11 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files connection with her claim, except as an act of justice and humanity” (Sawyer file January 17, 1884). There is no way to know the depth of Bond’s conviction. Yet one cannot miss the opportunity to point out the irony of a man who previously owned human beings now talking about justice and humanity. The fact that former owners appear in former slaves’ pension claims at all or that deci­ sions made in slavery affected their lives afterward underscores a continuity between slavery and freedom that is characteristic of former slaves’ pension claims. In the require­ ment that a claimant account for his or her current personal circumstances and connec­ tion to a particular soldier, the Civil War pension files allow readers to see this continuity readily. Many other genres of slave narratives tend to impose an episodic structure to a life, one that posits a radical break between slavery and freedom. But the evidence in the files insists that life did not simply begin anew at slavery’s end. Slavery and freedom were obviously radically different, but most former slaves living in the South were obliged to build a life out of slavery’s remains, remains that link them to what was while opening the future to what might be. In cautioning readers to avoid putting too much stock in the “power of self-deter­ mination,” historian Susan E. O’Donovan elucidates the significance of accounting for (p. 130)

continuity as a means of understanding fully former slaves’ experiences in freedom. In her story of freed men and women in southwestern Georgia, O’Donovan tells readers, “As­ pirations…are not possibilities. Choices are not limitless. Human reality…is contingent, but not boundlessly so. In the case of the black men and the black women of southwest Georgia…what they managed to create was conditioned by what they had been, what they had done, and what they had endured in the past” (O’Donovan 2007, 3–4). O’Donovan’s argument focuses on the limited possibilities in the specific context of post­ war southwestern Georgia, but her lesson is more broadly applicable to former slaves liv­ ing all over the South in the decades after the Civil War. Thus, pension narratives help us better understand the character of former slaves’ citi­ zenship by connecting it to the immediate precursor of their enslavement. In their empha­ sis on claimants’ material circumstances, former slaves’ pension narratives reveal the mere formality of a freedom that barely enabled them to survive. Pension officials often examined local tax records or took inventory of former slaves’ property in order to assess their level of need. In other instances, officials asked former slaves and their witnesses to give an accounting of their material circumstances. Gabrilla Baxter’s example is typical. Her witnesses, William Cuffy and Charles Griffin, list: Bed and Bedstead value at six dollars and seventy five cent Poultry value at three dollars One table value at twenty five cent that is what she own Her income by washing for two familys one day in a week one family she wash for every other week and one family every week at twenty five cent per day and the other at thirty cent per day (Baxter file date unknown)

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files Baxter’s poverty was the inheritance of her enslavement and the limited opportunities available to her or to her family in slavery’s aftermath. She, her husband Thomas, and their twelve children moved from place to place for years after slavery ended. At one point, they returned to Baxter’s former owner’s farm and worked for him for two years before moving around again. Thomas Baxter was ill with rheumatism and, as Gabrilla not­ ed, “was never able to do a good day’s work” before he died in 1888 (Baxter file Septem­ ber 12, 1892). In 1890, when he was 70 years old, Charley Jarvis traced his own poverty back to slavery, explaining that “he never owned any realy property in his Life, he was a slave and had no property of any kind only a little beding an cooking utencils….” (Jarvis file May 19, 1890). Witnesses William Reed and Nathan Butcher shed further light on Jarvis’s situation. [Jarvis] is jist as poor as a man can be so fair as property, he has nothoin like prop­ erty of any kind he has not decent clouthing to ware, and his occupation for his liv­ ing when he is able he carries baskets a round for women, such as markets, and any Little Light Bundels he Lives, in that way and from one neighbor to the other gives him a (p. 131) little some thing to eat at times some of them will give him an old cote [or] a pair of shouse…he has has no particlar home, he stays a round with his Friends, he is such an old citizen of this city and state the[y] wount see him starve…. (Jarvis file May 28, 1890) Jarvis made it clear in his own testimony that his advanced age and general infirmity notwithstanding, his poverty was born of the aftermath of slavery that did not allow him the opportunity to acquire property and to live independently. Unlike Gabrilla Baxter who might have relied upon her many children for help, Jarvis was alone and depended solely on the kindness of his neighbors for his survival. Sadly, his story is typical of many of the stories that emerge from the pension narratives of a freedom that is compromised politi­ cally, economically, and socially. And yet to end on a note that overemphasizes defeat would be a mistake. As in that of Roxanna Allen, these remarkable narratives recover the lost voices of perhaps more than 100,000 African Americans who not only survived their enslavement but also made a life for themselves afterward. Their participation in the pension process signifies their active citizenship, with its real-life limitations, and the recognition on the part of the federal government of their rights as such. The process also, as noted, allows them to express a sense of self and of self-worth, as well as of family and community, in ways that ask us to reexamine the conceptual relationships between the individual and the collective. We can only suggest here what African Americans’ Civil War pension files have to offer scholars and interested readers. What is currently “lost in the archives” beckons us to a deeper understanding of the experience of slavery and its aftermath.

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files

References Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiogra­ phy 1760–1865. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Blassingame, John, ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977, xvii–lxv. Escott, Paul D. Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, ed. “Introduction” in The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Mentor, 1987, ix–xviii. O’Donovan, Susan E. Becoming Free in the Cotton South. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007. Regosin, Elizabeth A. and Donald R. Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slav­ ery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files. New York: New York University Press, 2008, 1–7. Shaffer, Donald R. “‘I do not suppose that Uncle Sam looks at the Skin’: African Ameri­ cans and the Civil War Pension System, 1865–1934” Civil War History 46, no. 2 (June 2000): 132–147. —— After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Pension Bureau Records Pension records cited are found in the Records of the Veterans’ Administration, Record Group 15, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Abbreviations USCC: United States Colored Cavalry USCI: United States Colored Infantry USCT: United States Colored Troops Civil War Pension File of Richard Dabney (alias Gadlin), 1st USCC. Civil War Pension File of Alonzo Hodges, 1st USCC. Civil War Pension File of Jack Brown, 38th USCI. Civil War Pension File of John Henry, 1st USCC. Civil War Pension File of Issac Eason, 38th USCT. Civil War Pension File of Charley Jarvis, 1st USCC. Civil War Pension File of Samuel Hopper (alias Sandy Hopper), 38th USCT. Civil War Pension File of John Gough, 38th USCT. Page 14 of 15

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Lost in the Archives: The Pension Bureau Files Civil Civil Civil Civil Civil Civil Civil

War War War War War War War

Pension Pension Pension Pension Pension Pension Pension

File File File File File File File

of of of of of of of

Miles Gordon, 1st USCC. William Larence, 2nd USCC. Jerome Grason, 2nd USCI. Clem Hayden, 38th USCT. Caleb Parker, 2nd USCC. Fred Sawyer, 1st USCC. Thomas Baxter, 38th USCI.

Elizabeth Regosin

Elizabeth Regosin, St. Lawrence University

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives

The Witness of African American Folkways: The Land­ scape of Slave Narratives   John Michael Vlach The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.011

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the folkways of African American slaves on American plantations. It explains that the first generation of Africans who were brought to North American shores were skilled farmers and craftsmen and the women were skilled in the production of textiles and quilting. It also discusses the accounts of several eyewitnesses including Frederick Law Olmstead, which described the African American slaves as living in log cabins of various degrees of comfort and of commodiousness. This article also suggests that the social solidarity showed by the enslaved African Americans as they developed a community of workers served as a seedbed both of resistance against plantation owners and the formation of an African American identity. Keywords: African American slaves, folkways, American plantations, skilled farmers, Frederick Law Olmstead, logcabins, social solidarity, community of workers, African American identity

EFFORTS to recover the story of slavery from the point of view of African American cap­ tives flourished during the last decades of the twentieth century. During this period, there was a decided shift in historical inquiry away from high-status figures and a decided turn toward the narratives of working-class people. This shift to a new inquiry, sometimes re­ ferred to as the “new social history,” sought to offer an inclusive portrait of a massive population who, although they left only a few documents, had profoundly affected the course of American society. The usual and expected trail of written records readily shows what slaveholders were doing at any given time, but it offers only sketchy accounts of the experiences of the enslaved. The general silence of the voices of millions of African Amer­ ican captives makes it seem that members of the planter class were the sole creators of the thousands of plantations that characterize much of the South. Indeed, many of these sites can still be found all across the southern states from the shores of the Atlantic all the way to central Texas. Any interpretation of plantation history that fails to include recognition of the African American presence proves, finally, to be a biased and myopic account representative of only the smallest portion of the occupants of plantation society. Fortunately the rise of an alternate mode of inquiry has provided scholars with an inter­ Page 1 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives pretive strategy that has happily stimulated the development of a greater interest in ren­ dering a more accurate and detailed account of plantation life and culture. If one were to ask, “Who built the plantations?,” the correct answer would point to the thousands of captive Africans and their African American descendents rather than the owners of the estate. By 1860 the number of enslaved blacks in the United States num­ bered almost four million; an eightfold increase over the 700,000 captives counted during the first national census in 1790 (Kolchin, 242). Although it should not be a surprise that an ethnic group of considerable size would leave its mark on our national (p. 134) memory, most histories of plantation architecture ignore the presence of skilled black workers whose labors contributed considerably to the creation and development of these now fa­ bled estates. For example, the efforts of the Texas unit of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) slave-narrative project garnered a large trove of stories from more than 300 former captives, but only 50 of them offer descriptions of slave quarters. Still, by drawing from these and other sources, we can piece together an understanding of the history beyond the official record, the history manifested in the fields, the dwellings, and the environments that enslaved communities cultivated, crafted, and shaped as they adapted to the impossible conditions of slavery. When white pioneers en­ tered the forested wilderness for the first time, they felled trees and built log cabins—an effort generally lionized as heroic. They were celebrated as gifted people capable of bringing great expanses of wilderness under their control. African American slaves should likewise be acknowledged as heroic pioneers for their parallel efforts even as they were transformed into captive workers. Their uncompensated labor made it possible to open new lands for development across large swaths of North America—first in all the states along the eastern seaboard and later throughout the southeastern portion of our country. Although slave owners realized that they had to provide their human chattel with the basic necessities of food and shelter, slaves were expected to do their owners’ bidding for the remainder of their lives. Although some of these workers did, at regular intervals, plot attacks on their owners or their owner’s property, many more looked for ways to de­ velop a reasonable life within the slavery system even as they sought ways to circumvent many of their masters’ orders. Every plantation held a significant number of slaves who were trained to carry out all the crucial tasks required when attempting to transform forests into fields. The first genera­ tion of Africans who were brought to North-American shores were already skilled farmers and craftsmen. Many of them were discovered to be useful woodworkers because their homelands were located in the densely forested parts of the African continent; particular­ ly along the coasts of West and Central Africa. When captured and brought to the Ameri­ can South, they immediately displayed an ability to cope with a new landscape, in large measure, because their encounters with high temperatures, high humidity, and iron-rich red soil were all reminiscent of their African homelands. The process of acclimating them­ selves to the semitropical environment of the American South proved to be much easier for Africans than for European indentures. Over the course of several generations, the people of African heritage enslaved in the United States would add new skills to their cul­ tural repertoires, becoming the blended people (or creoles) now commonly labeled as Page 2 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives African American. And as they made this transition from Old World person to a New World citizen, they transformed their homes and environments as well. Although it is commonly assumed that all slaves lived in decrepit hovels, eye witnesses from the nineteenth century suggest that a significant portion of the slave cabins stand­ ing during the 1850s provided their occupants with a modicum of comfort. Frederick Law Olmsted, who would establish himself as a pioneering landscape (p. 135) architect, criss­ crossed the South several times, carefully noting the manner in which slaves were quar­ tered. He summarized his findings as follows: The houses of the slaves are usually log-cabins, of various degrees of comfort and of commodiousness. At one end there is great open fire-place, which is exterior to the wall of the house, being made of clay in an inclosure, about eight feet square and high, of logs. The chimney is sometimes of brick, but more commonly of lath or split sticks, laid up like log work and plastered with mud. (Olmsted 81) But Olmsted also encountered some squalid quarters that he said “were of the worst de­ scription, though as good as local custom requires” (290). Such was the case when he came upon a plantation along the banks of the Pee Dee River in South Carolina that proved to be one of the most decrepit shelters he had ever encountered: The negro-cabins, here, were the smallest I had seen—I thought not more than twelve feet square, inside. They stood in two rows, with a wide street between them. They were built of logs, with no windows—no opening at all, except the doorway, with a chimney of sticks and mud; with no trees about them, no porches, or shades, of any kind. Except for the chimney, I should have conjectured that it had been built for a powder-house, or perhaps and ice-house—never for an animal to sleep in. (161) The accuracy of Olmsted’s mid-nineteenth-century descriptions of slave house types are confirmed by various elderly African Americans who were interviewed during the 1930s by civil servants working in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s WPA, particularly the slave-narrative project directed first by John Lomax and subsequently by Benjamin Botkin. A.M. Moore, a former slave in Harrison County, Texas recalled for his interviewer that: “My mistress was Lucinda Sherrad and she had a world of children. They lived in a big log house but you wouldn’t know it was log house unless you went up in the attic were it wasn’t ceiled. The slaves helped master build the house. The quarters looked like a little town with houses all in lines” (Vlach, “Us Quarters” 168). Ex-slave Fred Dibble, a fellow Texan from Orange County, noted that his cabin was built in the same manner as the house of his owner, but that his master’s house was significantly different being two stories tall (Vlach, “Us Quar­ ters” 161–2). A step above the single-room cabin was a form known to scholars as the hall-and-parlor house, a two-room house consisting of an all-purpose room (the hall) shared by all and a Page 3 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives bedroom (the parlor) that was usually reserved for the sole use of the parents. Olmsted encountered such houses in Virginia as he traveled along the shores of the James River. Reporting on double-unit slave houses that he discovered, he wrote that they were well-made and comfortable log cabins, about thirty feet long by twenty wide, and eight feet tall, with a high loft and a shingle roof. Each divided in the middle, hav­ ing a brick chimney in the wall at either end, was intended to be occupied by two families (Olmsted 42) A building type that was developed for slave residences during the 1850s was a double tenement structure composed of two three-room units plus a loft space in the at­ tic. One entered such a house through a narrow but deep room that served as a meetingcooking-dining space. Adjacent to this area were two smaller rooms serving as bedrooms, presumably one for parents, whereas the other room was designated as a space for chil­ dren or other family members. The space in the loft that could be used as a sleeping area was usually accessed from the kitchen area via a ladder or a stairway. With four clearly (p. 136)

demarcated spaces, the tenement form was one of the few building types that offered its residents a measure of personal privacy (Vlach, Back of the Big House 161–2). Olmsted had observed this type of quarter while touring the southern states and he reported that: [the] cabin was a framed building, the walls boarded and whitewashed on the out­ side, lathed and plastered within, the roof shingled; forty-two feet long, twentyone feet wide, divided into two family tenements, each one twenty-one by twentyone; each tenement divided into three rooms—one, the common household apart­ ment, twenty-one by ten; each of the others (bedrooms), ten by ten. There was a brick fire-place in the middle of the long side of each living room, the chimneys rising as one, in the middle of the roof. Besides these roofs, each tenement has a cock-loft [attic], entered by steps from the household room. (Olmsted 184) The increased space found in the design of this house was considerably larger than what could be found in earlier types of slave houses. Although a slave family might have found in such a building only a modest change in their domestic organization, its plan offered a more commodious social arrangement than was possible in single-room cabins.

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives

Figure 8.1 Log Slave Quarter at Sotterly Plantation, Maryland.

Figure 8.2 Brick Slave Quarters at The Hermitage, Georgia.

Figure 8.3 Saddle-Bag Style Slave Quarter at the Forks of Cypress Plantation, Alabama.

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives

Figure 8.4 Saddle-Bag Style Slave Quarter at Mt. Lebanon Plantation, Kentucky.

Figure 8.5 Slave Quarter at the E. Sterling C. Robertson Plantation House, Salado, Texas.

In 1972 Historian Eugene D. Genovese published Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, a book that challenged scholars to view the institution of slavery from the perspec­ tive of the enslaved. Unlike previous studies that had examined plantations from the point of view of their owners, Genovese was interested in what the captive African (p. 137) (p. 138) Americans were able to do for themselves, and he suggested that millions of en­ slaved people had, in fact, been able to put their own mark on southern culture. The mark they made is everywhere evident today—in music, food, agricultural practices, architec­ ture and landscape design, weaving, quilting, pottery, and other areas of everyday life— but the manifestations of such arts and practical skills are rarely recognized as slave tes­ timony, worthy of as much attention as the most exquisitely crafted slave narrative. How­ ever, from such sources we can learn more about slavery than we can from some of the most direct accounts of slave life. The record of their efforts is strongly evident, for example, in the interviews with former slaves conducted by employees of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) in Texas from 1936 to 1938. Foremost among the crafts mentioned by former Texan slaves were activities connected to the production of textiles. That they would have this particular focus when Page 6 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives queried by interviewers becomes obvious when we recall that a plantation was, most of­ ten, a “machine” for the production of cotton fiber. Although much of that fiber was sent to mills—generally in the northern states—where it would be transformed into cloth, a considerable amount was also consumed on local plantations since slave women were not only field hands but also worked as spinners and weavers. Former slave Phoebe Hender­ son, when visited by an FWP interviewer recalled: “After they brought us to Texas in 1859, I worked in the field many a day, plowing and hoeing, but the children didn’t do much work ‘cept carry water…. I worked in the house too. I spinned seven curts [lengths of thread] a day and every night we run two looms, making large curts for plow lines” ( Vlach, By the Work 76). Anna Miller from the Palo Pinto hill country, roughly 60 miles west of Fort Worth, had a similar experience: “My work ’twas helping with chores and (p. 139) pick up the brush where my pappy was clearing the land. When I gets bigger, I’se plowed, hoed, and done all the going to the mill. I’se helps card, spin, and cuts the thread. We’uns makes all the cloth for to makes the clothes, but we don’t get ‘em…. The weaving was the night work, after working all day in the field” (Vlach, By the Work 78). Another craft skill practiced by enslaved women was quilting, a task that combined their weaving skills, sewing ability, and sense of design. Although the slave narratives offer no explicit information about designs or colors, it is certain that theses women did produce the bedcovers needed by their families. Julia Banks, who was held as a bondswoman near San Antonio, had a clear recollection of gatherings where quilting was practiced: I used to hear my grandmother tell about the good times they used to have. They would go from one plantation to another and have quiltings and corn huskings. And they would dance…. They used to go six or seven miles afoot to corn huskings and quiltings. And those off the other plantation would come over and join in the work. And they would nearly always have good dinner. Sometimes some of the owners would give them a hog or something nice to eat, but some of them didn’t. (Vlach, By the Work 80). Most quilting, however, was carried out in one’s cabin during the sporadic bits of time be­ tween the various field and household tasks that enslaved women were obliged to per­ form. Former slave Elvira Boles recalled that she had to leave her “crying baby” behind every day when she was sent to the woods to cut timber and split rails. But she felt com­ pensated for her arduous work when she could spend some time at night piecing what she called her “pretty quilts” (Vlach, By the Work 80). No doubt, in her eyes, a quilt sym­ bolized family, security, and home as well as a fancy bed cover that she had made and in which she found beauty and personal accomplishment. If we regard quilting as a tactic used by women to bring both physical and emotional warmth to their spartan quarters, enslaved men often performed an equivalent task with their woodworking skills. It often fell to them to build their houses and most of their fur­ nishings. If they did not have the requisite skills, they might enlist the help of a fellow captive known to be good at working with wood. Cary Davenport, a former slave from Walker County, Texas, recalled that his father had been not only a woodworker but an ac­ Page 7 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives complished artisan. He told an interviewer: “My father was a carpenter and old master let him have lumber and he make he own furniture out of dressed lumber and make a box to put clothes in…. And he used to make spinning wheels and parts for looms” (Vlach, By the Work 81). But Davenport’s father was not the only woodworking specialist in East Texas. Near Huntsville, Jordan Goree, a skilled African American mechanic, was building ginning houses where cotton was cleaned and shaped into bales. He was known particu­ larly for his skill at carving the spiral grooves into the central shafts of cotton presses. These mule-powered machines were used to shape the harvested crop of fiber into bales that could weigh as much as five hundred pounds. (p. 140) Although the genius of black craftsmen is rarely commented on in most studies of south­ ern history, there are some occasions where the prowess of African American artisans suggest the need for deeper and more inquisitive investigation. A case in point would be the career of John Hemings, a slave at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate. John was the son of Jefferson’s slave Elizabeth Hemings and a white carpenter named John Nelson. John Hemings, who was literate, also proved to be a skillful carpenter capable of produc­ ing the highest level of decorative embellishment. Given that he was raised at Jefferson’s estate, Hemings had regularly observed his grandfather’s many changes to his celebrated home. When he developed his skills as a finish carpenter, Jefferson would hire Hemings out to near-by planters such as F. Eppes. In a letter that Hemings wrote to Jefferson on August 11, 1825 he described what he had done for Eppes using his own invented spelling: We should go about preparing the chines [Chinese] raling [railing] & Puting up the ornaments of the hall. Master F. Eppes was saying something about tining the flat rouft [roof] over the hall. You can decide it between you how it shall be done. Sir please to send the tin as soon as you can. The flat roof will take three boxis [box­ es]; that’s seven in all. (Vlach, By the Work 165) Clearly Hemings was a skilled finish carpenter and not a run-of-the-mill “rough out” man. Because he was well aware of the level of his skills, one can detect in one of his surviving letters a strong note of self-confidence when he informs Jefferson: “I hope by the nex[t] to be able to Let you no [know] when I shul [shall] finesh [finish] and when to send for me” (Vlach, By the Work 166). Although his statement offers a summary of the tasks he had completed, it also signals the self-confidence of a skilled man who was the master of a much admired trade. That Hemings was able make his master seemingly stand and wait while he did interesting work away from Monticello suggests that craft skills could be used by some enslaved artisans to experience some of the attributes of independence that were, by law, denied to people of color. John Hartwell Cocke, who owned Bremo plantation in Fluvanna County, Virginia, experi­ mented with an exotic construction technique that was promoted in France in the early decades of the nineteenth century and had been witnessed by his neighbor Thomas Jeffer­ son when he was envoy to France. Called “pise,” Cocke used this method to build several Page 8 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives mud-walled structures intended to serve as slave quarters at his home site. These experi­ mental buildings followed the common plan of the saddle-bag house that provided two rooms with central fireplace and chimney placed between them. Proud of his experiment, he wrote a letter to the American Farmer in 1821 declaring that, after a period of five years, his earthen houses had “stood perfectly, affording the warmest shelter in winter and the coolest in the summer of any buildings their size I ever knew” (Cocke 157). Al­ though there were many virtues to Cocke’s experimental building, he attracted no follow­ ers. The long-standing preference for log and wood framed structures could not be over­ turned by one exotic experiment. In a land of forests that beckoned adventurers willing to move westward, log buildings would be employed at every social level. (p. 141) Although Cocke finally had to admit that his “pise” buildings were strange and unusual structures, he did not balk at the building choices of the slaves that he would liberate in 1847. After being sent west to Cocke’s large landholdings in Greene County, Alabama, his former captives quickly developed an exciting new life for themselves even though they were still using the building types they had lived in when they were bondsmen. Led by George Skipworth, a black man who previously had served as Cocke’s slave driver, they soon realized that a plantation could be a place where black people could work solely for their own benefit. In correspondence with Cocke, Skipworth recounts various achieve­ ments reporting in one instance that “frank has put Brick chimneys to the houses in the yard. He is now got a smal Job for mr. parker but he will finish it in a few days.” Later when he writes again about a mansion house that Cocke’s ex-slaves Lea and Archie were building, he notes that they “have got the boddy of the house and boards for covuring / they are now waiting for an oppertunity to get lumber from Landing / in the mean time they are getting timber in woods of different lenths” (qtd. in Miller 16). That Cocke’s emancipated slaves were building a plantation—an estate that was surprisingly being run by black people—marks a significant point in the efforts of African Americans to trans­ form themselves from items of property into free persons. For those blacks that could not wait for slavery to be abolished, physical escape by run­ ning away from their assigned plantations was a risky but plausible strategy, and their savvy ability to adapt their environments to their needs facilitated their efforts. Many run­ aways were captured and severely beaten as a warning to other slaves that they should not plan any future escapes. Consequently, those slaves who thought about running had to think very carefully how they would hide themselves from the professional slave catch­ ers. Local county patrols looking to receive a generous payment for returning a field hand were constantly looking for blacks who had run away from their owners. For these es­ capees, their best hope was to reach either a nearby city where they might be able to blend in with a large diversified population or to hide out into a seemingly impenetrable forest or swamp. An instance of the later choice was shared by former slave Ishreal Massie who spoke with the collectors of slave narratives who were working for the Virginia branch of the Federal Writers Project during the 1930s. Massie told them that:

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives We had one slave datrunned away an’ he had a vault in the woods fixed just like this room and he had a wife and two boys that he raised under there. Well, you say, “Describe.” You mean tell how it was built? There was a hole cut in the ground. I don’t cut a many a one an’ stole lumber at night to cover it over with. Then dirt was piled on top of this plank so that it won’t rain in there. Then he has him some piping-- trough-like—made of wood that runned so many feet in de ground. This carried smoke way away from this cave. For fire used bark ‘cause it didn’t give much smoke. He had him a hole on land. There was sticks, pine board, and trash on top to cover the hole. Ha, ha, ha. You could stand right over this hole and wouldn’t know it. (Perdue et al. 209–10) It is hard not to imagine that Massie was actually describing his own escape and modestly celebrating the clever manner in which he had avoided detection by camouflag­ ing his house as a feature of nature. (p. 142)

The contrast between the house of a plantation owner and that of a slave is impossible to overlook. The differences in size, location, mode of construction, quality of materials, and finishes collectively signal in an instant who was most important. The set of three slave quarters at Ben Venue plantation in Rappahannock County, Virginia, although impressive­ ly decorated, with their interesting raised parapets standing atop their gables, could nev­ er have been seen as important buildings (Calder, Register 356; Calder, Black History 32-34). The unmistakable core of the estate was the plantation’s mansion displaying the same type of parapet but on a building much taller, wider, and deeper than the miniscule cabins that seem to look up at the bigger structure in awe. The spatial relationship sug­ gests a group of children seeking the attention of a parent; they are clearly connected structures, but the difference in status and significance is unmistakable. A person living in the “big house” is, by association alone, thought to be more important than the en­ slaved servants assigned to diminutive cabins. Among slave owners, captive black people were understood to be less than persons; they were, rather, the necessary equipment needed to make a plantation profitable. If, as some planters believed, slave quarters were often sites of disease, then those cabins would have to replaced with sturdier buildings. We find in the letters of Joseph Ball, owner of Morattico plantation in Lancaster County, Virginia, an instructive case on this matter. Ball, writing on April 23, 1754 from London to his overseer Joseph Chinn, spelled out spe­ cific instructions for a new living quarter that was built for a slave named Aron Jameson: As soon as can be I would have a framed house twelve foot long and ten foot wide built for him and the end sill where the fire is to be must be at least three foot above the upper slide of the other sill and must be made up from the ground to that with clay, and then it must be at least three foot above the upper side of the other sill and must be made up from the ground to that with clay, and then from that [sill] quite up to the top lathed and filled, and the whole house must be lathed and filled, and the lock I have sent with him put upon the door…I wanted [to] have Page 10 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives the house no more than seven foot pitch from the upper side of the sill to the low­ er side of the plate and I would have the loft with inch plank, of which there must be left of the old house that may be blown down and I would have it under pinned with brick some five inches above the ground if it can be reasonably done. Also I would have the sills of locust, cedar, or mulberry or other lasting wood lain upon them; and the house must be jutted four inches; and it must be very well and tight covered and I would have the floor raised within two inches of the upper side of the sill. (Joseph Ball Letterbook) From the foregoing account one can easily visualize a small cabin that was not only sub­ stantially built with superior materials but finished with smooth plaster surfaces that would have rivaled the interior of the richest planter’s parlor. (p. 143) But other observers of the planters’ landscape and its pattern of organization encoun­ tered what they interpreted as a seriously flawed element. In the early 1740s British trav­ eler Edward Kimber closely observed the houses built for slaves in the Chesapeake re­ gion, reporting: “A Negro Quarter is a Number of Huts or Hovels, built some distance from the Mansion-house; where the Negroes reside with their wives and Families and cul­ tivate at vacant times little Spots allow’d them. They are indeed true pictures of Slavery, which begets Indolence and Nastiness” (Kulikoff 247). His criticism suggests certain po­ tential problems with a lack of order or adequate direction in the creation of slave dwellings, an opinion confirmed 40 years later by Johan David Schoepf who described various plantations in northern regions of Virginia: A plantation in Virginia has often the appearance of a small village, by reason of the many separate small buildings which taken all together would at time hardly go to make a single roomy and commodious house…. [Slave dwellings are] com­ monly so many small, separate, badly kept cabins of wood, without glass in the window, of the structure and solidity of a house of cards…. Thus are built gradual­ ly a good many small houses and cabins, commonly without the assistance of car­ penters, patched together by the people themselves and their negroes. (Schoepf 32–33) When former slaves were interviewed about the houses in which they were previously forced to live, they often responded in a positive manner, focusing on the features that they had created for their own pleasure. Nelson Cameron, who had worked for years on a plantation near Blackstock, South Carolina, recalled that his cabin was dressed up with flowers: “Us live in log house with a little porch in front and the morning’ glory vines use to climb ‘bout it. When they bloom, the bees would come a hummin’ ‘round and suck the honey out the out of the blue bells on the vine. I ‘members that well ‘nough, that was a pleasant memory” (Rawick 173–4). Cora Gillam, a former slave from Desha County, Arkansas, recalled that in her community people “made cupboards, and women that was smart would make covers for them. They would make home-made table and Page 11 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives everything” (Rawick et al. Series 1, Vol. 11, 129). George Fleming, a former slave from Laurens County, South Carolina, remembered how slaves fixed up their quarters with “good beds.” He also recalled that “We had shelves and hooks to put our clothes on. We had benches and tables with smooth boards” (Rawick et al. Series 1, Volume II, 129). A similar enthusiasm was voiced by Mandy Morrow from Burnet County, Texas who bragged: “Grandpappy am a carpenter. ’Cause of that, we’uns quarters am fixed fine…. We’uns have reg’lar windows and handmade chairs and a wood floor. Gran’pap spent his extra time fixing up the quarters” (Rawick et al., Series 2, 7, 2776). Although slaves regularly ran away from their owner’s plantations, the vast majority of African American captives remained on their assigned estates comforted by the presence of family and friends. Leslie Howard Owens is one of the few scholars to recognize that a vigorous slave culture was necessarily tied to a comforting sense of community and to a clearly demarcated space provided by the quarters where enslaved blacks were (p. 144) held as a group. He has suggested that “the Quarters, sometimes partially, sometimes en­ tirely, and often mysteriously, encompassed and breathed its own special vitality into these experiences [of the plantation], frequently assuring that bondage did not snuff out the many-sided existence that slaves created for themselves” (Owens 20). Armed with the supportive ideal of community, most plantation slaves found it easier to stay put than to attempt an escape. At the center of the their version of the plantation landscape was the ideal of family, not necessarily a biological family but a wide assortment of kin, both bio­ logical and fictive. Although plantation owners frequently threatened to break up fami­ lies, enslaved blacks developed an array of protest tactics with which to oppose them. Their forms of the day-to-day resistance included: feigned sickness, shirking, foot drag­ ging, feigned ignorance, stealing, lying, sabotage, deception, running away, and arson. The nuisance value of these actions proved to be an effective way to dissuade plantation owners from making good on most of their threats. The use of the so-called “weapons of the weak,” suggests anthropologist James C. Scott, “ achieve far more in their unan­ nounced, limited, and truculent way than the few heroic and brief armed uprisings about which so much has been written” (Scott 34). Slaves who made fictive claims on their owners’ land often found that it virtually was theirs. Once the quarters were treated by plantation owners as slave space, captive blacks made behavioral claims on other parts of their owners’ estates. The work spaces— fields, barns, pastures, work shops—effectively all became their property. Given that planters were significantly outnumbered by their captive workers, it was only prudent to grant some modest concessions. Once the quarters were claimed as a black space, fur­ ther claims would be made on fields, gardens, barns, and other buildings. The modest dis­ plays of social solidarity manifested by enslaved blacks as they developed a community of workers would serve as a seedbed both of resistance and the formation of an African American identity. The traces of the worlds they made are recorded in narratives and in­ terviews, in the records of slaveholders and in the observations of travelers, in the tangi­ ble remnants of the past and in the artisan methods that continue today, and in the shape of the natural and cultural landscape past and present. These records survive as valuable testimony to a history that cannot be reconstructed from traditional sources. They survive Page 12 of 14

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives as well as evidence that the past is ever-present, and still waiting for a full accounting and a just reading.

References Calder, Loth, ed. Virginia Landmarks of Black History. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Calder, Loth, ed. The Virginia Landmarks Register. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976. Cocke, John W. “Remarks on Hedges, Bene Plant, and Pise’ Buildings.” The American Farmer 3. 20 (1821). Joseph Ball Letterbook, April 23, 1754. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress micro­ film. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

(p. 145)

Kulikoff, Alan. “The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700-1790.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 35 (1978). Miller, Randall M. “Dear Master”: Letters from a Slave Family. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Ed. Arthur Schlesinger. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Owens, Leslie Howard. This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Perdue, Charles L., Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Philips, eds. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976. Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Vol. 2. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. Rawick, George P., Jay Hillegas, and Ken Lawrence, eds. The American Slave: A Compos­ ite Autobiography. Supp. Series 1 & 2. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. Schoepf, Johann David. Travels in the Confederation (1783-1784). Trans. Alfred J. Morri­ son. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1968. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

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The Witness of African American Folkways: The Landscape of Slave Narra­ tives Vlach, John Michael. “‘Us Quarters Fixed Fine’: Finding Black Builders in Southern Histo­ ry.” Perspectives on the American South 3 (1985). Reprinted in By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1991. Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill and London: University of Chapel Hill Press, 1993.

John Michael Vlach

John Michael Vlach, George Washington University

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text

The Slave Narrative as Material Text   Teresa A. Goddu The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.010

Abstract and Keywords This article examines the antebellum African American slave narrative as a material arti­ fact by discussing the genre’s diverse practices of authorship, publication, and circula­ tion. It uses a print culture methodology to address the following issues: Who published the slave narrative? What did its original editions look like? How widely was it circulated? In what forms was it distributed? The perspectival shift from literary text to material ob­ ject results in a richer understanding of the historical conditions under which the slave narrative was produced and provides new insights into the genre’s discursive meanings. By reframing the slave narrative as a material text, the article shows how the slave narrative’s discursive meanings are not only embedded in but also enlarged by the mater­ ial practices of its publication and circulation. Keywords: African American slave narrative, print culture studies, print practices, authorship, publication, circula­ tion, material text

OVER the past 30 years, literary criticism has established the slave narrative as a com­ plex discursive text. From the foundational works of the 1980s—Frances Smith Foster’s Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (1979), Marion Wilson Starling’s The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (1981), John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner’s The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theo­ ry (1982), Charles Davis and Henry Louis Gates’ The Slave’s Narrative (1985), and William Andrews’ To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986)—to more recent approaches such as Audrey Fisch’s edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to the Slave Narrative (2007), literary criticism has identified the formal patterns, rhetorical strategies, generic conventions, and literary influences of the slave narrative. The slave narrative has come to be viewed as an artful autobiographi­ cal act. Rather than a minor subgenre, the slave narrative has also become central to the African American literary canon and integral to the nineteenth-century U.S. literary tradi­ tion, influencing prominent genres such as the sentimental, the gothic, and realism (Wein­ stein 2007, Goddu 1997, Rohrbach 2002). The past 30 years has also marked an explosion

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text in the number of available slave narratives, both in print and digital forms (North Ameri­ can Slave Narratives). Despite highly sophisticated readings of the slave narrative as a discursive text and a greatly expanded canon, still little is known about the slave narrative as a material arti­ fact—who published the slave narrative, what its original editions looked like, how much it cost, how it was distributed, who read it, and so on. These are questions that the inter­ disciplinary fields of book history and print culture studies raise. Focused on the produc­ tion, distribution, and consumption of texts, these fields demonstrate that the meanings of texts are shaped by their material contexts. This perspectival shift from literary text to material object results in a richer understanding of the historical conditions under which the slave narrative was produced and provides new insights into the genre’s discursive meanings. A focus on the slave narrative’s materiality does not elide its (p. 150) textuality but rather foregrounds what Meredith McGill terms “the matter of the text”—the materi­ al forms of discourse and genre (2003, 8). Moreover, a focus on the material text can interrogate certain well-established truisms about the slave narrative and open new avenues for critical exploration. A material ap­ proach to the slave narrative can defamiliarize the genre’s seeming sameness and restore its rich diversity. In its efforts to establish the slave narrative as a distinct literary genre with shared conventions, literary criticism has emphasized the slave narrative’s “over­ whelming sameness” (Olney 1985, 148).The unintended result of this generic classifica­ tion has been to homogenize a complex tradition and narrow the diversity of its canon to a few “representative” texts. If, as James Olney argues, readers who look at dozens of slave narratives will not discover “anything new or different but only, always more and more of the same,” then to read one slave narrative is to read them all (1985, 148). Even as the canon of slave narratives has expanded exponentially to include, thanks to William Andrews’ efforts, every slave narrative published before 1920, critical attention has re­ mained focused on a few “representative” narratives, most notably Frederick Douglass’ and Harriet Jacobs’. As Eric Gardner puts it, a “large, rich, and wondrously complex and conflicted body of literature” has been reduced to “single supposedly representative texts” (2009, 8). A material approach to the slave narrative sets the multiplicity of the archive against the monolith of the genre. Moreover, it seeks not simply to restore the diversity of the print archive—that diversity has, after all, been hiding in plain sight in an impressive range of printed and digital texts—but to utilize print culture methodologies to challenge and com­ plicate generic readings of the slave narrative. Working inductively, the material ap­ proach attends to the wide array of historical conditions that produced the slave narra­ tive in order to ask how individual differences can complicate the slave narrative’s stan­ dardization. The material histories of specific texts provide a more detailed map of the slave narrative—its geographical diversity, its multiple editions and printed forms, its var­ ied publishing and distributional practices—that can, in turn, trouble the truisms of the broader tradition. By focusing on the publication and circulation histories of the antebel­

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text lum slave narrative, the height of the genre’s codification, new interpretive strategies and frameworks for the slave narrative emerge.

Published by Himself The slave narrative’s most definitive discursive paradigm derives from its subtitle, “Writ­ ten by Himself.” Found on a significant number of title pages, most famously Frederick Douglass’ (1845), “written by himself” represents the former slave’s selfhood in many of the foundational readings of the slave narrative. As Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates influentially argued, the slave narrative enabled former slaves to “write themselves into being” (1985, xxiii). In this formulation, literacy is a means of empowerment and lib­ eration. The slave’s trajectory from oppression to freedom is not (p. 151) just physical but discursive. Douglass’ freedom, as I have argued, is achieved not simply through his fight with Covey and his escape North, but through his ascension to literacy—his learning to read and to write, his ability to forge his own pass to freedom, his rising to speak on the abolitionist platform. His writing of the Narrative serves as the final step in this linguistic liberation. By writing his own story, Douglass produces his own identity and asserts his freedom (Goddu and Smith 1989). While critics have attended to the constraints inherent in the former slave’s empowerment through literacy, most notably the “white envelope” or the extensive editorial apparatus that frames the slave narrative’s “black message,” the general thrust of their readings has viewed the former slave’s authorship as a sign of his agency and authority (Sekora 1987). This reading of the former slave’s agency through authorship, however, elides the com­ plex historical conditions under which that authorship was produced. In the antebellum period, “written by himself” was less a sign of the former slave’s agency than an adver­ tisement of the text’s authenticity. Read as part of the slave narrative’s obligatory authen­ ticating documentation, “written by himself” may not always describe the text’s actual practices: as John Ernest states of Henry Box Brown’s narrative, “although the 1851 text includes in its title the familiar phrase ‘written by himself,’ Brown probably did not write it himself” (Ernest 2009, 131). Critics need, as Leon Jackson points out, to differentiate between the “history of practices as practiced” and the “history of the practices as repre­ sented” (2008, 4). By attending to the wide array of authorial positions announced on the title pages of antebellum slave narratives, a more complex and vexed model of authorship comes into view: narratives are also “dictated by himself” (Lewis Clarke 1845), “narrated by himself” (Josiah Henson 1849), “taken from his own lips” (Thomas Anderson ca. 1854), “written by a friend” (Andrew Jackson 1847), or “written from a statement of facts made by himself” (Henry Box Brown 1849). While many narratives were edited in some form (for instance, George Thompson edited Moses Grandy’s narrative and Isaac Fischer edit­ ed Charles Ball’s), some slave narratives declare their editors to be their authors: the Narrative of Henry Box Brown (1849) is “By Charles Stearns”; The Life and Adventures of Peter Wheeler (Wheeler 1839) is by “The Author of the ‘Mountain Wild Flower.’” Other narratives simply imply their authorship through their title such as Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (1836). Still Page 3 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text others, like Harriet Jacobs’ (1861), send a mixed message: “written by herself” and “edit­ ed by L. Maria Child.” As these examples show, the former slaves’ advertised agency over the composition of their texts varied widely: narratives were dictated, ghost written, edit­ ed, and transcribed. Without detailed textual histories (which are often impossible to re­ construct), it is difficult to generalize about authorial agency in the slave narrative, par­ ticularly those published before the Civil War. What such examples do suggest, however, is that there were a range of authorial arrangements and varied amounts of textual con­ trol. Rather than focus on texts with an identifiable author function in order to produce readings of authorial agency, critics should recognize slave narratives as the complex dis­ cursive and cultural negotiations of a corporate authorship. Questions of textual control and ownership become even more complicated when the for­ mer slave attempts to access print. This is evident in the other ubiquitous phrase that (p. 152) graces the slave narrative’s title pages—“published by himself.” This phrase is a reminder that the act of writing is incomplete without the act of publishing. The former slave must also “print himself into being.” The former slave not only had to negotiate the vexed editorial relationships of corporate authorship but also the institutional and eco­ nomic practices of the text’s production. The slave narrative’s title pages also record the genre’s different publishing arrangements. In addition to listing a publisher’s or printer’s name, they announce the former slave author’s relationship to that process: the narrative is “published by himself” (Lunsford Lane 1842), “published by the author” (Henry Bibb 1849 and William Grimes 1855), “published for the author” (Harriet Jacobs 1861), or “printed for the author” (Sojourner Truth 1850). Former slave authors entered into a vari­ ety of publishing arrangements to get their stories into print. Many were self-published through arrangements with local printing presses: such as the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1825) and The Narrative of Lunsford Lane (1842). Others were published under the auspices of The American Anti-Slavery Society: the Narrative of James Williams, An American Slave (1838), the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), and the Narrrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847). Still others were published by commercial anti-slavery presses: for instance, the Narratives of the Suffer­ ings of Lewis and Milton Clarke (1846) and the Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave (1848) were published by Bela Marsh; Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) was published by Miller, Orton and Mulligan; Josiah Henson’s Truth Stranger than Fiction (1858) was published by John P. Jewett. Publishing arrangements varied both across and within categories. The American AntiSlavery Society, for instance, fully sponsored the life story of James Williams, even going so far as to stereotype his narrative, while William Wells Brown had to pay to publish his work that came off The American Anti-Slavery Society’s press: as Laurence Cossu-Beau­ mont and Claire Parfait document, “[h]e had 3000 copies of his Narrative printed at a to­ tal cost of $326” (2009, 6). Self-published narratives were often financed up front, as in the case of Harriet Jacobs, who “using what was left of her savings…paid half the price outright” for the stereotype plates of her narrative, or on credit, as in the case of Sojourn­ er Truth (Yellin 2004, 143; Painter 1996, 110). Other narratives, such as Edmond Kelley’s (1851) and Charles Ball’s (1836), were financed through subscription. An ad for Ball’s Page 4 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text narrative in The Liberator states, “No more copies of the work will be printed than shall be subscribed for” (August 29, 1835). Kelley’s text registers the economic risk former slaves took as they entered into print. His introduction apologizes for not including all the documents promised in the subscription circular and explains that “the number of sub­ scribers is so small, that to publish an expensive book would tend to involve me deeper in debt than I am at present, ($865).” He goes on to state that without a larger number of subscribers “I shall not make anything on the work” (1851, 3). Indeed, most authors earned only modest profits from their narratives. In the arrangement that Lydia Maria Child worked out with the publisher Thayer and Eldridge (which eventually fell through), Harriet Jacobs was to earn 10% on the retail price of her book, which sold for one dollar (Yellin 1985, 280). William Grimes imagined that the 1855 edition of his narrative would net him enough money “to pay the printer, and have a small amount left to (p. 153) carry him safely through the coming year” (Andrews and Mason 2008, 112). Sojourner Truth had to embark on an extensive anti-slavery tour in order to pay off her $500 debt to her printer (Painter 1996, 116, 129). Others overtly framed their narratives in the humble terms of charity: Moses Grandy’s (1843) title page states that it is “Published and Sold for the Benefit of His Relations Still in Slavery.” Grandy and Lunsford Lane both state that their proceeds will be used to purchase family members from slavery on their title pages while Leonard Black promises that his profits will be utilized to continue his education (1847, 3). While such a self-effacing approach was one means of self-promotion, it also suggests these authors’ moderate expectations for their books. In general, the former slave, like many authors of the period, bore much of the cost of publishing while earning fairly small rewards. In an era of literary production where few publications earned robust profits, the slave narrative was no exception. Those authors who were able to capitalize on their stories were either subsidized or supported by the distributional networks of The American Anti-Slavery Society, such as Douglass, or were canny cultural entrepreneurs, such as Box Brown, who revised his text, and constantly re­ fashioned himself, to meet market demands. Most often, however, as Joanna Brooks ar­ gues, early black entrepreneurial authorship had limited chances of success (2012, 50). Even those with connections to larger anti-slavery networks, such as Harriet Jacobs, found it difficult to get their stories into print. As Jean Fagan Yellin details, Jacobs failed to arrange publication for her book in England, despite introductions made on her behalf, and followed an uneven path to publication in the United States: her first submission to the Boston house of Phillips and Samson failed because she could not get Stowe to agree to write a preface for the book; her second submission to Thayer and Eldridge, which was the only bookseller Child could find willing to undertake the book, fell apart when the publisher went bankrupt. Jacobs ended up buying the plates herself and arranging to have her book printed and bound at the Boston Stereotype Foundry (Yellin 2004, 137– 153; 1985, 280). Recorded in the publication histories of the slave narrative, then, is a more intricate, and often less liberating, account of the possibilities for early African American authorship.

Page 5 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text Through its publishing as well as its textual histories, the slave narrative tells complex stories about the economics of authorship and the negotiations of ownership. Rather than remain a discursive struggle within the text, these issues extend to the publication process. The rhetorical restraints inherent within the slave narrative are often magnified by the economic and material constraints of publication. Without more detailed publish­ ing histories of a wide range of slave narratives (for model examples see Brooks 2012, Green 1995, and Fabian 2000), it is difficult to gauge just how much former slaves could leverage the market for books to their own benefit and in what situations. Given the rela­ tively large number of self-published narratives (Blassingame estimates that “antislavery societies published less than 20 percent of the antebellum black autobiographies” [1977, xxix]), it would be helpful to know the range of ways that black writers accessed the press. What printers and presses were open to publishing black writers in this period and why? More work also needs to be done on copyright and the slave narrative. Some (p. 154) former slaves held the copyright to their texts (Frederick Douglass, Lunsford Lane, Lewis Clarke, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, among others); others, like Harriet Jacobs and Charles Ball, did not. However, it is unclear just what such textual property rights meant in a decentralized literary marketplace that operated under a nineteenthcentury copyright law that, according to Meredith McGill, was primarily concerned with the “circumscription of individual rights and not with their extension” (2003, 46). More­ over, in a literary marketplace that operated via reprinting, copyright could limit rather than extend circulation. Given the material workings of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace, possession of the book’s stereotyped plates may have been more important to an author’s profits and her narrative’s circulation. What, for instance, did Jacobs lose by ceding her copyright to Child and what did she gain by buying her plates? Rather than assume an easy equation between copyright and ownership, or between two different forms of property—the slave and her story—it would be better to understand how publica­ tion procedures translated into actual material practices. In order to understand the slave narrative’s precise parameters, it should be read within and integrated into the broader contexts of the period’s print culture systems.

Forms of Circulation In addition to a more detailed picture of the slave narrative’s publication practices, a rich­ er understanding of its forms of circulation is also required. Another truism about the slave narrative—that it was a bestseller—needs to be reexamined from a print culture perspective. From its earliest critics, the slave narrative has been depicted as having a formidable circulation. In his 1849 review of “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves,” Ephraim Peabody extols their “immense circulation.” He writes: “Of Brown’s Narrative, first pub­ lished in 1847, not less than eight thousand copies have been already sold. Douglass’ Life, first published in 1845, has in this country alone passed through seven editions…. They are scattered over the whole of the North….”(1849, 64). Following Peabody, twenti­ eth-century critics regularly rehearsed the number of editions and circulation figures of the most prominent slave narratives to argue more generally for the “enormous populari­ ty of slave narratives” (Nichols 1959, 152). Few slave narratives, however, reached this Page 6 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text threshold. As Blassingame states, most slave narratives were “abysmal failures, selling fewer than a thousand copies each” (1977, xxix–xxx). Moreover, as Cossu-Beaumont and Parfait point out, the large number of self-published narratives “imply that this type of lit­ erature may not have been as popular with American publishers as has often been claimed” (2009, 14). Yuval Taylor also cautions that “the number of editions is a problem­ atic indication of popularity,” given the slave narrative’s small print runs, which were tied to its most prominent mode of distribution—hand-selling (1999, xxi). Instead of formulat­ ing an equation between the slave narrative’s publication numbers and its popularity or generalizing from a handful of highly successful narratives to the genre as a whole, the significance of the slave narrative’s publication figures should be (p. 155) contextualized within the print culture practices of the period. Basic questions still need to be addressed before the slave narrative’s popularity can be fully assessed. How and where was the slave narrative distributed? How wide was its reach—both geographically and in terms of its audience? What factors influenced its chances for success? A first step would resituate the slave narrative’s publication figures within the particular contexts that they are de­ ployed. Drawn largely from its own pages (advertised on its title page or described in its paratext) or from publisher’s advertisements, these numbers are deployed for promotion­ al purposes. The publisher’s “Note to the Fourth American Edition” of William Wells Brown’s Narrative, for instance, states: “Three editions of this work, consisting in all of eight thousand copies, were sold in less than eighteen months from the time the first edi­ tion was published. No antislavery work has met with a more rapid Sale in the United States than this narrative” (1849, iii). The publisher’s advertisement at the back of James Pennington’s narrative marks it as “The sixth thousand” (1849, 89). An advertisement in Frederick Douglass’ Paper for Solomon Northup’s (1853) Twelve Years a Slave screams in capital letters “FOURTEENTH THOUSAND NOW READY” or for My Bondage and My Freedom, “5000 COPIES SOLD IN TWO DAYS!” (August 26, 1853; August 24, 1855). Playing to the vogue for large numbers in a rapidly expanding market culture obsessed with numeracy, the publisher pushes his book (Cohen 1982). The numbers that grace the title pages of slave narratives, such as Moses Roper (“Thirty-Sixth Thousand”) and William Wells Brown (1849) (“Eleventh Thousand”), similarly advertise the text’s populari­ ty even as they authenticate it. Numbers become the self-perpetuating sign of the text’s circulation while also securing its legitimacy, showing it to have been vetted not just by its white authenticators but the marketplace itself. Playing both to a literary market that works by puffery and to a culture that recognizes numeracy as an authoritative language, the slave narrative’s publication figures speak within a complex discursive context. The precise correlations between this discursive context and the material realities of the slave narrative’s circulation are often difficult to chart given the gaps in the African American publishing archive. Even if these publication figures are accurate, numbers alone are an insufficient measure of popularity without the context of the larger distribution system to which they refer. The slave narrative’s distribution systems were varied but depended heavily on the author’s self-promotion. Since most printers did not act as publishers, distribution for the slave narrative, even those that were not self-published, often fell to the author. Richard Page 7 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text D. Webb, for instance, arranged to have the British edition of Douglass’ Narrative printed but took no responsibility for its marketing or distribution. Douglass sold the Narrative at his speaking engagements (Fulkerson 1999, 92). Indeed, lecturing served as the central means of distribution for the slave narrative. Sojourner Truth, for example, joined Garri­ son and George Thompson on a tour of western New York in 1851 to dispose of her book (Painter 1996, 116). Several slave narratives embed their author’s relationships to the lecture circuit within their very form: Moses Roper’s narrative appends a list of churches in which he lectured while Lewis and Milton Clarke’s narrative includes answers by Lewis Clarke to frequently asked questions at his lectures (p. 156) (1848, 63–68; 1846, 103–109). Successful narratives depended upon the author’s circulating body. As “professional fugi­ tives,” former slaves marketed themselves in both word and flesh (Gara 1965, 196). This synergy helped to create a public for their narratives. However, it required constant movement to sustain. As Ann Fabian states, “[f]ugitives understood that it was difficult to create the market for their stories and difficult to maintain it” (2000, 106). While self-promotion on the anti-slavery lecture circuit was the central channel of circula­ tion for the slave narrative, there were other distributional networks available to the for­ mer slave as well. Harriet Jacobs, as Jean Fagan Yellin documents (2004, 144–148), hand sold her narrative by traveling to Philadelphia in order to call on anti-slavery activists, selling 50 copies of her book, and to visit the office of The Christian Recorder in the hope that they would notice her book (which they did). Rather than circulate her body on the lecture circuit, Jacobs wrote numerous letters to push her books. She was also able to tap into larger anti-slavery distributional networks by selling copies of her book to anti-slav­ ery agents to vend, by getting her narrative noticed in anti-slavery papers and by having it sold at anti-slavery offices in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Despite her success in accessing broader anti-slavery networks, she still complained of being cut out of the general market. She writes to John Greenleaf Whittier: “the Boston booksellers are dread­ fully afraid of soiling their hands with an Anti-Slavery book; so we have a good deal of trouble in getting the book into the market” (qtd. in Yellin 2004, 146). The extent to which the slave narrative broke into the wider marketplace remains an unanswered question. Basic studies of how widely the slave narrative was noticed or ad­ vertised outside of the anti-slavery press or of its geographical reach still remain to be done. A cursory examination of the places of publication in the North American Slave Narratives database suggests slave narratives were published in many different locales (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and London, as well as St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, New Bedford, and Syracuse). Charles Ball’s narrative Slavery in the United States (1836) and its later version Fifty Years in Chains (1859), for example, were published in places as varied as New York, London, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Lewiston, Pennsylvania. How­ ever, the extent to which any particular slave narrative circulated beyond a local region— or outside a self-identified anti-slavery audience—remains unclear. Many more case stud­ ies of individual slave narratives are needed before generalizations can be made. CossuBeaumont and Parfait theorize that the slave narrative, like anti-slavery literature more

Page 8 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text generally, “seems to have circulated via specific channels and within the rather narrow circles of anti-slavery activists and sympathizers” (2009, 8). Although it is difficult to gauge how marketable the slave narrative was more generally, its circulation within anti-slavery networks is more discernable. As Trish Loughran (2007) shows, the anti-slavery movement established a highly centralized publication system in the 1830s. Consisting of a centralized committee and local societies, the American AntiSlavery Society (AASS), formed itself—and its print publications—“on a corporate mod­ el” (Loughran 2007, 320). Creating a centralized distributional system for its publications —replete with book depositories, traveling agents, and a local library system—the AASS represented the leading edge of the nascent national market (p. 157) for books (Goddu 2009). Although this centralized circulation system collapsed in the 1840s along with its organization (the AASS split apart in 1840), many of its distributional sites remained available to the slave narrative, which exploded in the mid 1840s with the publication of Douglass’ narrative. Former slaves, such as William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass, as well as lesser-known figures such as Andrew Jackson, traveled the anti-slavery lecture circuit with their narratives. Slave narratives were also sold at anti-slavery bookstores, of­ fices, conventions, and fairs; they were available in anti-slavery reading rooms, distrib­ uted by anti-slavery agents, and advertised in anti-slavery publications. An advertisement in The Liberty Almanac for 1847 for the “Anti-Slavery Depository, Publication Office, and Free Reading Room” in New York, for instance, lists the narratives of Lewis and Milton Clarke, as well as that of Frederick Douglass, for sale at both wholesale and retail prices. According to The Liberator, editions of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass graced the book table at the Twelfth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar at Boston’s Faneuil Hall (December 26, 1845). By tracing the slave narrative’s path through anti-slavery dis­ tributional networks and grounding it within the anti-slavery movement’s material prac­ tices, its modes of circulation—and their meaning—come more fully into view. Take, for example, The Narrative of James Williams (1838). The first slave narrative pub­ lished by the AASS, it was distributed widely through anti-slavery networks and had an immense circulation, despite the fact that Williams fled to England before its publication so there was no body to back up the book. While the controversy over the text’s veracity, which erupted shortly after the book’s publication, eventually forced the Executive Com­ mittee to withdraw it from circulation (it was published in February 1838 and withdrawn in October of that year), the Narrative’s circulation during that short period was impres­ sive, as were the AASS’s plans for its distribution. The Narrative of James Williams was produced in two formats: as a cheap eight-page pamphlet, which was included as No. 6 of The Anti-Slavery Examiner and No. 3 of The Abolitionist’s Library (selling for $1 per hun­ dred), and as a “neat volume” of 108 pages (25 cents per single or $17 per hundred) (Williams 1838, 8). The Executive Committee of the AASS heavily invested in Williams’ narrative. It was stereotyped in an edition of 5000 copies in February (Minutes, 38). By April, plans were announced to adapt it for universal circulation by stereotyping it in cheap sheets: “LET THE LAND BE INUNDATED WITH THE TALE OF HIS TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS” proclaimed The Emancipator (April 12, 1838). Hoping to place “James Williams in every Family,” the Narrative was stereotyped in a quarto form of 10,000 Page 9 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text copies to be sold for “the very low price of ten dollars a thousand, one dollar and twentyfive cents a hundred, twenty-five cents a dozen.” At this price, E. C. Delavan ordered 4000 copies and expressed “a hope that 400,000 copies” would be “published for the State of New York alone” (The Emancipator April 12, 1838). In the same advertisement, The Emancipator boasts that a single auxiliary had ordered 10,000 copies. Williams’ nar­ rative sold briskly, selling 10,000 copies in three days, according to The Emancipator, and leaving “several orders unsupplied” (May 3, 1838). Emboldened by this response, The Emancipator called on abolitionists to “furnish the means of publishing and circulating this season…a million copies of the Narrative, without delay”(May (p. 158) 3, 1838). The plan for this unprecedented circulation took several forms: it was sold at anti-slavery de­ positories as far west as Cincinnati; it was purchased and reprinted by local societies (the Ohio Executive Committee published 6000 copies of the Narrative to sell at its state con­ vention); it was sent to every member of Congress; and it was integrated into the antislavery library system (The Philanthropist July 24, 1838; May 22, 1838; The Friend of Man September 19, 1838; The Emancipator June 21, 1838). In June, the AASS listed the Narrative as among “the more important and valuable” works to be included in an antislavery library. Furthermore, they urged abolitionists to circulate “at least 100 of James Williams…in every town in the state” (The Emancipator June 21, 1838). By September, the Executive Committee authorized 25,000 copies to be stereotyped (Minutes, 94). The Narrative gained an even wider circulation when it was reprinted in two periodicals: The Liberator (March 16, 1838) published an extract, and The Michigan Observer reprinted the entire narrative (The Pennsylvania Freeman September 6, 1838). What, then, are we to make of the brief but remarkable publication history of the Narra­ tive of James Williams? First, Williams offers a very different model of slave authorship. Neither entrepreneurial nor self-promotional, Williams’ narrative relies fully on the pa­ tronage of the AASS for its circulation. Physically absent, Williams is not only unable to back up his story (hence making it vulnerable to attack by southern critics) or to propel its circulation. Rather, the Narrative’s extraordinary circulation showcases the strength of the anti-slavery distributional system and suggests how crucial its centralized structure was for this narrative’s dissemination. While Williams’ text was published at the height of the anti-slavery movement’s distributional power, its circulation history suggests that we might well attend more closely to the important role that the anti-slavery infrastructure played in the circulation of the slave narrative more generally. Second, because of its role as an official AASS publication, the Narrative’s publication fig­ ures can be more fully contextualized and, hence, better assessed. Obsessed with num­ bers as an indicator of social change, the AASS kept detailed accounts of their publication figures. While the AASS embraced large numbers as an indicator of their own strength and promoted fantasies of universal circulation (like The Emancipator’s vision of a million copies of James Williams in circulation), their annual reports do provide a way to situate the Narrative’s numbers within their own system. In their May 1838 report, the AASS cal­ culated a total of 646,502 copies issued from their press (Fifth Annual Report 1838, 46). In May 1839, that number was up to 724,862: of those 210,639 were pamphlets and 93,875 were tracts (Sixth Annual Report 1839, 52). Clearly the Narrative’s figures fall Page 10 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text well within this range. Moreover, contemporaneous texts, such as The American Antislav­ ery Almanac or Theodore Weld’s best-selling tract, American Slavery As It Is (1839), sold in even larger numbers: Weld’s tract sold 100,000 copies in its first year, whereas Lewis Tappan claimed that newsboys would sell “10,000 copies of the old Almanac in 2 days!” and the Executive Committee authorized the publication of 50,000 copies of The Ameri­ can Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1839 (qtd. in Barnes and Dumond 1934, 835; Minutes, 94). Williams’ narrative, whose circulation the AASS prioritized during the summer of 1838 as second only to the almanac, might have attained (p. 159) similar numbers had it remained in circulation (The Emancipator June 21, 1838). The fact that the AASS stereotyped the Narrative also supports its circulation figures. What those figures still do not tell us, however, is the correlation between the number of copies produced and the number of copies circulated or read. Since the bulk of the Narra­ tive’s copies were sold to anti-slavery auxiliaries for dissemination, it is hard to know how many were redistributed and how quickly this occurred. One account of its distribution in New York State suggests that the AASS’s rhetoric was backed up by action: “Our city An­ ti-Slavery Society have just had the narrative of James Williams distributed throughout the city—a copy left with every family, and in every store and office, and two or three copies in boarding houses. It took 1,357 copies; cost, $13.57, and the services of a boy a little over two days” (The Friend of Man July 11, 1838). Given that the library system was just being announced in the summer of 1838, however, it is unclear how widely—or even whether—the Narrative was circulated through this system before it was withdrawn. Moreover, since the Narrative, like many of the AASS cheap publications, was designed for gratuitous circulation, it is unclear how often a single copy was recirculated or, con­ versely, even read. The afterlife of Williams’ narrative also needs to be traced. Despite its withdrawal by the Executive Committee, it continued to be advertised in anti-slavery peri­ odicals, a sign that there were copies still in need of disposal. The Liberator advertised the Narrative (in sheets) in its lists of books for sale at the Anti-Slavery Depository as late as March 6, 1841. Finally, while the extent of the Narrative’s circulation remains unclear, its impact on the AASS was immense. The public withdrawal of the narrative not only undermined the AASS’s credibility but also affected their approach to the slave narrative for many years to come. They did not sponsor another slave narrative until 1845 when they published the Narrative of Fredrick Douglass. The publication history of Williams’ Narrative also chal­ lenges critical accounts of the slave narrative that trace the origins of its marketability to Douglass’ 1845 Narrative which sold 4500 copies from May to August of 1845 (much less than Williams’ publication figures for a similar time period). Williams’ narrative demon­ strates that the market conditions necessary for the slave narrative’s mass circulation were available as early as the 1830s. Besides mapping in more detail the modes of the slave narrative’s circulation—through anti-slavery libraries, depositories, reading rooms, and lecture circuits as well as other lo­ cations—more attention needs to be paid to its forms of circulation. The slave narrative circulated in a multiplicity of material forms: in sheets, pamphlets, or volumes, each cre­ Page 11 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text ating a different circulation context. The success of Williams’ narrative, for instance, de­ pended upon it being stereotyped in cheap sheets. Similarly, an extract from Douglass’ Narrative, published as a tract by E. M. Davis in an “edition of 10,000 copies” and intend­ ed for “gratuitous distribution” for “those who are not willing to be identified with the ac­ tive Abolitionists,” may have reached a wider audience than Douglass’ more expensive volume (ca. 1845, 32). Participating in the nineteenth-century culture of reprinting, slave narratives were also recirculated within a variety of different texts. They were para­ phrased in the pages of the almanac, as Henry Box Brown’s was within The Liberty Al­ manac for 1851 (15); they were extracted within anti-slavery (p. 160) compendiums such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (1853) A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; they were even reprinted within other slave narratives, as a selection from Moses Grandy’s Life was with Aaron’s The Light and Truth of Slavery (1845, 47–48). Mostly, however, they were extracted in the pages of periodicals: Williams’ in The Liberator and The Michigan Observer, Lewis Clarke’s in The National Anti-Slavery Standard (October 20 and 27, 1847), and Jacobs’ in The Weekly Anglo-African (March 30, 1861). Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States was extracted or abridged in four anti-slavery periodicals when it was first published, The Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine (“Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave” 1836), The Anti-Slavery Record (“A Slave Execution” 1836), The Slave’s Friend (“Charles Ball’s Moth­ er” and “Charles Ball’s Return” 1837), and Slavery in America (“Narrative of Charles Ball” 1837) as well as later in two other periodicals, Chamber’s Miscellany (“Life of a Ne­ gro Slave” 1853) and The Southern Quarterly Review (“Life of a Negro Slave” 1853). In addition to extending the circulation of the slave narrative, the culture of reprinting also created new audiences for it. Ball’s text, for example, reached a range of anti-slavery au­ diences, a highbrow audience in The Quarterly, a middlebrow one in The Record, and a children’s audience in The Slave’s Friend, as well as a British audience in Slavery in America and Chamber’s Miscellany and a southern readership in The Southern Quarterly Review. By tracing how the slave narrative circulates in parts as well as a whole, the genre’s reach as well as its multiple audiences and contexts come more fully into view. To truly understand the extent of that reach, then, the study of the slave narrative needs to extend beyond the material form of the book. A focus on the slave narrative as book not only considerably underestimates the number of slave narratives produced but also the range and contexts of their circulation. Anti-slavery periodicals, for instance, not only reprinted slave narratives but also regularly published original narratives. For instance, The Liberator published the “Narrative of James Curry, A Fugitive Slave” on the front page of its January 10, 1840 edition and The National Anti-Slavery Standard published a regular column titled “Tales of Oppression” (October 22, 1840). Other types of anti-slav­ ery texts also included original slave narratives: The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838 published the “Story of Anthony Gale” (Gale 44); The Liberty Bell, an anti-slavery gift book, published the “Story of a Fugitive” (Hopper 1843, 163–169). Besides increasing the sheer number of slave narratives in circulation, these texts within texts foreground questions of genre and material form. Folded within other forms, these slave narratives highlight how material and discursive contexts affect not only circulation but also mean­ ing. What, for instance, is the difference between reading a slave narrative in a gift book Page 12 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text versus a newspaper or an almanac? How does the material form as well as the discursive context frame the possible meanings of the slave narrative published within their pages? Similarly, how does a narrative’s meaning change when it is transformed into different forms? The proliferation of Henry Box Brown’s narrative into an array of visual and generic forms—a lithograph, a woodcut, a panorama, a children’s story, a song sheet—is just one example of the slave narrative’s adaptation within different media (Wood 2000, 103–117). In documenting the diverse circulations and (p. 161) transformations of the slave narrative, consideration must also be given to how medium affects meaning. Reframing the slave narrative as a material text, then, produces opportunities for new in­ terpretations of the genre. It not only broadens the field to include texts that circulate be­ yond the boundaries of the book but it also significantly reconfigures the genre by reveal­ ing its diversity through its various publication, distributional, and discursive contexts. The slave narrative’s discursive meanings are not only embedded in but also enlarged by the material practices of its publication. The range of those meanings must be built one case study at a time. While there may remain aspects of the slave narrative’s material his­ tory that cannot be reconstructed, there exists a robust archive that has received little critical consideration. Attention to the material manifestations of the slave narrative in­ herent within its extensive print archive will produce both a richer understanding of the genre and an expanded knowledge of early African American print practices.

References Aaron. The Light and Truth of Slavery. Aaron’s History. Worcester, MA: The Author, 1845. . July 16, 2013. “A Slave Execution.” The Anti-Slavery Record 2.12 (December 1836): 149. Anderson, Thomas and J.P. Clark. Interesting Account of Thomas Anderson. Virginia: s.n., 1854? . July 16, 2013. Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiogra­ phy, 1760–1865. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1986. Andrews, William L. and Regina E. Mason, ed. Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man. Lewistown, PA: John W. Shugert, 1836. ——. Fifty Years in Chains, or, The Life of an American Slave. New York: H. Dayton; Indi­ anapolis: Asher and Co., 1859. . July 16, 2013. Barnes, Gilbert H. and Dwight L. Dumond, ed. Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844. Volume Two. New York: D. Appelton-Centu­ ry Co., 1934. Page 13 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb. New York: Published by the Author, 1849. . July 16, 2013. Black, Leonard. The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery. New Bedford: Benjamin Lindsey, 1847. . July 16, 2013. Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Inter­ views, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1977. Brooks, Joanna. “The Unfortunates: What the Lifespans of Early Black Books Tell Us About Book History.” Early African American Print Culture. Ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 40–52. (p. 162)

Brown, Henry Box and Charles Stearns. Narrative of Henry Box Brown. Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849. . July 16, 2013. Brown, William Wells. Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Boston: The AntiSlavery Office, 1847. . July 16, 2013. ——. Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave. London: Charles Gilpin, 1849. . July 16, 2013. “Charles Ball’s Mother.” The Slave’s Friend 2.4 (April 1837): 11–14. “Charles Ball’s Return.” The Slave’s Friend 2.6 (June 1837): 10–11. Clarke, Lewis. Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke. Boston: David H. Ela, 1845. . July 16, 2013. ——and Milton Clarke. Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke. Boston: Bela Marsh, 1846. . July 16, 2013. Cohen, Patricia Cline. A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1982. Cossu-Beaumont, Laurence and Claire Parfait. “Book History and African American Stud­ ies.” Transatlantica 1 (2009). . July 16, 2013. Davis, Charles T. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. The Slave’s Narrative. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Anti-Slavery Of­ fice, 1845. . July 16, 2013. ——. Extracts from the Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Philadelphia: s.n, 1845? Page 14 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text ——. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855. . July 16, 2013. Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 2009. Fabian, Anne. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Ameri­ ca. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 79–116. Fisch, Audrey, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Fifth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. New York: William S. Dorr, 1838. Foster, Francis Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narra­ tives. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin Press, 1979. Fulkerson, Gerald. “Textual Introduction.” The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series Two: Autobiographical Writings. Volume 1: Narrative. Ed. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivi­ gan, and Peter P. Hinks. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. 87–97. Gale, Anthony. “Story of Anthony Gale” in The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838. Boston: D.K. Hitchcock, n.d. 44 Gara, Larry. “The Professional Fugitive in the Abolition Movement.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 48.3 (1965): 196–204. Gardner, Eric. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Liter­ ature. Jackson, Mississippi: U of Mississippi Press, 2009. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. ——. “The Antislavery Almanac and the Discourse of Numeracy.” Book History 12 (2009): 129–155. Goddu, Teresa A. and Craig V. Smith. “Scenes of Writing in Frederick Douglass’s Narra­ tive: Autobiography and the Creation of Self.” The Southern Review 25 (1989): 822–840. Grandy, Moses. Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy. London: Gilpin, 1843. . July 16, 2013. (p. 163) Green, James. “The Publishing History of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.” Slav­ ery and Abolition 16 (1995): 362–375. Grimes, William. Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. New York: [W. Grimes], 1825. . July 16, 2013.

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text ——. Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Brought Down to the Present Time. New Haven: Published by the Author, 1855. . July 16, 2013. Henson, Josiah. The Life of Josiah Henson. Boston: A. D. Phelps, 1849. . July 16, 2013. ——. Truth Stranger than Fiction. Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1858. . July 16, 2013. Hopper, Issac T. “Story of a Fugitive” in The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom. Boston: For the Massachusetts’s Anti-Slavery Fair, 1843. 163–169. Jackson, Andrew. Narrative of the Writings of Andrew Jackson. Syracuse: Daily and Week­ ly Star Office, 1847. . July 16, 2013. Jackson, Leon. The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. Lydia Maria Child. Boston: Pub­ lished for the Author, 1861. . July 16, 2013. Kelley, Edmond. A Family Redeemed from Bondage. New Bedford: Published by the Au­ thor, 1851. . July 16, 2013. Lane, Lunsford. The Narrative of Lunsford Lane. Boston: J.G. Torrey, 1842. . July 16, 2013. The Liberty Almanac, for 1847. New York: William Harnard, n.d. The Liberty Almanac for 1851. New York: Published by the Am. and For. Anti-Slavery So­ ciety, n.d. “The Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave.” The Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine 1.4 (July 1836): 374–393. “Life of a Negro Slave.” Chamber’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, Vol­ ume 9. Ed. William Chambers. (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853). 1–32. “Life of a Negro Slave.” The Southern Quarterly Review (January 1853): 206–227. Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. McGill, Meredith. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834–1853. Philadel­ phia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text Minutes of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Boston Public Library, Boston, MA. “Narrative of Charles Ball.” Slavery in America No. 11 (May 1837): 261–264. Nichols, Charles H. “Who Read the Slave Narratives?” Phylon 20 (1959): 149–162. North American Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews. University Library at the Uni­ versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. . July 16, 2013. Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup. Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853. . July 16, 2013. Olney, James. “‘I was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Liter­ ature.” The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford: Ox­ ford UP, 1985. 148–175. Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. (p. 164)

Peabody, Ephraim. “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves.” Christian Examiner and Religious Mis­ cellany 47.1 (July 1849): 61–93. Pennington, James W. C. The Fugitive Blacksmith. London: Charles Gilpin, 1849. . July 16, 2013. Rohrbach, Augusta. Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Race, Realism and the U.S. Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Roper, Moses. Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery. Berwick-Upon-Tweed: Published for the Author and Printed at the Warder Office, 1848. . July 16, 2013. Sekora, John. “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative.” Callaloo No. 32 (1987): 482–515. Sekora, John and Darwin T. Turner, ed. The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Crit­ icism and Theory. Macomb, Illinois: Western Illinois UP, 1982. Sixth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. New York: William S. Dorr, 1839. “A Slave Execution.” The Anti-Slavery Record 1.1 (January 1835): 149. Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place In American History. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853. Page 17 of 18

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The Slave Narrative as Material Text Taylor, Yuval, ed. I Was Born A Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives. Volume One. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999. Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Boston: Printed for the Author, 1850. . July 16, 2013. Watson, Henry. Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave. Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848. . July 16, 2013. Weinstein, Cindy. “The Slave Narrative and Sentimental Literature.” The Cambridge Com­ panion to the African American Slave Narrative. Ed. Audrey Fisch. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge UP, 2007. 115–134. Wheeler, Peter. Chains and Freedom: Or, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wheeler. Ed. Charles Edwards Lester. New York: E. S. Arnold, 1839. . July 16, 2013. Williams, James. Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society; Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1838. . July 16, 2013. ——. Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave. The Anti-Slavery Examiner No. 6 (1838): 1–8. Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865. New York: Routledge, 2000. Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Text and Contexts of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself.” The Slave’s Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. 262–282. ——. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.

Teresa A. Goddu

Teresa A. Goddu teaches at Vanderbilt University. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, she is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, His­ tory, and Nation (Columbia UP) and is currently completing a book project on anti­ slavery print, material, and visual culture.

Page 18 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader

Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discur­ sive Reader   Dwight A. McBride and Justin A. Joyce The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.003

Abstract and Keywords This essay argues that black literary production during the nineteenth century was articu­ lated under complex discursive conditions. This discursive terrain provides a meaningful way to engage the complexity of the condition of the slave, a condition that continues to inform African American testimony to this very day. This essay maps the rhetorical mark­ ers constituting the terrain of abolitionist discourse—focusing on religion and corporeali­ ty—and charts the discursive milieu within which African American slave narratives have been read. Recasting the abolition debate as a discourse broadens our considerations of texts as “public” documents; that is, texts that were distributed to a wide population of discursive readers through a mixture of oral and written literacy. Placing these narratives within their larger context provides a fuller picture of the irksome overdeterminacies of abolitionism, Romanticism, and the emergence of a distinctive American literature and nationalism within which they were produced and first received. Keywords: discursive terrain, slave narratives, religion, corporeality, discursive reader, rhetorical markers

It is impossible for us to assume that these people [Africans] are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak and another to hear. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers THE most cursory review of black literary production during the nineteenth century demonstrates that the primary concerns of these texts are the issues of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics, and liberation. These concerns, we argue, were articu­ lated under very complex discursive conditions. Asking questions about how the authors and speakers of these texts “bear witness” to these experiences provides a rich and meaningful way to engage the complexity of the condition of the slave, a condition that Page 1 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader continues to inform the state of African American testimony to this very day. The chief concerns of this essay are twofold: to map the rhetorical markers constituting the terrain of abolitionist discourse, and to chart the discursive milieu within which African Ameri­ can slave narratives have been read. Recasting the abolition debate as a discourse places central significance on the issues of language, rhetorical strategy, audience, and the sta­ tus of the production of the “truth” about slavery. This recasting also broadens our con­ siderations of abolitionist discourse to include not just anti-slavery writing but also the various discursive forces that give rise to and make possible or necessary such writing. In addition, charting the several contexts that received and spread the narratives of freed slaves deepens our understanding of the transatlantic and cosmopolitan quality of aboli­ tionist discourse, thereby complicating much of reigning historiographical wisdom, which historicizes abolitionism in narrow and often nationally delineated contexts. Montesquieu’s ironic statement, this essay’s first epigraph, points at the primary site of contestation for slavery debates in the nineteenth century: African humanity. Theo­ ries like Hegel’s description of Africa in The Philosophy of History as the “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit,” or “merely isolated sensual existence” and the popular climatologi­ cal theories disseminated throughout the eighteenth century, along with the obsession of (p. 166)

nineteenth-century anthropologists (fueled by the theory of evolution) with the measure­ ment of race differences, are all examples of racial thinking that circulated widely in an effort to prove that Africans were fundamentally inferior to Europeans and were, there­ fore, especially fitted for slavery. Such ideas served as moral justification for much of the treatment of Africans under slavery. From the content and rhetoric of the debates waged between the anti-slavery agitators and the proslavers one can see that the major issues debated were not only over the nature of slavery, as an institution, but also over the na­ ture of the slave. This explains why abolitionists were constantly responding to this claim in their writings by showing examples of the humanity of the African. Indeed, these de­ bates also reveal much about the moral stakes involved for the slave master as well. A preliminary understanding of the issues involved in the debates over slavery, then, pro­ vides a point of departure from which to begin explaining the discourses that animate, as well as the context that both enables and limits, the testimony of slave narrators. An understanding of these issues signals the complex relationship between the slave wit­ ness and those who would receive his or her testimony. As the second epigraph from Thoreau implies, the “reader” is not only constructed by the witness, but the imagined reader becomes completely discursive for the witness—the fray of discourses, so to speak, into which the witness must enter to be heard at all. This broad-ranging approach to un­ derstanding abolitionism, rather than assuming a hierarchy among this variety of forms, is concerned with the production of meaning that is possible considering the interplay of these forms taken together in the terrain that is abolitionist discourse. For the moment, we want to examine the metaphor of the discursive terrain in order to understand the situation of discourse into which the slave narrator enters when he or she takes pen into hand. If there is a discursive terrain created by abolitionist discourse, what exactly is the function of that terrain? What does that terrain do to the slave narrator? Page 2 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader What does it mean to the slave narrator? If the situation of the discursive terrain is that there is a language about slavery that preexists the slave’s telling of his or her own expe­ rience of slavery, or an entire dialogue or series of debates that preexist the telling of the slave narrator’s particular experience, how does one negotiate the terms of slavery in or­ der to be able to tell one’s own story? The discursive terrain does not simply function to create a kind of overdetermined telling of an experience, it creates the very codes through which those who would be the readers of the slave narrative understand the experience of slavery. If language enables articula­ tions, language also enables us to read, decipher, or interpret those articulations. As a re­ sult, it becomes very important for the slave narrator to be able to speak the codes, to speak the language that preexists the telling of his or her story. Hence the story has to (p. 167) conform to certain codes, certain specifications that are overdetermined by the very discursive terrain into which the slave narrator is inserting himself or herself. Abolitionists, or potential abolitionists, who would hear these testimonies also had to be competent to read abolitionist discourse and had to understand something of the develop­ ment and dissemination of that discourse in order to be able to hear the slave or the exslave. Even more radically, the discursive terrain of abolition allowed the slave to be able to come and to speak in the first place. But to speak of what? It allowed for speech on the individual’s very experience as a slave. That is, it produced the occasion itself for bearing witness, but to an experience that had already been theorized and prophesied. In this way, the slave serves as a kind of fulfillment of the prophesy of abolitionist discourse. The slave is the “real” body, the “real” evidence, the “real” fulfillment of what has been told before. Before the slave ever speaks, we know the slave, we know what his or her experi­ ence is and we know how to read that experience. Although we do not ourselves have that experience, we, nevertheless, know it and recognize it by its language. This is because the language that the slave has to speak in, finally, is the language that will have political efficacy. And the language that will have the greatest degree of efficacy is the language that the reader already recognizes of slavery—the very discourse that creates, allows, and enables the situation for the slave to be able to speak to us at all. We use speaking here both in the theatrical sense of speaking publicly and in the written sense of the slave nar­ ratives that we still have today. In this way the slave’s narrative also bears witness to the accuracy of the reports and testimony of white abolitionists. In addressing the issue of truth or authenticity in testimony, Foucault offers the following comments: Finally, I believe that this will to knowledge, thus reliant upon institutional support and distribution, tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse—I am speaking of our own society. I am thinking of the way Western literature has, for centuries, sought to base itself in nature, in the plausible, upon sincerity and science—in short, upon true discourse. (219)

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader This is instructive when one thinks of the Romantic project of treating or thematizing Na­ ture and the common man, the oppressed, the lowly—all as extensions of “Nature.” For the Romantics there was not a more ultimate sign of the “authentic” or real than that of Nature. The slave theatrically represents a state of nature. The slave is the material—the real, raw material—of abolitionist discourse. The slave is the referent, the point, the very body around which abolitionist discourse coheres and quite literally “makes sense.” As with the producer of any narrative, slave witnesses must understand the terms of the discursive terrain to which they are addressing themselves. Once they do, they must de­ termine how best to mold, bend, and shape their narrative testimony within those terms to achieve their political aims. The narrative challenge, then, is to relate one’s story in terms that will “make sense” for one’s readership (which we understand here less as a group of “real people,” than as a complex of discursive concerns). But what is there to say about this “sense” that abolitionist discourse makes? What underlies and makes possible this sense? What Nietzsche named the “will to power” Foucault rearticulates as the “will to truth”: (p. 168)

True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is inca­ pable of recognizing the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, hav­ ing imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal can­ not fail to mask it. (219) The question is: What is being masked about the will to truth of abolitionist discourse? If anything is being masked, it is the very overdeterminacy that we have been discussing. What is also being masked in that overdeterminacy is that by using the very terms of the institution of slavery to talk about these human beings as “slaves,” “Africans,” and later as “Negroes,” one supports and buttresses the idea that the “slave,” if not subhuman, is certainly not of the same class of people as free Europeans. Even abolitionists could more than sustain such a contradiction. Even as we employ the trope of a discursive terrain along with its companion metaphor of theater to get at the problems of witnessing, we also deploy a third trope of “mapping” to talk about what these slave witnesses have to do to the discursive terrain of abolitionism and to the memory of their experiences in order to bear witness and to tell the “truth” about slavery. It is useful to include “mapping” in this cluster of tropes because mapping helps us to see the conscious nature of our constructions. In this way we also see the pur­ posefulness of these tropes. When we say, “I am mapping this out,” it is because we want to know how to get someplace, how to talk about the structure or morphology that en­ ables whole ideas, whole discourses. We look out upon the world that is unformed and want to impose order and form upon it. That is a very God-like desire. This is not to sug­ gest that other cultures do not do this, or that pre-European contact cultures in other places did not have “maps.” Everyone has landmarks or lieux de memoire that tell what is significant in a given terrain: for example, there is the river where my mother was bap­ tized, that is the place where an elder passed on to the next world, there is the house in which I was born. Slave narratives themselves are told through these kinds of landmarks. Page 4 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader The constructed nature of memory is among the chief constituents of slave narrative testi­ mony that we want to bear in mind in our examination of the narratives. Mary Prince, for example, maps out the landscape of her memory of slavery in her narra­ tive. She does this through witnessing moments from memory. Even Prince’s description of when she arrived at the home of her new master, Captain I—, is very telling in this way: It was night when I reached my new home. The house was large, and built at the bottom of a very high hill; but I could not see much of it at night. I saw too much of it afterwards. The stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners. (54) This description is compelling for several reasons, not the least of which is that it has traces of the Gothic with its attention to the large house and the dark, desolate land­ scape it occupies. At other moments she speaks of torture and events of torture them­ selves become metaphorical landmarks that map the terrain of Prince’s memory of slav­ ery. Even the house is not allowed to remain only a literal house. It too, in the landscape of Price’s memory, gets metaphorized, indeed, anthropomorphized: “The stones and the (p. 169)

timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners.” Rhetorically, the literal material of the house is the “best thing in it.” It is what the house, like the specific events of torture that are described by Prince in the narrative, represents that is central in the landscape of slave memory. It is also these metaphorical mappings that are finally very meaningful in slave testimony as well. This issue of remembering testimony is also interesting in terms of the idea of the collec­ tive body. That is, while this is literally “the history of Mary Prince,” Prince’s narrative im­ plies the impossibility of telling an individual tale, as do any number of other slave testi­ monials. The slave body is both singular and collective. That is why entire moments of narrative flourish are spent in these texts describing the treatment of other slaves who are not the narrator. While the other slaves are not the slave that is witnessing in the nar­ rative, they are a part of a collective slave body by condition. The slave is a self that is al­ ways engaged in a kind of collective corporeal condition that makes it virtually impossible to speak of the self solely as an individual. Individual experiences of horror, torture, scarred bodies are not in themselves as meaningful as collective utterances of abuse. We do not mean to deny their importance. Rather, we mean to suggest that these instances are like individualized articulations in relationship to a larger language. They are best un­ derstood within a larger context that both enables their utterance and gives them mean­ ing. The meaning of these particular events comes through the condition of the collective black body under slavery. That is, Prince’s experience literally “makes sense” because she locates it in the collective—which includes a variety of other slaves’ experiences that wit­ ness and legitimize her own. This kind of return to the body, to physicality, seems to take us back to a place where one can say something about slave experience that is not just discursive and not just about narration and representational politics. Even so, the body is only a space of limited refuge from discourse. One can retreat into the body, but only until one decides to act in the Page 5 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader world. Identity is not just about being in the body, but about the body being in the world. The slave body, in this way, not only signifies in the world, but the world also signifies and recreates the slave body. The body, then, is a contingency. In narrative, it is contingent upon the version of the self that is being articulated at any particular moment. The identi­ ty of the body, in short, is context bound. In an effort to comprehend more fully the complex cognitive and narrative negotiations involved in telling the “truth” about slavery, it has been useful for previous scholars to isolate, purely for the convenience of analysis, particular strategies used by prominent figures that constitute determining tropes within abolitionist discourse. For example, a narrow focus on hegemonic white abolitionist discourse in the antebellum period will bring out the influence of the discourses of natural rights and natural law, (p. 170) suggest that the abolitionist debates need to become a more integrated part of critical accounts of canonical Romanticism, and account for the philosophical development of the masterslave dialectic and both its contributions and challenges to abolitionist discourses. Simi­ larly, close attention to The History of Mary Prince—a narrative that privileges an episte­ mology of experience—will call up Prince’s implied claim that real or authoritative knowl­ edge of slavery is available only through actual slave experience and thereby be interest­ ed in the political and narrative ramifications that arise as a result of her claim. Similarly, a lens trained upon The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano could read Equiano’s philosophical argument against slavery and connect this narrative to the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, highlighting the circulation and political function of religious rhetoric and the ways in which both Wheatley and Equiano anticipate the moral arguments of the proslavers in their oppositional discourses on Christianity, especially in their own charac­ terizations of the Christian God. Productive as these methods have been, however, one needs to be wary of attributing any particular approach as unique to the writer(s) to which it has been ascribed. We are in­ stead calling for a different approach, one attentive to the larger discursive terrain and not just the strategies of individual writers, for these strategies circulate in important ways, and most often do so concurrently. While one might emphasize the mobilization of religious or Christian rhetoric in the work of Wheatley, for example, that should not sug­ gest that she does not participate in rhetorical and oppositional strategies utilized by oth­ er writers, or that writers of other abolitionist texts do not also make use of religious rhetoric. What should be clearly understood, instead, is that each of these strategies rep­ resents a significant category in the discursive terrain of abolitionism. We will turn now to recast, in terms most familiar to our readers, the discursive terrain into which the slave narrator enters to give his or her testimony. That is, we want to con­ sider who is the intended reader of the slave’s testimony. The search for this reader leads us not to a particular person or even to a particular community of persons. Rather, this “discursive reader,” which the slave implies in his or her testimony, is in fact a confluence of political, moral, and social discursive concerns that animate, necessitate, and indeed make possible slave testimony itself. The discursive reader for the slave witness is the imagined horizon wherein the proslavery advocates (and their arguments for slavery), the Page 6 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader abolitionists (from the sentimental moralist to the staunchly political Garrisonians), the ongoing debates between these two over slavery (which are characterized by such discur­ sive sites as black humanity, natural rights, the Christian morality of slavery, the treat­ ment of slaves under slavery, and so forth) all come together as an entity that will be the recipient of the slave’s testimony. Or put another way, it is this discursive reader who serves as principal witness to the slave witness. By foregrounding the implied profile of the discursive reader in our reading of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, we call attention to the various rhetorical strategies employed by slave witness­ es involved in telling their “truth” about slavery. Douglass’s narrative received a great deal of attention nationally and internationally in its day. Much of this had to do with its narrative force and rhetorical sophistication. It must also be said (p. 171) that much of this had to do with its timing. In the years following the publication of Douglass’s Narrative, as the nation moved closer to civil war and the number of slave narratives vying for the public’s attention grew, it became more difficult for slave narratives to be published. We must remember that among the various other purposes they served, slave narratives were sensational for their time as well: The great antebellum works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, or Margaret Fuller did not sell nearly as well as the approximately one hundred book-length slave narratives. The epic character of in­ dividuals who first willed their own freedom, then wrote the story proved irre­ sistible to readers in the American North and Britain. Those who would never lit­ erally see slavery could find a literary medium through which to observe and per­ haps understand it. (Blight, 16) The sensationalism of slave narratives cannot be ignored. The public wanted them to be increasingly revealing and even pruriently detailed about suffering under slavery. This de­ mand for the sensational might explain why Harriet Jacobs, for instance, had far more dif­ ficulty by 1860—some fifteen years after Douglass’s Narrative came out—trying to secure publication of her narrative. Still, it makes sense to seek our profile of the discursive reader in this most successful narrative of the nineteenth-century. Douglass was clearly aware of his discursive milieu, and he pays it a great deal of attention in crafting his testi­ mony. One of the most striking aspects of Douglass’s Narrative is the self-consciousness with which he understands, profiles, and addresses his discursive reader. Evidence of this is presented throughout the Narrative with its attention to the various tenets of abolitionist discourse (abolitionist needs and concerns for these testimonies, proslavery arguments about authenticity, the misrepresentation of Southern slavery, natural rights discourse, religious and moral discourse that tends toward moral suasion, etc.). By focusing our at­ tention on how the discursive reader is constructed implicitly in this text, we begin to gain perhaps the clearest picture yet of the complex discursive terrain that is abolitionist Page 7 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader discourse and the numerous demands it placed on the rhetorical strategies used in slave testimony. Chapter 1 of Douglass’s Narrative chronicles the move from childhood innocence into a consciousness of slave experience. In so doing, it demonstrates the status of slave episte­ mology—what slaves know and do not know. The words “know” or “knowledge” them­ selves appear no less than twelve times in this short chapter alone. The chapter is arranged in two distinct halves in regard to the question of slave epistemology. The first half, consisting of the first five paragraphs, is the section in which Douglass constantly equivocates—purposefully moving back and forth between what he knows and what he does not know. This shifting back and forth, in response to a potentially distrustful discur­ sive reader, establishes Douglass’s desire for complete veracity. It shows him to be a reli­ able witness. After all, any witness who would tell you clearly from the very (p. 172) begin­ ning what he does not know, as well as what he knows—and who takes pains to inform his reader of what he knows by inference versus what he knows as a matter of fact—is at the very least self-consciously concerned that his reader trust his veracity. The remainder of the chapter ceases equivocating and begins to make full declarative statements about what the narrator experiences, almost completely dispensing with the need to speak about what he does not know. In fact, few negative epistemological statements are made at all in the last half of the chapter. Having established himself as reliable (and what read­ er cannot but be moved by the childhood memories and sympathies Douglass plays on in this chapter), he is now freer to state his case. The first chapter closes with the representation of the loss of childhood innocence about slavery. This loss of innocence is caused by the frequently examined beating of his Aunt Hester, which Sadiya Hartman labels a primal scene for Douglass: I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a wit­ ness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it….It was all new to me. I had never seen anything like it before. I had al­ ways lived with my grandmother on the outskirts of the plantation, where she was out to raise the children of the younger women. I had therefore been, until now, out of the way of the bloody scenes that often occurred on the plantation. (42–43) Many of the various aspects represented by the discursive reader cohere in these impor­ tant passages. The horror and spectacularizing of slave corporeal punishment shames the proslavery reader with the psychological uses to which such public punishments are put by slave owners, while at the same time speaking to the sympathies of Northern readers who may not be as familiar with the brutalities of slavery. For the benefit of the more sen­ timental aspect of the discursive reader much influenced by Romantic ideology and the loss of innocence, it associates this kind of violence with the loss of innocence for the Page 8 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader child Douglass who witnesses it. It also plays on the fetishistic desire of the spectatorial reader to know slavery when Douglass essentially represents his feelings as unrepre­ sentable: “I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it” (42). The geography of the plantation, as described by Douglass, should remind us of the wider geographical concerns of abolitionist discourse. That is, Douglass’s position “on the out­ skirts of the plantation” is not unlike that of Northerners who had limited experience with the actual institution of slavery. In this way, the Northern reader is identified in this rhetorical economy with the innocent child Douglass, and through Douglass’s testimony might also experience a primal scene leading to a conversion from spectator to abolition­ ist. There is much to suggest in this opening chapter of Douglass’s narrative (p. 173) that the witness is well aware of the various aspects of the discursive reader to whom he is ad­ dressing his testimony. The narrative arc of chapter 2 moves from description of the landscape and the mode of production and management of the large plantation system of Colonel Lloyd’s plantation to some intimate details about the domestic lives of the slaves. Douglass demonstrates his concern with slave epistemology in statements such as, “His death [the overseer Mr. Se­ vere] was regarded by the slave as the result of a merciful providence.” Another example occurs when he reports to the reader about what a privilege the slaves thought it was to be asked to run an errand to the “Great House Farm”: The home plantation of Colonel Lloyd wore the appearance of a country village….The whole place wore a business-like aspect very unlike the neighboring farms….It was called by the slaves the Great House Farm. Few privileges were es­ teemed higher, by the slaves of the out-farms, than that of being selected to do er­ rands at the Great House Farm. It was associated in their minds with greatness. A representative could not be prouder of his election to a seat in the American Con­ gress, than a slave on one of the out-farms would be of his election to do errands at the Great House Farm. (45–46) Scholars have commented on the fact that Douglass may indeed be influenced in this characterization of political parties here by the Garrisonian doctrine of antipartyism. In­ deed, his comparison of the Great House Farm to Congress is an astute negotiation of cul­ tural politics that subtly undermines the terms of authority within the discursive terrain. More interesting for our purposes is the extent to which Douglass demonstrates to his discursive reader the fact that he trades on insider information. He knows what the slaves think and how the slaves refer to things. This speaks to the abolitionist need for slave testimony to give eyewitness accounts that revealed information to which white abolitionists did not have direct access. Douglass closes chapter 2 with his discussion of the meaning of slave songs. His examina­ tion of these read most readily to abolitionist of the more sentimental moralist variety. He writes:

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparent­ ly incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then alto­ gether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest an­ guish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliver­ ance from chains. (47) Douglass suggests that there are two kinds of interpretive epistemologies with re­ gard to slavery, both equally valuable. There is knowledge produced and understood in the slave community, and there is the knowledge produced and understood from outside the slave community. Both play a role here; and Douglass, as narrator/slave witness and Douglass as the subject of narration gets to play both roles. Only after freedom does he comprehend the “deep meaning” of the slave songs, which he reads as “a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” This explains why Dou­ (p. 174)

glass moves (as Equiano often did in his narrative) from talking about himself in the first person in the opening chapter of his narrative to the vacillating voice that shifts between Douglass as slave witness (the Douglass who writes the narrative) and his descriptions of the thoughts and feelings of Douglass the slave (subject of narration) and of “slaves” more generally. As narrator, “slave” is a category of which Douglass seems to want to claim first-hand knowledge without having to be constrained to speak only in this voice. This vacillation of voice speaks to the tension of presenting oneself to a discursive reader as both the au­ thentic eyewitness to slavery—the former slave (legally in his case still a fugitive slave) still connected enough to that community to represent it—and as the cultivated man of letters who produces the narrative and advances the argument for black humanity. This textual tension, not unlike the tension modern-day black “public” intellectuals experi­ ence, seems aptly represented here. It is finally this latter Douglass—who can now inter­ pret the slave’s songs—who makes the following statement at the end of chapter 2 of the Narrative: I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their greater con­ tentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy….The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion. (47)

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader Douglass speaks here to correct erroneous readings of slave singing as evidence of their contentment—very likely stories Northerners picked up from proslavery advocates. Ad­ dressed explicitly to correct this opinion of people of the North, it also implicitly speaks to the proslavery advocacy and at the same time educates Northern readers about how com­ mon it is for slavery to be misrepresented for nefarious purposes. The example of the Colonel’s prized garden that was the source of so much temptation for the hungry slaves is an interesting one with which to open chapter 3 of the Narrative. It attests to the lunacy and arbitrary nature of slave punishment, and the text does not want for other examples like it. These types of stories, wherein Douglass describes the details of a certain arbitrary situation, such as the Colonel tarring the fence around the garden so that any slave caught with tar on him would be automatically punished under (p. 175) suspicion that he had been in the Colonel’s garden, certainly authenticate the narrative by virtue of reporting with such detail. Such details also present a picture of slavery largely unavailable to the distant Northern reader—proximity to slavery being one of the aspects that concerns the discursive reader. Douglass reports the following: Slaves, when inquired of as to their condition and the character of their masters, almost universally say they are contented, and that their masters are kind. The slave holders have been known to send in spies among their slaves, to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition. The frequency of this has had the effect to establish among the slaves the maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of telling it, and in so doing prove themselves a part of the human family. (50) This explanation, along with the story preceding it of the unfortunate, unwitting slave who answers truthfully when Colonel Lloyd interrogates him and is sold away for so do­ ing, seems a direct reply to proslavery advocates’ rhetoric that slaves are actually quite happy and well taken care of—another aspect of the discursive reader to which Douglass addresses himself. Douglass here is also very astute about what constitutes “truth” and what are its shifting parameters for the slave. Citing the fact that slaves know when to suppress the truth rather than to “take the consequences of telling it” as testament to their humanity is striking. Knowing full well how important veracity is to his testimony as slave witness, Douglass discusses the circumstances—under slavery—that force slaves to lie. By lying, he reasons, they demonstrate their intellect and the use of it as a means of self-preservation. This, he concludes, “proves [them] a part of the human family.” Logic so sound and at the same time so circuitous can only be the result of Douglass’s awareness of a complex discursive reader. Another aspect of abolitionism that garners Douglass’s full attention in his narrative is the rhetorical uses of religion by the institution of slavery. Douglass is more concerned to point out the irony of religion’s effects on the hearts of slave holders: I have said Master Thomas was a mean man. He was so. Not to give a slave enough to eat, is regarded as the most aggravated development of meanness even among slave holders. The rule is, no matter how coarse the food, only let there be Page 11 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader enough of it….Master Thomas gave us enough of neither coarse nor fine food….We were therefore reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of our neighbors. This we did by begging and stealing, whichever came handy in the time of need, the one being considered as legitimate as the other. A great many times have we poor creatures been nearly perishing with hunger, when food in abun­ dance lay mouldering in the safe and smoke-house, and our pious mistress was aware of the fact; and yet that mistress and her husband would kneel every morn­ ing, and pray that God would bless them in basket and store! (68) Remarkable for how it relates the neglect of a basic human need for food—with which any reader can identify—to the supposed Christian piety of the master and mis­ tress who neglect the need of the slaves, this passage is emblematic of Douglass’s cri­ tique of slaveholder religion. Douglass also makes clear to the reader that such ironic treatments from Christians by slaves also have the effect of reducing the slave to a state of moral depravity, resulting in “begging and stealing.” In this way he not only elicits sym­ pathy for the moral choices to which such neglect leads the slave, but also leaves open the possibility of other kinds of moral depravity of which slavery may make the slave ca­ pable. This plays into the logic of those abolitionist readers whose concerns with slavery (p. 176)

originated from a concern with what slavery did to the moral education of the slave and, therefore, to the possibility of the slave’s salvation. In order that there be no doubt as to his critique of religion, Douglass also directly relates religion to corporeal violence. Following a nearly two-page-long discussion of what a “mean” man his master was, Douglass offers up this observation of religion’s relationship to violence against slaves: I have said my master found religious sanction for his cruelty….I have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip; and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of Scripture–“He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.” (70) In addition to demonstrating the dangers of a system in which people exercise absolute control over the lives of others, this passage shows how such absolute exercise of power justified itself and its violence by means of the very religion that many abolitionists be­ lieved condemned slavery. This is also an attack on that aspect of his discursive reader who believed that slaves were not equal to whites and were, therefore, better off in slav­ ery where at least they were “taken care of.” Douglass’s reply to such claims was simply that “Master Thomas was one of the many pious slave holders who hold slaves for the very charitable purpose of taking care of them” (70). Among the various aspects of the discursive terrain of abolition, Douglass is acutely con­ cerned to address the religiosity of his discursive reader. An important context here comes from black communities themselves, in particular the discourse that arises in and is shaped by African American organizational efforts like the national convention move­ ment. Douglass was involved in those efforts, and his appendix was shaped by his involve­ Page 12 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader ment in the 1843 convention in Buffalo. Consider, for example, resolutions taken from the minutes of the Buffalo convention: 1. Resolved, That we believe in the true Church of Christ, and that it will stand while time endures, and that it will evince its spirit by its opposition to all sins, and espe­ cially to the sin of slavery, which is a compound of all others, and that the great mass of American sects, falsely called churches, which apologize for (p. 177) slavery and prejudice, or practice slaveholding, are in truth no churches, but Synagogues of Satan. 2. Resolved, That we solemnly believe that slaveholding and prejudice sustaining ministers and churches (falsely so called), are the greatest enemies to Christ and to civil and religious liberty in the world. 3. Resolved, That the colored people in the free States who belong to pro-slavery sects that will not pray for the oppressed—nor preach the truth in regard to the sin of slavery and all other existing evils, nor publish anti-slavery meetings, nor act for the entire immediate abolition of slavery, are guilty of enslaving themselves and oth­ ers, and their blood, and the blood of perishing millions will be upon their heads. 4. Resolved, That it is the bounded duty of every person to come out from among these religious organizations in which they are not permitted to enjoy equality. (15) These resolutions represent both an earnest effort within the Black community to admon­ ish the hypocrisy of pious slave owners as well as an intense determination to shift the terms of authority and reclaim an integral role for Christianity, properly conceived, in their own communities. Similar to the complex negotiations of religious justifications for slavery as evinced in the convention movement resolutions, Douglass is determined to navigate the complex reli­ gious aspects of the discursive terrain of abolition. He returns to this theme in chapter 10 when he makes the following damning statement about religion: I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—and sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slave holders find the strongest protection…. [N]ext to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all the slave holders with whom I have ever met, religious slave holders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. (82) This passage, the whole of chapter 9 of the Narrative, and the appendix to the Narrative in which Douglass qualifies his critique of religion as that of “slave holding religion” to­ gether stand as testament to the centrality of religion as one of the main discursive issues still for abolitionists even by the mid-nineteenth century. This clearly continued to be the case even some fifteen years later near the dawning of the Civil War. It stands to reason that Douglass might have been addressing himself to this complexly religious discursive reader. It also demonstrates his recognition of the importance of religion to his discursive Page 13 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader reader, especially as its moral sanction was something to which both abolitionists and proslavery advocates alike wanted to lay claim. Clearly the climax of Douglass’s philosophic critique of slavery is chapter 10. In this most narratively unwieldy chapter of the Narrative, Douglass brings together for the benefit of his reader the many concerns he addresses about slavery. Still, the most strik­ ing aspect of this chapter is how it displays the caprice and randomness of corporeal pun­ ishment of slaves. Beyond showing the physical and psychological terror under which slaves existed, it also bears witness to the aspect of the discursive reader lacking a proxi­ mate understanding of slavery by reinforcing and legitimizing what white abolitionists had already been saying about the brutalities of slavery, even as it further discredits proslavery advocates’ contention of the image of the happy slave: “It would astonish one, unaccustomed to a slaveholding life, to see with what wonderful ease a slaveholder can find things, of which to make occasion to whip slaves” (82). This statement to the reader who has a distant understanding of slavery further signals his purposefulness of address. Douglass not only understands his discursive reader, but fashions his testimony with this reader’s concerns in mind. The confluence of interests which Douglass brings together in chapter 10, along with the other moments we have examined, demonstrate the extent to (p. 178)

which he is attentive to these narrative pressures. Douglass’s close attention to the pressures and expectations of the discursive terrain of abolition allows him to shift the terms of authority within his narrative. The clearest state­ ment in the Narrative of Douglass’s conscious knowledge of the power he wields as wit­ ness occurs in his description of escape: I deeply regret the necessity that impels me to suppress any thing of importance connected with my experience of slavery. It would afford me great pleasure in­ deed, as well as materially add to the interest of my narrative, were I at liberty to gratify a curiosity, which I know exists in the minds of many, by an accurate state­ ment of all the facts pertaining to my most fortunate escape. But I must deprive myself of this pleasure, and the curious of the gratification which such a state­ ment would afford. I would allow myself to suffer under the greatest imputations which evil-minded men might suggest, rather than exculpate myself, and thereby run the hazzard of closing the slightest avenue by which a brother slave might clear himself of the chains and fetters of slavery. (94) In this passage, Douglass offers an explanation for the absence of detail in his description of his escape. That he calls attention to this absence suggests that he presumes his read­ ers appreciate that up to this point he has been providing them great detail. This state­ ment also demonstrates that he is working with a complex understanding of the function and purpose of his testimony. That he deeply regrets that “necessity” impels him to “sup­ press anything of importance connected with [his] experience in slavery” reiterates to his reader his efforts to disclose fully his slave experience. This further attests to his desire to tell all. He goes even farther when he introduces the word “pleasure” in the very next sentence. Douglass’s admission that to tell all would afford him “great pleasure” and “add Page 14 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader materially” to the interest of his narrative can only be read as a desire to witness. Dou­ glass wants to give his testimony. He even appreciates the (p. 179) pleasure involved in be­ ing the one who can bear witness. Herein is the one place where slave experience is a benefit—the role of the eyewitness. Douglass speaks here of how full disclosure would “materially add” to the interest of his narrative. Such a statement demonstrates a strong understanding of his readership and of market forces involved in the production of a slave narrative. The other side of his pleasure in full disclosure is identified by Douglass as the gratifica­ tion of his reader’s “curiosity.” It also points to the fine line between witness and specta­ tor to which the reader of such narrative cataloging of brutality is subject. Douglass rec­ ognizes that there is some of both in his discursive reader and seeks to use such knowl­ edge to his narrative advantage. Still, it should not escape us that the one time in the nar­ rative when Douglass chooses explicitly to deny both his narrative pleasure and the grati­ fication of his reader’s curiosity is in the name of brotherhood with his fellow slaves. All pleasure and all gratification are subordinated to Douglass’s strong belief that he and others must never do anything to limit the chance of other slaves to liberate themselves from “the chains and fetters of slavery.” This commitment to the liberation of other slaves, a feeling for others alike deprived by American racism, can bring us out of Douglass’s Narrative to observe another aspect of his discursive reader: free, literate blacks in the North. As Elizabeth McHenry suggests in her study, Forgotten Readers, many of the nineteenth-century slave narratives, along with earlier documents like David Walker’s Appeal, were directed to blacks with widely diver­ gent levels of literacy. These texts were consumed and disseminated largely as “public” documents; that is, they were not solely read privately, in isolation, as we understand reading today. Instead, through the activities of African American mutual benefit soci­ eties, reading groups, and literacy organizations, these texts were distributed to a wide population by being read aloud, memorized in part, and recited publicly through a mix­ ture of oral and written literacy. Though the model of literacy that comes to us from Douglass’s own life and writings—whereby the literacy he “stole” from whites serves as a powerful affirmation of blacks’ humanity—has long dominated the reception of slave nar­ ratives and other black texts of the nineteenth century, “nineteenth-century literary soci­ eties endorsed a broader notion of oral literacy that did not valorize the power of formal or individualized literacy over communal knowledge” (McHenry, 13). Blacks of various reading abilities—like Douglass’s own wife, Anna Murray Douglass, who could neither read nor write—were thus able to participate in the larger enterprise of African American letters, a mission central to seeking “effective avenues of public access as well as ways to voice their demands for full citizenship and equal participation in the life of the repub­ lic” (McHenry, 23). This wider community of varied literacy in the nineteenth century is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the growth of the African American press during the antebellum period. To close with this aspect of Douglass’s discursive reader—a reader who acts as witness for the slave witness by allowing and enabling the slave to be able to speak to us Page 15 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader at all—we turn to the most prolific genre of nineteenth-century African American writ­ ings. Recent scholarship has rediscovered the vast corpus of the antebellum black press, and many of these newspapers are available in their entirety in digital archives. Perhaps (p. 180) the most important new discovery about this body of writings is, in fact, the rela­ tive absence of attention to slavery. Papers that have long been assumed devoted entirely to the issue of slavery and emancipation have been rediscovered as a vast repository of black writings on diverse subjects. Read in this light, papers like Freedom’s Journal, Col­ ored American, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and numerous others constitute a record of antebellum black communities’ attempts to utilize written texts to combat white assump­ tions of black inferiority. These early black newspapers were integral to the cultivation of a publicly respectable black community—a community with varied literacy that nonethe­ less avidly pursued in their readings and collectively put forward in their writings “an in­ tellectual identity that was the result of the active pursuit of a literary education” (McHenry, 90). The literate education pursued in the pages of these papers is, like the varied characteris­ tics embodied in the discursive reader, multifaceted to say the least. Looking solely at Douglass’s own paper, The North Star (the name of which he would later change to Fred­ erick Douglass’ Paper), reveals discussions of the work of contemporary canonical au­ thors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well excerpts from Herman Melville and the serial publication of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. What’s important here is not only that the papers would have contained articles, excerpts, or discussions of these writers aimed at a diverse black population of varied lit­ eracy, but also that the writers were placed alongside reviews of slave narratives. What was so revolutionary about this strategy, and what remains striking about it today, is the implicit suggestion that written works by black writers, by freed slaves, be considered alongside more traditional pieces of literature. We see this suggestion clearly in a review written by Douglass of the Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb from the August 17, 1849 issue of The North Star. Even as he affirms Bibb’s veracity by noting, “we doubt not in every essential particular [his description of the cruelty of slavery] is true,” Douglass lauds this slave narrative as “one of the most in­ teresting and thrilling narratives of slavery ever laid before the American people.” What’s revealed here, again, is Douglass’s attention to his discursive reader, a reader who was seeking both a literary education and testaments to the horrors of slavery. Reviewing Bibb’s narrative as both a “thrilling narrative” and “a most valuable acquisition to the an­ ti-slavery cause,” Douglass provides his reader with a text that can be both. It should sur­ prise us little then that this review ends with the “hope that it may be widely circulated throughout the country.” Neither is it surprising that Douglass ends his September 28, 1849 North Star review of another slave narrative, that of Henry “Box” Brown, by exhort­ ing his readers to “Get the book.” What is unexpected, perhaps, is the diverse nature of the reader to whom he addresses his plea. What would it mean, for instance, to “get” such a book for one who cannot read? Where would such a reader go to experience this text? What might it mean within a com­ Page 16 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader munity of readers—some of whom could only be listeners—to read such a book? Might there not be a material experience of the book itself, one of tactility or smell perhaps, that could offer connection to such a community without “meaning” in the strict sense, so that “getting” it went beyond the actual act of reading? Clearly the multifaceted (p. 181) read­ ership facilitated as much by the discursive terrain as by a complexly participating black community should lead us to a reconsidered approach to such texts and reading prac­ tices. As much as these texts navigate a complex contemporaneous discursive terrain, so have they been received in multiple discursive milieux. In “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” Douglass suggests, “we have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future” (2113). His text again addresses various aspects of a dis­ cursive reader, for this searing indictment of America’s past and present also looks for­ ward to a better future, finding solace in the country’s relative youth. This text also unset­ tles traditional classifications, blurring the lines between the oral and the written, the speaker and the author, the listener and reader. Delivered as a speech on July 5, 1852 and reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper on July 19 of that same year, the material experi­ ence of Douglass’s eloquence reaches far beyond a speaker and his audience, or even a reader and her text. It is experienced today primarily in anthologized excerpts in college classrooms whose diversity and inclusiveness Douglass could only have dreamt of, or made available electronically through digital copies and on websites in a technological feat of readership, access, and dissemination far beyond the wildest imaginings of even the most ambitious nineteenth century newspapermen. Exploring their discursive readers will continue to open avenues of inquiry for the explo­ ration and reexamination of what nineteenth-century slave narratives mean or how they make sense. Placing these narratives within their larger discursive context provides a fuller picture of the irksome overdeterminacies of abolitionism, Romanticism, and the emergence of a distinctive American literature and nationalism within which they were produced and first received. Considering the varied means beyond solitary study that in­ dividuals and groups of the past may have understood and transmitted written materials also opens a wider array of possibilities for understanding raced communities. These readers will, finally, provide us broader avenues for the use of the pains of our past, a more knowing navigation of the perils of our present, and the fulfillment of the promise of our future.

References Blight, David W. “Introduction: ‘A Psalm of Freedom.’” In Narrative of the Life of Freder­ ick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself (1845). ed. David W. Blight. Boston: Bedford Books, 1993. Douglass, Frederick. “Review of Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb.” The North Star, Au­ gust 17, 1849, 2. ——. “Review of Narrative of Henry Box Brown.” The North Star, September 28, 1849, 2. Page 17 of 18

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Reading Communities: Slave Narratives and the Discursive Reader ——. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself (1845). Edited by David W. Blight. Boston: Bedford Books, 1993. ——. “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” (1852). In The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. B. Ed. Hershel Parker. 2003: 2108–2127. (p. 182) Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” In The Archeology of Knowledge. trans. Alan Sheridan. 1969. Reprint, New York: Pantheon, 1972: 215–237. Hartman, Sadiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of History (1837). New York: Dover, 1956. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831). Edited by Moria Ferguson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2002. Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizens: Held at Buffalo, on the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th of August, 1843. For the Purpose of Considering Their Moral and Political Condition As American Citizens. New York: Piercy and Reed, 1843.

Dwight A. McBride

Dwight McBride, University of Illinois at Chicago Justin A. Joyce

Justin A. Joyce, Northwestern University

Page 18 of 18

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature

A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Liter­ ature   Kenneth W. Warren The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.025

Abstract and Keywords This article reads the history of the slave narrative in light of the tension between, on the one hand, the quest of exceptional individuals for liberation, and, on the other, the chroni­ cle of exploited workers striving collectively to achieve equality. The story of the fugitive slave as an individual has been more explicitly a part of American literary history than has the more collective story that emerged when, in response to escaping slaves crossing Union lines during the Civil War, fugitives were declared contrabands, thus transforming the war, irrevocably, into a war for the abolition of slavery. This tension within the slave narrative reflects broader tensions within American literature generally to reconcile the individual’s quest for unimpeded freedom as represented by Herman Melville’s Ahab with the desire to acknowledge the political priority of black and white workers. Keywords: fugitive slave, slave narrative, abolition, slavery, Civil War, contrabands

Early in his 1845 Narrative, Frederick Douglass declares, I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the en­ tertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this liv­ ing word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like minis­ tering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise. (36) Worth noting here is the personal quality of Douglass’s recollection of his confidence in his eventual liberation. To be sure, he writes from a desire to make his tale exemplary of the general condition of enslaved Africans in the south; his story matters precisely be­ cause it represents more than the story of a single individual. Indeed, his words are com­ Page 1 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature patible with the abolitionist rhetorical strategy of decrying the unjustness of slavery by showing how it condemns exceptional individuals to lives of drudgery and pain. So there is no doubting the ardency of Douglass’s opposition to the system of slavery, nor how cru­ cial his writing and his agitation were to bringing about its end of in the United States. And yet, despite Douglass’s desire to attack the whole of the slave system, the conviction he expresses in the preceding example pertains to his own liberation and not the end of slavery as a whole. In many ways this is no surprise. Despite the difficulties fugitives faced, it was easier in the 1830s to imagine escaping slavery as an individual than to imagine the collapse (p. 184) of the system as a whole. Yet Douglass’s belief that as a particular individual he would be redeemed from slavery, even as the system as a whole continued to exist, also points to a tension within his narrative that is common to most of what we deem classic slave narratives. Douglass cannot help expressing a belief that he has been singled out among his unfortunate compatriots for a special fate distinguishing him from the common lot. Perhaps overstating this point a bit, Douglass’s biographer, William McFeely, con­ trasts Douglass to the maniacally driven Thomas Sutpen in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, writing that unlike Sutpen, “Frederick seems to have had no sense that he should scratch and gouge his way past social degradation. He simply knew that he be­ longed inside the great house” (23). But this sense of preferment was not unique to Douglass among ex-slave authors. A no­ ticeable feature of the slave narrative as a genre is the fact that it is primarily the tale of remarkable individuals—Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Josiah Henson, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and others—making their way north against all odds. From the stand­ point of American literature, the paradigmatic slavery-to-freedom narrative is the story of the exceptional individual defying the odds to gain freedom despite the historical fact that the numbers of blacks who gained freedom by choosing, collectively, to leave plantations and follow Union armies dwarfs the number of those who managed to find their way north prior to the Civil War. It is as a tale of the rise of the individual that, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, slave narratives were incorporated into prevailing norms “of equal op­ portunity, contract society, upward mobility, free trade, and the sanctity of private proper­ ty.” (648). Bercovitch argues that what we find in Douglass’s narrative is what we find elsewhere in much of the literary work that constitutes canonical American literature, namely, an affirmation of the “liberating appeal of free-enterprise ideology.” On this ac­ count, “freedom for Douglass means self-possessive individualism. It takes the form of a movement from absolute injustice (represented by the slave system) to absolute justice, represented by the tenets of American liberalism” (648). Even Douglass’s faith in providence bespeaks this ideology. Well before the moment when Douglass’s expressed his confidence that a divine power had decided in favor of his liber­ ation, the meaning of providence itself had undergone a change. As Quentin Skinner writes, no longer simply an indication of God’s favor, by the eighteenth century the “con­ cept of providence began to be used in good faith (as it is still used) to refer simply to act­ ing with foresight about monetary affairs” (116). This change is significant because, as Page 2 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature many a reader of Douglass’s Narrative has pointed out, the series of events that strength­ ened Douglass’s resolve to escape from slavery stem as much from his growing sense of himself as an exploited worker as it does from his physical resistance when threatened with a whipping from the slave-breaker, Mr. Covey. Upon being robbed of his wages, Dou­ glass recalls with outrage I was now getting, as I have said, one dollar and fifty cents per day. I contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully my own; yet, upon each re­ turning Saturday night, I was compelled to deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh. And why? Not because he earned it,—not because he had any hand in earning (p. 185) it,—not because I owed it to him,—nor because he possessed the slightest shadow of right to it; but solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up. The right of the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas is exactly the same. (84) Douglass’s sentiments were not unique to him. The enslaved in general were aware of themselves as unjustly exploited even when they were receiving no wages. Marion Wilson Starling notes in her study of the genre that “slave insurrections were labor uprisings” of­ ten brought on by “the cycles of prosperity alternating with depression characteristic of any system of private gain dependent upon a world market.” Among the factors contribut­ ing to Douglass’s decision to escape may have been the effects of the economic panic of 1837. As Starling observes, “in times of depression and panic, the slaves were the chief sufferers (7). Yet, despite slaves’ general awareness of being exploited, Douglass’s account of his radi­ calization highlights the singularity rather than the exemplarity of his experience. This is not to say that Douglass was not aware that, at bottom, slavery was continuous with the exploitation of labor generally. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass observes that white laborers and black laborers ought to share an interest in abolishing slavery be­ cause the slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference be­ tween the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to one slaveholder, and former belongs to all the slaveholders collectively. (330) In seeing slavery as part of a broader system of labor control and exploitation, Douglass was remarking the specific character of American freedom, which as Edmund Morgan has shown, was made possible because the rise of racialized chattel slavery significantly reduced the threat to social order that would be posed by the presence of a large politi­ cally recognized landless laboring class that might take the claim that “All men were cre­ ated equal” as a warrant for demanding material and political equality with the dominant classes. By ascribing natural inferiority to the nation’s vast agricultural laboring popula­ tion in the south, American statesmen permitted tyrannical repression in a nation pro­ claiming innate human freedom as its raison d’etre. The rise of the slave narrative, then, Page 3 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature might have betokened the advent of a genre that was insurgent through and through. Such narratives could have attacked not only the idea that racial difference justified de­ priving some people of their liberty (or, when they were not enslaved, segregating them and consigning them to occupations deemed degrading), but also, as a genre written by men and women who had to earn their living by the sweat of their brows, these narratives could have challenged the idea that those who had only their labor to offer in exchange for material well-being were of lesser worth than property holders and those who consti­ tuted the professional, commercial, and business classes. Taken collectively, the slave narrative eloquently voiced the slave’s demand for full mem­ bership in the polity, championing the idea that the story of national redemption (p. 186) could not reach its full conclusion until the liberation of its black population was achieved as well. As Paul Kaufman observed early in the twentieth century, “‘the strange anomaly of Negro bondage in the first democratic state became the motive force of a humanitarian protest which may be called the second wave of the romantic movement in the social realm, and which gathered intensity second only to the original agitation for human rights in the eighteenth century’” (qtd. in Starling, 1). Along with narratives of Indian captivity, of which Mary White Rowlandson’s 1682 Narrative of the Captivity and Restora­ tion of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is the most well known, slave narratives became the head­ waters for that broad stream of American sentimental literature that achieved wide popu­ larity and has been credited with transforming the United States from a slave to a free nation. In Philip Fisher’s words, “The sentimental novel, as a radical form of popular transformation, has its inevitable American subject in slavery and the black experi­ ence” (19). Of course, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) is the major mid-ninteenth-century literary work most visibly indebted to slave narratives. Stowe’s ability to paint a vivid picture of the lived injustice of slavery, and her recourse to senti­ mentalism, reflected the strategies of slave narrators, in particular Josiah Henson, with­ out whose work Uncle Tom’s Cabin would not have achieved the unmatched success it en­ joyed at midcentury. But it is not only the American sentimental novel that draws from the story of the slave’s flight from bondage. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or the Whale (1852), and the work of some of the anti-sentimental writers such as Mark Twain, and Henry James, upon whom the prestige of American literature has been built, derive some of their power from their awareness of the centrality of slavery to the character of the U.S. nation. In the mid-twen­ tieth century, Ralph Ellison contrasted Melville and Twain favorably to modernists like Hemingway, arguing that the writers of the American Renaissance succeeded in writing genuinely tragic fiction because they conceived “the Negro as a symbol of Man” (88). Sterling Stuckey has argued along the same line for a more direct influence of Douglass’s 1845 Narrative on Moby-Dick, claiming that Douglass’s narrative inspired Melville to cre­ ate “characterizations, dialogue, and storylines that are shaped in part, the evidence ar­ gues, by the Narrative, and more generally by his understanding of the importance of mu­ sic and dance to black culture” (69). Although less adamant about asserting the impor­ tance of any single slave narrative in shaping Melville’s novel, Michael C. Berthold has as­ serted, “Moby-Dick can be regarded as a palimpsest of American captivity writing gener­ Page 4 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature ally, quoting and embellishing the tradition that begins with Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 narrative and includes the slave narratives published in Melville’s own lifetime” (145– 146). But as Berthold and others have suggested, despite the author’s personal opposition to slavery, Melville’s inheritance from the American slave narrative did not produce an un­ equivocal endorsement of the idea of liberty, but rather a generalizing of the idea of hu­ man bondage within which the urgency of liberating the enslaved appears diminished in favor of a philosophical reflection about the limited freedom of mankind as a whole. “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that” asks Ishmael in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, intimating that no one, or perhaps no American, enjoys true freedom. So that however (p. 187) strange it might seem for Ishmael to submit willingly to maritime discipline under which corporal punishment was at times more plentiful than fresh drinking water, he insists that his decision merely makes evident what is, in one way or another, the universal human condition. He reasons, However the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that every­ body else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content. (798) From such a vantage point any claims for giving priority to the plight of southern slaves are made to sound not only like special pleading but also like naïve conclusions about the human condition. By contrast, as Berthold puts it, “Melville grants captivity near norma­ tive status,” so that it is not universal freedom but general consolation that is wanted. “Even Ahab, the ostensible ‘supreme lord and dictator,’ can be understood as an epitome of Nietzschean slave morality” (144). So that where the slave narrative sought to expand the domain of freedom to include ever-growing swaths of humanity, the romantic litera­ ture that in part stemmed from these narratives sometimes worked, paradoxically, to ex­ tend—at least metaphysically—the dominion of bondage. Yet neither the ambitions of Ahab nor the hopes of the fugitives with whom he can be as­ sociated (many critics have noted Ahab’s special relationship to the cabin boy Pip) indi­ cate acquiescence in the social or metaphysical condition of bondage. Infamously declar­ ing, “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” Ahab shocks his first mate, Starbuck, with his re­ fusal to kneel to anyone or indeed to anything that will not acknowledge his innate digni­ ty. Ian Maguire has argued that the oscillation between admiration and condemnation of Ahab within Moby Dick stems from Melville’s engagement with the politics of labor in the early 1850s. The worsening conditions of labor in the North led many to charge that white workers had become little more than wage-slaves. Ahab’s willingness to elevate his own dignity above his responsibility to bring in whales for the Nantucket market, then, might express his defiance at the idea that a fair market price ought to determine a man’s value. The question here, however, is whether Ahab’s defiance, or, say, Douglass’s refusal to accept a beating at the hands of Covey, strikes a blow for humanity as a whole (or let’s Page 5 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature just say, on behalf of those forced to hew wood and draw water), or solely for the excep­ tional individuals who are able to challenge their oppression directly. Maguire, citing Starbuck’s acid observation that, although Ahab “would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below,” notes that (973) “the desire for masterlessness may only reconfigure rather than eradicate hierarchies of race and class” (293). Understandably, then, a standard feature of many slave narratives (and indeed of a novel like Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, which is built up­ on narrating the journey of its black characters from slavery to freedom) are scenes whose purpose is to show that, rather than being welcomed by white workers in the North, black fugitives often faced hostile discrimination in their efforts to earn a living. Repeatedly, Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others recount the prejudices they (p. 188) en­ counter while seeking work in the free states, with Douglass famously being unable to ply his trade as caulker, “such was the strength of prejudice against color, among the white calkers” (Narrative 95). So, if slave narratives did not routinely extend their critique of in­ equality to the exploitation of labor as a whole, at fault in part was the unwillingness of white laborers to welcome their black counterparts into their ranks. The major factor here, however, was the extent to which abolitionism and free labor ideology converged upon each other intellectually and organizationally. Condemnations of slavery coupled with the praise of free labor itself could easily become criticism of the abilities of the en­ slaved. So that when John William DeForest in his novel, Miss Ravenal’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty sought to combine a tale of the Civil War with a tale of black free­ dom he did so by contrasting southern slavery to Free Labor ideology in the North, de­ picting the presumption that liberating the slave would be not only a matter of destroying the political and economic power of the planter class but also a project of instilling in freedman and planter alike the discipline, virtues, and habits of mind associated with free labor. Dr. Ravenal, the idealistic father of the novel’s namesake, Miss Lily Ravenal, takes up the project of reorganizing black labor in an explicit demonstration of the putative su­ periority of free labor over slave labor. Upon being paid what is described as a fair wage for their labor, the former slaves working under Doctor Ravenal’s direction are said to have done “more work that summer than the Robertson’s [their former owners] had ever got from double their number by the agency of a white overseer, drivers, whips, and pad­ dles” (265). Likewise Harper in Iola Leroy endorses a character’s view that paramount among the tasks that educated blacks faced after emancipation was “to train future wives and mothers” from the women of the race. Upon seeing “in the newspapers that colored women were becoming unfit to be servants for white people,” this character, Lucille De­ lany, reasons “that if they are not fit to be servants for white people, they are unfit to be mothers to their own children.” She then concludes that she could serve the race by “opening a school” for this purpose (199). Thus, without missing a beat, Harper’s narra­ tor accepts the idea of generalized incapacity among the formerly enslaved population. As American authors after the Civil War incorporated the narrative of the former slaves’ transit from bondage to freedom into autobiographies, histories, novels, and poems, they would do so with all of the ambivalence that attended the actual process of incorporating the formerly enslaved into the full political, social, and economic life of the nation. Given Page 6 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature that Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn hangs on the problem of freeing an al­ ready free man, Ernest Hemingway’s claim that all of American literature stems from that novel would seem to vindicate Theodore Parker’s antebellum pronouncement that “All the original romance of Americans is in [slave narratives], not in the white man’s novel” (44). To write of America in the 19th century would be to write of the slave. Indeed DeForest, who in 1868 coined the term “The Great American Novel,” would grudgingly designate Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the “nearest approach to the desired phenomenon” to date. But another of Twain’s novels, Pudd’n’head Wilson, suggests that what also remained in­ tact from slave narrative to novel was the original American ambivalence about the (p. 189) romance of liberation. Pudd’n’head Wilson’s version of that dream, a mordant sto­ ry of two boys switched in infancy by a young slave mother fearful of her son being sold downriver, reduces the number of possible fates to being either slave or master. The idea that no one should be a slave devolves into the less altruistic assertion that neither me nor mine deserves such a fate. The idea that the slave’s quest for liberation was at bottom merely a version of a generic and more mundane American desire to get ahead in a rapidly commercializing society re­ flected the Gilded Age, a label supplied by the 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, co-authored by Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, in which allegedly philanthropic schemes to “uplift” the Negro stand as little more than attempts to defraud investors and the federal govern­ ment. Douglass’s third revision of his narrative under the title The Life and Times of Fred­ erick Douglass (1881, 1892) lamented at once the nation’s backsliding from its commit­ ment to the numerous individuals who felt licensed to importune him for money and posi­ tions based on claims that they, their parents, or grandparents had “assisted slaves in their flight from bondage” (389). For many, the legacy of emancipation had become a hunger for political patronage. Indeed the most influential slave narrative after Douglass’s, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, which was written late in the centu­ ry and not published until 1901, did not offer a formula for reimagining a truly egalitarian society, but instead provided Washington’s blueprint for incorporating black freedmen in­ to a position of political subordination in the industrializing New South. Explicitly dis­ paraging labor agitation as irresponsible behavior by workers who had gotten “two or three months ahead in their savings” (35), Washington’s narrative sought to align the eco­ nomic and political interests of black laborers in the south with those of their white em­ ployers. Although Washington’s narrative was the most politically consequential of fin-de-siècle at­ tempts to retell the story of the slaves’ transit from slavery to freedom, novels by other writers during the same period sought to shift their focus from the sole individual (or mother and child) in flight from slave-catchers to the families and communities for whom the advance of federal troops or the end of the war itself brought about their liberation from enslavement. Before it succumbs to depicting the illiterate black freedmen in terms of their deficiencies, Harper’s Iola Leroy begins with depictions of southern slaves secret­ ly following the progress of the war and debating among themselves the pros and cons of fleeing immediately from the plantation—scenes whose intent is to portray the intelli­ Page 7 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature gence and political competency of even illiterate slaves. By the novel’s end, however, these same slaves are expressing the need for leadership and direction by black elites and are described as almost innately averse to radical challenges to the nation’s political and economic order. In the words of one of the novel’s heroic figures, “the negro is not plotting in beer-salons against the peace and order of society. His fingers are not dripping with dynamite, neither is he spitting upon your flag, nor flaunting the red banner of anar­ chy in your face” (223). Published in 1901, the same year as Washington’s Up From Slavery, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s third novel, The Fanatics, one of his so-called white-life fictions, uses a brief in­ terlude to depict the problems besetting blacks who left the south as groups rather than (p. 190) as individuals. Set in Ohio in 1861 in the fictional town of Dorbury in southern Ohio, The Fanatics dramatizes the destruction of personal, family, and community rela­ tionships brought on by what the novel portrays as rigid political convictions on either side of the sectional divide. The novel’s 14th chapter is titled “The Contrabands,” refer­ ring to the term given to blacks who fled plantations for the Union lines in the aftermath of Benjamin F. Butler’s battlefield decision to declare escaping slaves contraband of war whose confiscation was justified by the demands of armed conflict. In Dunbar’s account, southern blacks, upon hearing news of the order, act immediately and recklessly. He writes: Drunk with the dream of freedom, at the first intimation of immunity they has­ tened to throw off their shackles and strike for long-coveted liberty. Women, chil­ dren, young, able-bodied men and the feeble and infirm, all hastened towards the Union lines. Thence, it was usually an easy matter, or at least, one possible of ac­ complishment, to make their way North to the free states. (Fanatics, 240) In the novel, as no one will be surprised, the arrival of the contrabands is hardly cause for celebration. Dunbar’s narrator notes, Since 1829, there had been a gradual change for the better in the attitude of Ohio towards her colored citizens, but now, all over the state, and especially in the southern counties and towns there had come a sudden revulsion of feeling, and the people rose generally against the possibility of being overwhelmed by an in­ flux of runaway slaves (242). Perhaps more surprising is that this revulsion against contrabands is initially shared by the blacks in Dorbury, who, “even before they could pronounce the word that disgusted them, they were fighting their unfortunate brothers of the South as vigorously as their white neighbors” (243). And there is no mistaking the irony with which the narrator de­ scribes outrage among Dorbury’s resident black population when the migrating blacks seek to worship among the citizens who themselves have been largely segregated from the town’s white population. He observes:

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature These outcast families seeking God, had stepped upon the purple robes of these black aristocrats, and they were as one for defiance. (243) The pastor tried in vain to show them the difference between people who had been freed three or four years before and those just made free, but somehow, the contraband and none of his company could see it, and the meeting was broken up. (244). Perhaps the moment of greatest poignancy in Dunbar’s story of exodus comes a few pages later when a white man named Raymond Stothard, who has been charged with try­ ing to “throw off the stigma of Negro invasion,” comes upon A small family of black folk who had just arrived from some place south of the riv­ er. There were a father and mother, both verging on old age, a stalwart, stronglimbed son, apparently about twenty, and two younger children. They were all ragged, barefoot and unkempt. (246). Upon being challenged by Stothard, the young man holds his ground and asserts, “We come up hyeah…’cause we hyeahed it was a free state.” And when told, “It’s free for (p. 191)

white people, not for niggers,” the young man responds, “We hyeahed it was free fu’ evahbody, dat’s de reason we come” (246). Unlike Frederick Douglass’s or Harriet Jacobs’s tales, Dunbar’s brief account is told from the outside, rather than from the in­ side. It is the tale not of a single remarkable individual, although the young, defiant young man just quoted does stand out momentarily with his glare of defiance. But the fo­ cus instead is on families and small bands whose significance derives not from their sin­ gularity but from the fact that their story and situation has become common. Indeed from the point of view of the communities that were becoming destinations for these people, their stories are becoming all too common. It would not be until after the 1960s, when African American authors turned, in signifi­ cant numbers, to retelling the slave’s story in fictional form that Toni Morrison in Beloved would explore at length the self-destructive consequences of this ressentiment in a story, also set in a small Ohio town, and based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a fugitive who murdered one of her own children in an attempt to prevent her young family from being returned to slavery. In Morrison’s retelling, it is the resentment of the community of black freedmen, brought on by the ostentatious feast thrown by Baby Suggs, the moth­ er of the novel’s protagonist, Sethe, to celebrate her daughter’s escape from slavery, that results in the community’s failure to warn Sethe of her imminent recapture. However, before the 1960s, when the story of slavery would return in force among black writers, the most significant efforts to reframe the account of the slave’s emergence from bondage appears in the literary genealogy traced by the wildly popular classics of south­ ern racism such as Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1903), which was adapted by D. W. Griffiths for his film The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Mar­ garet Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936). These stories, along with what became a dominant strain of southern historiography stressing the “tragic” consequences of eman­ Page 9 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature cipation on the treasonous states of the former Confederacy, helped shift the point of sympathy in the nation’s popular imagination from the exploited laboring class of south­ ern blacks to southern whites. This view did not go entirely unchallenged. In 1935 W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Re­ construction in America, 1860–1880 in which he described both the myriad decisions by enslaved blacks to cross Union lines when the Federal armies made their way into the South, and the ad hoc decisions by Union officers not to adhere to the official policy of re­ turning slaves to their owners, as a “movement [that] became a general strike against the slave system on the part of all who could find opportunity” (64). Du Bois observed that, “Once begun, the general strike of black and white went madly and relentlessly on like some great saga” that would determine the outcome of the war (64). Although Du Bois’s view would eventually turn the historiographical tide in relation to studies of the Civil War and Reconstruction, by and large, this saga would not stir the imaginations of Ameri­ can fiction writers for another three decades. (p. 192) William Faulkner, the white southern writer, perhaps in some ways most responsive to the problem of slavery for black and white alike, gave the title of a Negro Spiritual, “Go Down, Moses,” to his series of interlocking stories, Go Down, Moses (1940), which he ded­ icated to his childhood black caretaker, Caroline Barr. In Faulkner’s text, however, the slave’s desire for freedom is often sounded in ironic and plaintive counterpoint to the pro­ found tones of the spiritual popularized by the bass-baritone of Paul Robeson’s inimitable voice, intoning, unequivocally, “Let my people go.” In the book’s first story, “Was,” the es­ cape of the slave Tomey’s Turl is part of a choreographed plot to enable the “fugitive,” whose escapes have become ritualistic, to live together with Tennie, the woman he loves, but who is enslaved on a nearby plantation. Yet perhaps the most striking direct echo of the slave narrative tradition in the book occurs in its most well-known story, “The Bear,” when Ike McCaslin makes an effort to bestow on his family’s ex-slaves some of the inheri­ tance to which they are entitled. Seeking the young woman, Fonsiba, who left the Mc­ Caslin plantation with her fatuous husband, who believes he can support his family using a grant from his father’s military service during the Civil War, Ike comes upon a “log cab­ in built by hand and no clever hand either.” Here he finds the deluded husband, wearing “gold-framed spectacles which…did not even contain lenses,” in the act of reading a book in the midst of that desolation, that muddy waste fenceless and even pathless and without even a walled shed for stock to stand beneath: and over all, permeant, clinging to the man’s very clothing and exuding from his skin itself, that rank stink of baseless and imbecile delusion, that boundless rapacity and fol­ ly, of the carpetbagger followers of victorious armies. (267) It is almost impossible not to see in Faulkner’s description an allusion to Booker T. Washington’s recollection of “one of the saddest things [he] saw” while traveling through Alabama as a schoolteacher, namely:

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature a young man, who had attended some high school, sitting down in a one-room cab­ in, with grease on his clothing, filth all around him, and weeds in the yard and gar­ den, engaged in studying a French grammar. Although Faulkner may have only been channeling Washington’s text unconsciously, the difficulty he experiences representing with dignity black expectations for immediate and unqualified admission to the polity would seem to indicate the limit of his expropriation of the tale of the ex-slave. With the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the point of view from which the story of slavery was narrated returned to that of those seeking escape from bondage. Interestingly, however, Leslie Fiedler argues that the most popular of these post-Civil Rights stories, Alex Haley’s Roots, which was made into an extraordinarily successful television miniseries, did not subvert its literary predecessors but continued their psychological and cultural work. Fiedler argues that these books, “understood as a single work (i.e., Uncle Tom’s (p. 193) Cabin, The Clansman, Gone with the Wind, and Roots) composed over more than a centu­ ry…constitute a hitherto unperceived Popular Epic” (17). In contrast to Fiedler’s popular epic, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), sought to tell, from Turner’s point of view, the story of his rebellion as an ordeal of consciousness. Selected for the Pulitzer Prize, Styron’s novel nonetheless outraged many black readers and influential scholars, who saw his attempt to get inside Turner’s head as presumptuous and insulting. John Henrik Clarke edited a volume, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, which drew up a bill of particulars against Styron, and in doing so signaled that, for the time being, narrating the story of slavery from the slave’s point of view would be largely viewed as the task of the black writer. Accordingly, the decades after the late 1960s produced a number of black-au­ thored novels of slavery, including Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), Ernest Gaines’s, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Haley’s Roots (1976), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1990), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Morrison’s Beloved (1986), Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory (1994) and Feeding the Ghosts (2000), Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1994), J. California Cooper’s In Search of Sat­ isfaction (1994), and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2004). Ashraf Rushdy has des­ ignated several of these novels—in particular those by Gaines, Reed, Johnson, and Williams—as “Neo-slave narratives,” because of the way they “assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” in order to develop “arguments about the political and cultural level of the sixties” (3,6). As Rushdy points out, many of these authors wrote explicitly with the intent of countering not only Styron’s Nat Turner but also Stanley Elkins’s influential historical study, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Academic Life (1959), which among other things infamously asserted that the figure of “Sambo,” the childlike black slave who identified with his master, was an historically accurate characterization of black personality.

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature The story of slavery became, then, a counter-assertion of black agency under the slave regime and throughout the history of segregation and second-class citizenship that fol­ lowed it. Although it is difficult to generalize across these more recent novels, among the features of many of these stories is their attempt to imagine their protagonists within rather than in isolation from the slave community, the term that also gave John W. Blassingame the title for his influential study, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972). Although acknowledging that those “slaves who escaped were extremely resourceful men,” Blassingame takes pains to make the story of the runaway a collective not an individual story (200). If, at some level, the individuals within slave nar­ ratives stood out against the larger population of the enslaved, what many recent writers have sought to do is to depict the network of interactions and associations among slave populations that made such individuals possible. As Edward P. Jones’s The Known World illustrates, even those few blacks who themselves owned slaves can be recuperated as part of that community. However, the rise of “community” as a way of describing the en­ slaved also indicates that, in these tales (with the possible exception of, Johnson’s Oxherd­ ing Tale, in which Karl Marx makes a brief appearance), (p. 194) understanding slavery as part of the broader exploitation of the laboring classes in the nineteenth century would be muted in favor of rebuilding a sense of cultural connection across the social and econom­ ic differences that by the 1960s were becoming more evident within the black American population. Yet, also among the more interesting aspects of contemporary fiction writing may be the way that the tale of the slave, in both its collective and individual form, has proved pro­ ductive for white authors as well as black. In 2005 E. L Doctorow published The March, which, as if picking up Du Bois’s assertion of the great saga being written in the wake of the union armies’ conquest of the treasonous south, chronicled the fate of various individ­ uals, both black and white, as they followed the armies of William Tecumseh Sherman on his devastating March to the Sea. Even more recently, there is Peter Dimock’s 2012 novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time, a very strange text that takes the form of an extended letter to a fictional character based on Daniel Levin from the Of­ fice of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, who composed the document legalizing the practices of torture perpetrated at Abu Ghraib during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In this text, Dimock’s narrator, Theo Fales, draws upon Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and a newspa­ per account of a lesser known ex-slave, George Anderson, in order to find a redemptive history of the American nation that will not make the examples of abuse demonstrated at Abu Ghraib the inevitable result of the American historical narrative. In an author’s note, appended to the volume, Dimock tells us that part of the method that Fales recommends for constructing his redemptive history are “taken verbatim from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” (160). What these later novels seem to indicate is that the imagination of American writers will continue to contemplate the significance of the slave narrative in telling the story of the history of the nation.

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature

References Bercovitch, Sacvan. “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History.” Critical In­ quiry 12 (Summer 1986): 631–653. Berthold, Michael C. “Moby-Dick and the American Slave Narrative.” The Massachusetts Review 35.1 (Spring, 1994):135–148. Blassingame, John. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford U Press, 1979. DeForest, John William. “The Great American Novel.” The Nation 6 (January 9, 1868): 27– 28. DeForest, John William. Miss Ravenal’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. New York: Penguin. 2000. Dimock, Peter. George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time, A Novel. Cham­ paign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994: 103–452 (p. 195) Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994: 1–102. Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994: 453–1045. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press, 1998. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Fanatics. The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Eds. Herbert Woodward Martin, Ronald Primeau, and Gene Andrew Jarrett. Athens, OH: Ohio U Press, 2009: 171–304. Ellison, Ralph. “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity.” The Collected Es­ says of Ralph Ellison. Ed, John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1995. Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Fiedler, Leslie. The Inadvertent Epic. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. Fisher, Philip, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1985. Kaufman, Paul. “The Romantic Movement,” in Norman Foerster, The Re-Interpretation of American Literature: Some Contributions toward the Understanding of Its Historical De­ velopment. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928 Page 13 of 14

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A Reflection on the Slave Narrative and American Literature Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. New York: Oxford U Press, 1990. Maguire, Ian. “‘Who Ain’t a Slave?’: Moby-Dick and the Ideology of Free Labor,” Journal of American Studies 37. 2 (2003): 300. McFeely, William. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1995. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, or the Whale. Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick. New York: Library of America, 1983. 771–1408. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage 2004. Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: Norton, 2003. Parker, Theodore. The American Scholar. Ed. George Wilson Cooke. Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1907. Rushdy, Ashraf H. F. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford U Press, 1999. Skinner, Quentin. “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action.” In James Tully, ed. Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, Princeton: Prince­ ton UP, 1988. 98–118. Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981. Stuckey, Sterling. “Cheer and Gloom: Douglass and Melville on Slave Dance and Music.” Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation. Eds. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 2008. 88–109 Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Norton, 1996.

Kenneth W. Warren

Kenneth W. Warren is Professor of English at the University of Chicago and author of What Was African American Literature? (2011). He coedited Renewing Black Intellec­ tual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (2009) with Adolph Reed, Jr. and Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (2013) with Tess Chakkalakal.

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture

The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture   Marcus Wood The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.022

Abstract and Keywords Slave Narratives and Visual Culture—This piece considers the operations of the visual el­ ements within first-generation American slave narratives. The texts surveyed begin with Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1797) and ends with John Barber’s A History of the Amis­ tad Captives (1840). Special emphasis is given to the consideration of how new and evolv­ ing reproductive technologies, and lithography and photography in particular, were uti­ lized in the slave narratives. A central concern is the extent to which slave narratives knowingly interrogated and subverted visual conventions, which had earlier been evolved to celebrate white male authors. In this context, the ingenious innovations of female por­ traiture within key texts by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and William and Ellen Craft are revealed to express potent satiric and radical elements. Keywords: visual culture, slave narrative, lithography, photograph, female slave portraiture, Sojourner Truth, Har­ riet Tubman

Establishing the Pictorial Parameters of the Slave Narrative THE role of visual imagery within the tradition of the North American slave narrative was, throughout its development, vitally significant, but it is difficult to assess. The slave narrative evolved during a period in which America saw an unprecedented revolution in popular press technology and an expansion in a series of consumer markets that both de­ veloped and required visual material. These environments included advertising, both in­ side and outside the press; illustrated journalism; the children’s book market; abbreviat­ ed sensational fiction (the American equivalent of the “penny dreadful”); illustrated gal­ lows literature; single-sheet print production including political prints, satires, and the il­ lustrated song-sheet (with lithography becoming increasingly important in all these areas from the mid-nineteenth century); and, tangentially, the nascent market for illustrated pornography. The slave narratives were, at different times and in different ways, adapted into each one of these markets. In order to provide an assessment of how images func­ Page 1 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture tioned over time within slave narratives it is, therefore, necessary at the outset to think about parameters. The parameters that need to be established relate to form, to function, to technology and to chronology. Without some initial ground clearing and boundary set­ ting “the illustrated slave narrative,” in fact, constitutes a virtually limitless terrain. If, for example, fictional slave narratives, most spectacularly those contained within Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Archie Moore, the White Slave; Or, Memoirs of a Fugitive were to be in­ cluded, the visual elements in their adaptation are, quite simply, endless. I will according­ ly excise the element of the fictional slave narrative from the discussion, even while ac­ knowledging the fact that Stowe claimed historical sources for each one of her major characters. (p. 197) So what are the limits—what might the first and last illustrated slave narratives be? Set­ ting originatory and terminal limits to slave narratives, which incorporate a visual compo­ nent, is no easy matter. Putting aside, for the time being, illustrated broadsides and gal­ lows literature, the slave narrative proper, within the North American canon, might be seen to begin with The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, published in London in 1797, an autobiography which has been claimed, albeit contentiously, as con­ stituting the first great American slave narrative. The inclusion of this text in the major teaching anthologies of African American literature means that, whether we like it or not, this text is now considered part of a North American canon, indeed as the ur-text of the American slave narrative. From the perspective of this discussion, the fact is significant because all early editions of this text, whether English or American, carried one iconic im­ age, the full-page engraved portrait of Equiano. Adapted from an oil painting, this pre­ sented the author as ex-slave, good Christian, and as a late eighteenth-century scholar and gentleman. This image has a claim to be the most significant visual icon within pub­ lished slave narratives, and it set a vastly influential precedent with regard to how the exslave author envisioned him or herself, and how s/he was presented to a mainly white readership. The importance, and ingenious development, of the author portrait within subsequent slave narratives, and the level of autonomy that ex-slave authors exerted over their imagistic construction, must consequently be major concerns of the following as­ sessment. But if there is a relatively clear starting line, there is no clear finishing line. Illustrated slave narratives, indeed slave narratives generally, do not have focused endings. There is, of course, the complex question of the extent to which seminal African American autobi­ ographies, whether those of Booker T. Washington, or Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, are engaged in such intense and intimate dialogues with the slave narrative as to be, in effect, extensions of the genre. Yet even sidelining this issue, the slave narrative archive remains alive and evolves to this day in pictorial contexts, with novels, illustrated graphic novels, and children’s books still appearing, which retell and develop all the major slave narratives via the incorporation of rich visual elements. By extension, of course, film and television also continue to take the visual interpretation of major slave narratives in new directions, and can be seen as modern extrapolations of the genre in documentary and film. For example, one of the most copiously illustrated texts to come out of the North American slave narrative tradition was John Barber’s 1840 A History of the Amistad Cap­ Page 2 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture tives…with Biographical Sketches of Each of the Surviving Africans. The only text within the tradition to give biographical accounts of slave insurrections on board a slave ship, the text and its detailed images were vital sources for Stephen Spielberg’s Hollywood mo­ tion picture Amistad. As this example would indicate, the afterlife of the slave narrative within the new reproductive technologies of the twentieth and indeed twenty-first cen­ turies is an under-researched phenomenon, but unfortunately this subject must also fall outside the limits of the present discussion. The following study consequently takes William Still’s magisterial The Underground Rail Road as the end of the line. The decision to stop at this text can be taken on the grounds that Still’s book was both an end and a beginning. It constitutes the most spectacular and most (p. 198) inclusive nineteenth-cen­ tury attempt to incorporate, within the covers of a single richly illustrated cultural histo­ ry, the main body of the most important slave narratives. Still’s book, published in 1872, also marks the point at which slave narratives moved into an adaptive market place, which anthologized, compressed, edited, fragmented, re-wrote, and pictorialized them to suit its own postbellum agendas. Still is personally and vitally connected to his slave sub­ jects, many of whom he was personally involved in helping, yet he has his own story to tell, and his own way of telling it, and he looks to the future as much as the past. With one eye on a very personal testimonial inheritance, he trims, re-arranges and re-invents slave narratives to fit an agenda underpinned by a determination to fix posterity. The use of vi­ sual materials in this context was vital to his narrative purposes and ideological agendas. In this sense his work connects in vital ways with the whole body of texts, most influen­ tially William Wells Brown’s The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, and Wilson Armisted’s, A Tribute for the Negro, which incorporate slave narratives into larger illustrated structures related to African American achievement.

Infiltrating and Overpowering the Author Por­ trait—The Slave Frontispiece as Subversive Iconic Space Within the hierarchy of Western art, portraiture has long held a central place as the aes­ thetic space where personal power is expressed and explored. With the arrival of the press and the relatively easy integration of mass-produced wood and copper-engraved im­ agery within the covers of a single book, the personal portrait became irrevocably con­ nected with authorship and ownership. Within incunabula the frontispiece was frequently the only component carrying imagery, and as book-production developed it was not un­ common for the only image in a volume to consist of the initial portrait of the author. These portraits possessed an enormous weight of authority, and came to carry more. The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, for example, is unimaginable without the full-page portrait of the bald bard staring out from opposite the title page. Such portraiture also in­ flected fictional autobiographical narratives. For example, the first edition of the most celebrated mock travel narrative of all time, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture carried a single plate, the full length engraved portrait of Crusoe, in his famous homemade costume, an image to which I shall return.

Figure 12.1

The expression of the essence of authorship through this initial personal appearance not surprisingly came to constitute perhaps the most charged and contested visual space within slave narratives. The majority of published slave narratives did not carry any im­ agery, and of those that did, the vast majority carried only one image, the author’s por­ trait. Yet these portraits take in a whole host of reproductive technologies and ways of seeing, and pose the most difficult questions. How was a person who had been legally and economically designated as outside humanity, while a slave, to present him­ self or herself before a free white readership in America or Europe, or to their smaller au­ (p. 199)

dience of fellow free blacks? At what stage would ex-slave authors feel confident enough to take on the power of the author-portrait and turn it to their own ends as a vehicle for expressing black identity, black autonomy, or indeed black satiric anger? The answer to the second question is, of course, from the very beginning. The image of Equiano, already alluded to, (see figure 12.1) illustrates the point forcefully. The frontispiece to the first English edition carries, at the bottom of the copperplate, the inscription, “Olaudah Equiano / or / Gustavus Vassa / the African / Published March 1797 by G. Vassa”. Equiano insists on establishing his identity in several ways. He names him­ self four times, first with his African name, then with the first title applied to him when he entered slavery and was given the name of a Swedish king, Gustavas Vassa, on the whim of the English sailor who owned him, then he re-asserts his original identity as “The African” before giving a precise date to the appearance of his portrait, taking (p. 200) re­ sponsibility for it as the publisher, and registering his own name, finally, in the form of his slave name G. Vassa. The frontispiece seems to testify to Equiano’s confidence in his hy­ brid status; he embraces both his ex-slave position, his Africanness, and his new status as Page 4 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture a free African in England. Although the later editions of the autobiography carry increas­ ingly poor quality engravings, this first image that Equiano personally published has been produced to the highest reproductive standards. It was common in the eighteenth centu­ ry for significant authors to have their portraits adapted from extant oil portraits. There was in fact an African precedent, perhaps even a direct model, for Equiano’s engraved portrait. In 1744, the autobiography of William Unsah Sessarakoo was published under the title The Royal African; or Memoirs of the Young African Prince of Annamaboe accompanied by an elaborate engraved portrait. Sessarakoo, a Ghanaian noble, had been enslaved briefly in Barbados before his father got him freed. The memoir presented him very much in the sentimental mode of wronged African royalty, made popular by contem­ porary stage adaptations of Behn’s Oronooko. His portrait shows him as a full-blown Eu­ ropean style Aristocrat, posed in the manner of a martial portrait by Joshua Reynolds, and apart from the color of his face, he might as well be a white general or Mi’lord. Equiano’s presentation of himself both in his writing and in his portrait differs substantially from this earlier model, and resists both appropriation and stereotypification. That Equiano had already had his portrait professionally painted is testimony to his stature; that he wanted to have it reproduced to the highest standard is testimony to the way he wanted to control and market his image. That this image is now well on the way to becoming a global icon, reproduced in countless books, exhibition publicity, bill boards, museum ad­ vertising hoardings, documentaries, and all over the Web, is testimony to the success and care of the original operation. Certain kinds of engravers specialized in the work of transferring the subtle shading and half-tone of oil painting into a copper-plate image. Two techniques, almost certainly re­ quiring two separate engravers, have been used to produce this copy of Equiano’s por­ trait. The first is line engraving, which has been used for the overcoat and the rendition of the open pages of the Bible that Equiano holds in his right hand. Yet to render the skin tones on the face and hands, to render the hair, and to render the delicate half tones of the white silk waistcoat and the linen cravat, the much more expensive and difficult tech­ nique of stipple engraving has been applied. This was a highly refined technique, which requires a remarkable sense of touch and which was normally applied to the production of print portraiture of the highest quality. It is a technique that gives unrivalled subtlety in the rendition of expression and skin tone, and before photography, it provided print technology’s most precise way of getting a likeness. Equiano’s African features are ren­ dered conspicuously and accurately without caricature. He looks calmly, straight at the viewer, confident in his identity as both completely African and completely European. A man at ease with his identity and his destiny, he has not only survived slavery, but evolved through it into a strong complex individuality.

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture

Figure 12.2

The subsequent history of the author portrait within slave narratives is in a sense a tale of the degree to which these images succeeded in appropriating and subverting the aesthet­ ic and technical resources of western portraiture. The majority of title portraits (p. 201) are engravings that obey the rules of the European portrait tradition and that present the author as a respectable gentleman in respectable clothing. Most commonly, the costumes and hair styles mimic those of fashionable nineteenth-century white society in Europe and the Northern States of America. Representative examples are the frontispieces to John Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia, Samuel Ringgold Ward’s Autobiography of a Fugitive Ne­ gro, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (all three narratives appearing in 1855), Noah Davis’s 1859 A Narrative of the Life of the Rev. Noah Davis and Israel Campbell’s 1861 An Autobiography, Bond and Free. Sometimes the mimicry in these por­ traits appears excessive, even parodic, as in the bizarre coiffure adopted by John Ander­ son in the frontispiece to Harper Twelvetrees’s 1863 The Story of the Life of John Ander­ son, the Fugitive Slave. At other points, the use of the crudest and cheapest technology can have peculiar results.

(p. 202)

Take for example the little pamphlet narrative of 1845 The Light and Truth of Slavery; Aaron’s History. Beneath the title is a half page woodcut portrait with the inscription “Reader here is the picture of the poor degraded wayfaring Aaron” (see figure 12.2). The picture, however, is itself so poor and degraded as to give no rendition of Aaron at all, the entire face is swallowed up in one mass of black printer’s ink. Strangely this eradication of personal identity through poor technology seems to give the portrait a certain power, as if Aaron’s identity has been engulfed in a universal blackness. This image, however, constitutes both a technical and semiotic extreme, for, when compared with that of Equiano, the slave subject has apparently no control over either text or image and his in­ dividuality literally disappears in the process of publication. Other frontispieces departed radically from the normal conventions of portraiture. For example, Henry Trumbull’s very Page 6 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture early Life and Adventures of Robert the Hermit of Massachusetts published in 1829 car­ ried a full-length portrait of Robert. The escaped slave elected to live the life of an out­ sider, and he is shown with his shaggy locks and eccentric clothing standing in the woods outside his den, a sort of cross between Robinson Crusoe, a salvage man and a holy sage. Several of the ex-slaves who published narratives were concerned not only to exert pre­ cise control over how their image was presented in pictorial form but also to play with the conventions of portraiture in elaborate and revealing ways. Frederick Douglass was, of course, not only a very beautiful man but one very astute in how his image was presented and manipulated both inside and outside his various narrative publications. The multiva­ lent body of portraiture that evolved around him, and that originated in the slave narra­ tive frontispieces, constitutes something of a master-class in how an African American could control, popularize, and manipulate his or her image. Douglass’s image was rapidly deployed not only within the covers of slave narrative but across a broad range of repro­ ductive technologies. Douglass appeared in variously carefully orchestrated forms in lith­ ographs on song sheets and in collectable and mass-produced forms of photographic por­ traiture, most notably the carte de visite. Douglass’s narratives also all contained engrav­ ings within the text. The first My Bondage and My Freedom carried two full-page plates marking the two stages of his life as delineated in the title, bondage and freedom. These are, however, highly stylized compartmentalized designs. The first presents stock scenes of slave life, the runaway chased by a dog, a girl on the auction block, blacks capering and dancing round the campfire. These scenes are so familiar and so unreal as to be al­ most abstract. The last autobiography, the 1892 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass carried a photographic frontispiece showing Douglass with white hair and beard, in the mode of a nineteenth-century patriarch. The main body of the text carried numerous sin­ gle sheet wood-engraved illustrations that drew on the full power of nineteenth-century sentimental illustration to present key scenes of loss and suffering from his slave years. Other slave authors showed remarkable ingenuity in the manner in which they used im­ agery to develop their self-image within the covers of their narratives. The most spectacu­ lar example of this practice is The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1850). Bibb’s was the most heavily illustrated of all slave narratives and interrogates the visual (p. 203) con­ ventions used to contain and proscribe the slave subject with unprecedented sophistica­ tion. Bibb’s frontispiece portrait was set up in dialogue with another image that called to mind the icon used in runaway slave advertisements, thus making a shocking statement about slave individuality and autonomy. The main body of his text contained a plethora of images, many of them drawn from earlier stock sources and old woodblocks. Bibb is con­ sequently often pictured not actually as himself but as a figure who had existed in an imagistic earlier life as someone else. The text consequently makes layered and disturb­ ing comments on how processes of visual imposition and disempowerment had been ap­ plied to the slave body within mainstream abolition publishing. Equally radical in his use of subversive visual materials was Henry “Box” Brown, who went to remarkable lengths to question how symbolism and portraiture co-exist, and to suggest that a liberationist identity could be powerfully fixed onto a symbolic object. Two Page 7 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture very different versions of Brown’s narrative appeared, one in America in 1849 titled Nar­ rative of Henry Box Brown, authored by Charles Stearns, and one later in England in 1851 titled Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, both describing his remarkable escape to freedom by rail from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia, sealed within a packing case. As his name would suggest, “Box” Brown’s very identity became subsumed with the container in which he traveled in danger and pain to freedom. In the wood engravings within the text, Brown and the box become bizarrely fused, existing as a form of iconic Siamese twins. The box, both as tomb of slavery with Brown in it, and as space of resurrection when he emerged from it, became a universal abolition symbol. It was reproduced in children’s books, in song sheets, in single-sheet prints, and the actual box was imaginatively taken to Britain by Brown and used in several “reconstructions” of his ordeal. On occasion he traveled from one lecturing location to another boxed up on a train, to dramatically re-emerge in the lecture hall. That the life of Brown’s box existed not only outside the text but outside its time is evident in the way a full-sized facsimile of the box forms the centerpiece of Glenn Ligon’s 1993 installation To Embark in the perma­ nent African American galleries of the Art Institute of Detroit. “Box” Brown spectacularly demonstrated how visual material developed initially in the context of the illustrations to a slave narrative could then be used to infiltrate a whole variety of other publishing and performative spaces.

Female Slave Narrative Self-Imaging—Interven­ tions and Innovations So far, this discussion of the treatment and history of the author portrait in slave narra­ tives has had an exclusively male focus, yet the representation of the female slave/exslave author, provides many influential examples of women using this visual opportunity in ways that comment ironically on gender and that indeed subvert male traditions of rep­ resentation. It could be argued that this process in fact pre-dated the male (p. 204) infil­ tration of the author portrait genre. Although not strictly a slave narrative, Phyllis Wheatley’s landmark Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral published by sub­ scription in England in 1773, included some scanty biographical details, but more impor­ tantly, it provided the first great author portrait in slave literature. Phyllis sits within a roundel inscribed with a text that designates her “Phyllis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston.” Her status in the text is ambiguous, as the word servant at this time still carried its early, and biblical, meaning of slave. We do not know what input Phyl­ lis had into her portrait, but the engraved image is not ambiguous and boldly shows Phyl­ lis rising above her social station to assume the traditionally white male role of inspired artist calling upon the muse. The effect is emphasized by the ironic use of costume. Phyl­ lis is dressed in her servant’s attire, including an apron just visible below her right elbow, but she is seated at a table engrossed in the task of the author. She is shown deep in med­ itation, her quill pen paused above a sheet she is writing on, her left hand pensively sup­ porting her chin. This is a vision of a young poet making art: shown in profile her lips are pursed in concentration, her one visible eye stares into the middle distance, and she is Page 8 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture lost in the process of creation. So deep is her focus on the work that the reader is not ac­ knowledged at all. Once the slave narrative got seriously underway in America, a host of remarkable women authors and ex-slave subjects appeared in print, and there are numerous examples of the astonishing capacity of the woman’s slave narrative to take up the author portrait and shape it to new ends. Many texts are predictable and contain frontispieces showing con­ ventional images of seated, respectable-looking women, well dressed and with hair straightened, looking out demurely at the reader (typical examples would be the fron­ tispieces to the first edition of the narrative of Harriet Jacobs). Yet many other examples take on these conventions in ways that can be radical and shocking.

Figure 12.3

Sometimes the effect comes down to sheer force of personality and looks. The most out­ standing portrait in this regard is that of Sojourner Truth (see figure 12.3). Olive Gilbert’s 1850 Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave carried a fairly crudely executed woodcut portrait, but here form and content enforce each other to remarkable effect. Truth is set in an oval roundel, which acts like the lens of a magnifying glass to throw the viewer right up against this august woman. The framing device puts her right in your face. The extraordinarily powerful lineaments of Truth’s face are well served by the un­ compromising and harsh lines of the wood engraving. This is not a face that requires the softness, refinements, and half-tones of stipple engraving, lithography or daguerreotype to bring out its qualities. This woman is powerfully, undeniably, proudly African, as well as American. Her sternly set mouth, strong flat nose, simple white turban, and unstraight­ ened hair form a dramatic frame for those fierce eyes, embodying a confrontational pow­ er, and an honesty that almost seems to grab and physically shake the viewer. This is a woman who doesn’t need any of the cultural or theatrical props of white portraiture to es­ tablish her credentials or her human value. There are no books, or quills, or pointing fin­ Page 9 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture gers, or symbolic background objects, and, in fact, there is no setting whatsoever. All that is needed is the wonderful face radiating the transcendent qualities embodied in the name of its owner, and inscribed in simple capitals (p. 205) below—Sojourner Truth. Per­ haps no other diasporic name embodies the qualities of its owner so perfectly: this woman was a traveler after truth her entire life, and the meaningful fusion of this simple text and image makes this frontispiece purely emblematic.

Figure 12.4

Truth seems to have had a shrewd understanding of how to market her image and of how to play with the stereotypes of portraiture. The image for the frontispiece to the first edi­ tion of her narrative (see figure 12.4) makes an educative contrast when set against the later celebrated photographic portrait, used in editions of her narrative in the early 1860s, and marketed as an ambrotype carte de visite, which sold in the thousands. In the 1850s and 1860s positive paper prints of photographic images became reproducible for the first time, and started to feed into the abolitionist market. The renowned portrait of Truth is an example of an ex-slave campaigner controlling the new technology and the new market in order to make a serious political statement. Truth, of course, knew and worked (p. 206) with Douglass and toured with him and Garrison. Although she would have seen the manner in which these brilliant abolition publicists manipulated imagery, including portrait photographs, the image she created has integrity and a witty engage­ ment with women’s rights, as well as the rights of slaves, which is all her own. In the cel­ ebrated image, we see a very different creation from the earlier, stronger younger woman in the woodcut, and this time there is a plethora of highly meaningful if ironized props. Truth wears the same austere costume as in the earlier image, but the remarkable eyes are literally glazed, and the inevitable volume, presumably the Bible or a copy of her own narrative, rests on the table. She sits, looking up from her knitting, peering through white-framed spectacles, as if the camera has caught her off guard. The large ornate bro­ cade tassels which hang to the top right of the picture further give the impression that Page 10 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture the camera has moved into her private domestic space, and frozen her in the act of “women’s work.” These tassels suggest a curtain, or domestic hanging of some sort, or even the covering of a four poster bed, which seems to have been drawn aside to reveal a woman, quietly doing what respectable nineteenth-century women are supposed to do. The image was at one level a tongue-in-cheek attempt to reassure a white audience that the subject was quiet and respectable and knew her place, but given what Sojourner Truth actually did, and what she was really like, it must also surely contain an element of comedy. The image was mounted on cards, carrying the inscription “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” and Truth seems to have controlled the composition and manu­ facture of the image herself, using it as a calling card and as a fundraising scheme. The mysterious aphorism she invented is clearly playing some funny but serious games with the selling of bodies as (p. 207) images and as fact, and as such is among other things a comment on the marketing of slave experience within the slave narratives. There is also the inference that this picture is a shadow, not merely in the sense that photographs are shadows painted with light, but in the sense that this version of Truth is not the truth, but is a mere shadow of the earlier portrait, her true substance. The most fascinating intervention into the area of gender and representation in the con­ text of the slave narrative frontispiece must be the image that appeared at the front of Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. The Crafts’s celebrated narrative of escape famously involved gender reversal and cross-dressing. The slightly built, light-skinned, and intellectual looking Ellen dressed up in an elaborately and painstakingly constructed disguise, as a young white male in­ valid. Ellen’s husband William pretended to be her man servant, or “boy.” The couple then made the perilous public journey by rail through the slave states and up to Philadelphia and freedom. The narrative of their escape is told in the first person by William Craft who archly refers to Ellen throughout as “my young Master,” “the young Master” or similar so­ briquets. Much of the narrative is given over to heavily inflected and semicomic encoun­ ters between Ellen and her fellow white travelers. The processes of comedic mistaken identity climax when two young ladies fall for the attractive young invalid, who finally re­ ceives an invitation to visit from the girl’s enthusiastic father. Ellen’s cross-dressing was the most spectacular, and in narrative terms the most entertaining aspect of the escape, and it is on her personification as a white gentleman that the frontispiece exclusively fo­ cuses (see figure 12.5).

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture

Figure 12.5

And yet the portrait exists in a more elevated register than the text, for there is no humor about this image. We do not have the portrait of a slave woman, but of a fragile looking white invalid, with roughly cropped hair, a cravat, a sling, a cloak, a vast stove-pipe top­ per, and the remarkable green-lensed steel-rimmed spectacles. The image suggests all sorts of questions concerning slavery, color, class, authorship, and gender. Ellen had to undergo a strange ordeal of transformation in order to move into freedom. She had to lose her beautiful hair, and she had to imagine herself to be that which she most ab­ horred, a white slave-owning male. The image intimates both her courage and her beauty, and insists upon breaking down the sentimental stereotype of the fleeing slave woman as passive victim. The text of the narrative in this sense exists in ironic resistance to the im­ age, because, in William’s account, Ellen is frequently presented as on the verge of emo­ tional breakdown and is shown to barely stave off total collapse right up until the very in­ stant of their arrival in Philadelphia. Yet this image shows a confident, intelligent, ethere­ al young woman playing a part with something amounting to theatrical genius. The final point of this picture is that it makes us believe that this “black” slave woman could suc­ cessfully make every male slaveholder and sympathizer she encounters believe her to be a free white man. In this sense, the image celebrates not only slave volition but black fe­ male resourcefulness and empowerment. It is nothing less than the literal destruction of the myth of the male slave patriarchy. Ellen makes the representatives of the slave power take her corporeal reality for that of a slave master, yet all the time she is a real and re­ markable slave woman, and that is what the frontispiece is (p. 208) describing, not just some melodramatic and semicomic act of dramatic disguise. In point of fact, Ellen did not make the journey looking as we see her in the frontispiece, for we are told in the narra­ tive that just as the couple were about to depart, “It then occurred to her that the smoothness of her face might betray her; so she decided to make another poultice, and put it in a white handkerchief to be worn under the chin, up the cheeks, and to tie over the head. This nearly hid the expression of the countenance, as well as the beardless Page 12 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture chin” (Running a Thousand Miles, pp. 35–6). Yet William states with regard to the fron­ tispiece plate: “The poultice is left off in the engraving, because the likeness could not have been taken well with it on.” (p. 35) This is an important point: The Crafts wanted to insist that this one vital image was not just a theatrical impression of Ellen in her dis­ guise, but that it was like her, that it manifested her true “likeness,” that it showed her real self always to be at the heart of things and to override any necessary deception.

Figure 12.6

Perhaps the most in-your-face example of female imagistic usurpation within the imagery of the slave narrative is the superb woodcut of Harriet Tubman which appeared as fron­ tispiece to Sarah H. Bradford’s 1869 Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (see figure 12.6). (p. 209) This is an image that, like that of Ellen Craft, questions accepted gender roles for the woman slave, yet its technique is very different. Tubman herself was no writer, and never sought self-publicity, living her remarkable and heroic life, as Frederick Douglass empha­ sized in his tributary letter printed at the opening of Scenes in the Life, in the shadows: “The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the ser­ vice of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You on the other hand have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night.” (Scenes, p. 7) She did not arrange for a narrative of her guer­ rilla resistance activities to be produced during the years before the war, no doubt for pragmatic reasons. Her ingenious methods for smuggling slaves out of the South were closely guarded secrets, and the price the slave power had placed on her head made her the most wanted abolitionist and slave liberator in North America. Consequently the printed account of her life had to wait until shortly after the end of the Civil War, and stands as testimony to the continued popularity of the slave narrative as tale of adven­ ture. Bradford’s narrative was a ghost-written affair composed four years after the Civil Page 13 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture War, and was intended to function as a fundraising testimonial as well as a biographical narrative. Yet the frontispiece is exceptional in showing “General” (p. 210) Tubman as a warrior leader, actively fighting slavery at the height of hostilities, and acting as a mili­ tary scout. There are frequent references within the text equating Tubman with leg­ endary martyrological freedom fighters, most notably Joan of Arc and John Brown. What is, however, striking about this portrait is the way it is rooted in fact, not fiction, and yet it straddles or conflates different roles, male and female, black and white, passive and ag­ gressive. The plate is referred to in the following terms: “The spirited wood-cut likeness of Harriet, in her costume as scout, was furnished by the kindness of Mr. J. C. Darby” (Scenes, intro. p. ii). This glorious image shows Harriet standing full length, against an open sky, in the middle ground a row of army tents is sketchily indicated. She stands three quarter profile looking out meditatively to the viewer’s bottom right, her right foot peeping out from her voluminous striped full-length calico skirt to point at the simple caption in capitals “Harriet Tubman.” What is remarkable about this image is the way it fuses male and female costumes and portrait props in a manner that must have un­ nerved many a white male northern reader. Tubman’s figure has been constructed along rigorous geometric lines to form a triangle, or massive attenuated pyramid. She clearly wears a female costume beneath her military accoutrements, indeed she appears to be wearing clothes which would have been standard wear for a “mammy” in the slave South. On top of her head is a “madras” style turban in brightly chequered fabric, and, as men­ tioned, heavy wide calico skirts. Yet superimposed on this garb is the partial uniform of a union soldier: She wears an army great-coat, carries a military forage-bag slung over her arm, and most dramatically casually grasps the barrel of a Winchester rifle in her hands. She rests the gun butt on the earth and looks as relaxed and at ease with the weapon as any seasoned military campaigner. The manner in which the lines of the elegant gun ac­ crete themselves to the outline of her skirt and coat, and the manner in which she almost cuddles the gun barrel, suggest that the weapon is, if not an actual extension of her body, then a very close companion. The heroic anecdotes that compose the text weave in and out of this monumental design, which saturates the entire book with a rare power. The overall effect of the composition—simple, monumental, calm—is to suggest that we are in the presence of a colossus. Given the history of the Civil War and the reluctance to arm even black slave soldiers, let alone women, this image is quite remarkable. It should also be noted that it stands in bold dialogue with the innumerable frontispieces of military books showing male leaders standing beside their arms. Within the context of slavery and abolition, the image appears to have a particularly powerful comment to make upon the frontispiece to John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Slaves of Surinam (see figure 12.7).

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Figure 12.7

This full-page engraving showed the romantic young army Captain leaning affectionately against his upright rifle, while he gazes wistfully at the naked prostrate corpse of a young black slave he has killed. Tubman’s armed relation to the revolted slave is rather a differ­ ent one. The portrait has a good claim to be the most powerful portrait of an ex-slave, let alone an ex-slave female, to have been created in the American slave diaspora. (p. 211)

Slave Narrative and Images of Violent Resis­ tance Tubman’s image is finally powerful because it raises, albeit implicitly, a subject that verged on the taboo within slave narrative, that of armed slave resistance. The idea that slaves should want to fight, and indeed want to kill, for their right to freedom was not one that sat easily within the covers of books sanctioned by white northern abolitionists. In­ deed much of abolition thought and publication in North America was directed at control­ ling aggressive representations of the slave, and in particular at taking discussion away from slave violence and the memories of the Haitian slave revolution with their accompa­ nying atrocity literatures. It is consequently not surprising to see explicit and extreme slave violence as a significant silence within the majority of visual materials generated by slave narratives. There are, in fact, three principle contexts in which slave violence was represented in widely disseminated imagery related to the slave narrative. The first is in biographies of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the second is the rebellion of Nat Turner, and the third are the accounts of the Amistad revolt and the subsequent fate of Joseph Cinque and his fellow insurrectionaries. The imagery generated around each of these did not ap­ pear in what might be termed classic slave narratives, but, nonetheless, they constitute a vital part of the slave-narrative tradition.

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture The pictorial retelling of Toussaint l’Ouverture’s life story within antebellum illustrated slavery writing constitutes a fascinating example of containment and selective memory. The widest selling and most elaborate text to take on this theme was the intriguingly ti­ tled Toussaint l’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography, probably edited by abolition­ ist James Redpath,which came out in 1863, the year of the initial (p. 212) Emancipation Proclamation, when there was still fierce debate in the North over the question of whether free slaves should be armed and taken into the army. Indeed, the preface to this volume sets out the ensuing accounts of Toussaint’s life as an incontrovertibly positive re­ sponse to the questions “Are negroes fit for soldiers” and “Are negroes fit for officers” (Toussaint, p. vi). Yet despite this admirable and grammatically paradoxical in­ terrogative assertion, the book itself is a fascinating amalgam of an earlier English and French source, and presents a highly biased and compromised account of Toussaint. The first three parts, indeed the bulk of the book, is a heavily edited reprinting of the English­ man John Relly Beard’s 1853 London publication The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti, a book that was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The short fourth section of the volume constitutes the first English language translation of Toussaint’s autobiographical writings, optimistically entitled a “memoir” as organized in St. Remy’s La Vie de Toussaint l’Ouverture. Beard’s volume sold well in the United States as well as England, and was heavily illustrated with high quality single-sheet copper en­ gravings. In fact the whole book is a thinly disguised tirade against Napoleon and the French, and uses the Haitian revolution and Toussaint as vehicles for the expression of abhorrence at French perfidy, barbarity, and violence. The illustrations reflected this, for there are only four full-page plates that explicitly deal with Toussaint and the revolution. All four show Toussaint and his followers as victims of French cruelty and treachery. The volume opens with a full-page frontispiece illustration showing “Toussaint captured by stratagem,” a favorite subject of anti-Gallic British glee. The next page carries a large plate showing Toussaint tragically expiring in his freezing French prison cell in the Jura mountains. The third plate is a fully blown piece of Victorian sentimentalism depicting “Toussaint Parting from his wife and Children,” chained and about to sail for France, and surrounded by effete and sadistic looking French officers, the black leader stands on deck and embraces his weeping family. The last print is an even more extreme fictionalization of French crimes against the black family. In a plate entitled “Revenge of the French upon the Blacks” there is a violent scene showing the French troops carrying out LeClerk’s or­ ders and murdering the black Francophile Maurepas’s wife and children before his eyes, as he is tortured to death. It is significant, then, that the plates have a consistent agenda that shows black male military leaders as passive victims, not as the engineers of the first and only successful mass-slave revolutionary war in the Atlantic Diaspora.

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture

Figure 12.8

The American edition appeared to find, even this version of history, too contentious. The preface to Toussaint l’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography stated that the illustra­ tions from Beard’s edition had been excised “and others deemed more interesting and pertinent substituted for them.” In fact, the volume carries almost no illustrations at all apart from a large map, a large-scale reproduction of Toussaint’s signature, and a new frontispiece that reproduces in crude engraving the 1838 lithograph of Toussaint’s bust portrait by Maurin, from an earlier lost drawing. This image notoriously emphasizes Toussaint’s African physiognomy in ways that relate closely to racist caricature. This vol­ ume could hardly give a clearer expression of the manner in which black revolutionary (p. 213) violence, and indeed the memory of the Haytian revolution, was sidelined within the visual archive of the slave narrative. When it came to slave insurrections on America’s home soil, the slave narrative was even more circumspect. The Southampton slave revolt did of course generate a plethora of printed material incorporating both words and images, yet little of this material could be said to constitute a slave narrative as such. Even the celebrated Confessions of Nat Turn­ er penned with feverish speed by Turner’s defense lawyer, Thomas Gray, and designed to cash in on the interest the massacre generated, is a highly compromised document and carried no imagery. The one contemporary image that did appear and that treated the events full on took the form of a cheap single-sheet printed broadside, showing the mur­ derous excesses of the insurrectionists. The other visual imagery that occurred in the press or later pamphlet publications was strictly policed and had an agenda designed to make the slaves look insane, idiotic, comic, or all of these. Images showed the fanatic Nat infatuating his docile and dull witted accomplices around the campfire, or else showed Nat at the point of, or after, his capture as a beaten and petrified human beast. It is con­ sequently accurate to state that the Turner Insurrection did not, in the strict sense, con­ tribute to the visual archive of the slave narrative. This state of affairs is in itself highly educative. There is, in fact, only one slave narrative within the American tradition that can claim to show an act of successful armed insurrection. This ironically, and indeed most revealingly, does not concern African American slaves, but newly captured Africans who were official­ ly the property of Spanish Cuba. As national interest in the case of the Amistad captives grew in 1840, John Barber brought out a curious hybrid volume A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amis­ Page 17 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture tad, by the Africans on Board; Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York; with Biographical Sketches of Each of the Surviving Africans also, an Account of the Trials had on Their case. As its fulsome title suggests, the book ingeniously combines a whole vari­ ety of sensational and popular publishing forms including maritime adventure story, trav­ el book, or “voyage,” slave narrative, and trial literature. Yet this volume contains some of the most unusual visual documents in the Atlantic slavery archive. (p. 214) Opposite the title page (see figure 12.8) was an elaborate folded plate, a long horizontal wood engraving showing The Death of Capt. Ferrer, the Captain of the Amistad July 1839. The viewer looks down from a slightly raised position outside the scene, as if viewing from the deck of a nearby boat. The scene is set in shallow space on the main deck, and shows the captain surrounded by four male slaves naked to the waist and raising their cane knives aloft. To their right, another slave appears to be commanding them to strike. The image consequently gives the impression not of a chaotic and messy murder but of an organized and efficient execution. Behind the legs of the captain and the two execution­ ers on the left, the prostrate corpse of the cook is visible, lying supine with knees raised. Other slaves look on with serious expressions while one of the ship’s owners, either Mon­ tez or Ruiz, flees in consternation. The extremely attenuated format of the design, run­ ning right along the ship’s deck, has the effect of letting the story unfold in narrative se­ quence in a manner reminiscent of the Bayeux tapestry. This powerful image showed slaves freeing themselves through extreme violence and using the very tools used to work slaves to death on the sugar plantations as the weapons of their vengeance. And yet the Amistad “captives,” as they were termed, enjoyed a peculiar and suspended status within the American imaginary. The courts needed to ponder the question of whether these be­ ings were foreign contraband, foreign goods, or free humans. The public at large needed to address larger questions about how the Africans were to be seen: Were these people savages who had murdered their masters, or freedom fighters who had asserted their lib­ erty, and who pointed the way for America’s slave population? Were they Africans, or Spanish chattels, or honorary Americans owed the protection of the land of the free? Were they to be pitied or dreaded, were they to be seen as people or as specimens, were thy indeed men and brothers or a racial other?

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture

Figure 12.9

The way in which imagery was applied to these figures can answer some of these ques­ tions. In fact, every slave is represented individually, but none of them, with the exception of Cinque their leader, could be said to be represented as an individual. The slaves are in­ troduced as numbers (see figure 12.9), and each one is presented not in portrait form but in terms of a silhouette that records the facial angle of the relevant individual. Each sil­ houette rises out of a white shirt collar that has been engraved according to an identical formula for each figure, and all the collars have been shaded to suggest line and volume. Consequently this gesture toward three dimentionalism in the clothing merely serves to underline the totally flat and emotionless representation of each human head. The mode of representation has been adapted straight out of the phrenological and physiological techniques evolved by Lavater and Petrus Camper. Identity is thus described solely through outline, the space of the skull and face in each case being fully shaded in, to de­ note an equal and all-encompassing blackness of the subjects. Bizarrely, the only distin­ guishing features drawn over the outlines is the facial hair with small beards and mous­ taches drawn on subjects 2 and 24. The captives consequently appear in a suspended vi­ sual space, somewhere between criminals being officially recorded, anthropological spec­ imens being analysed, and people having their portraits made. The brief biographical notes appended to each slave similarly seem very uncertain of their status. They give the African name of the subject, often details of the (p. 215) capture, and then arbitrary ob­ servations on the life and experience of the subject. These strange featureless heads stand out as a brutal negation of the elaborate personal identities which as we have seen were so carefully constructed for the frontispiece portraits to the slave narratives. The first and last portraits are, however, entirely different. Serving as visual book ends for the main gallery, they depict the leader Joseph Cingue (Cinque) and the free black exslave James Covey, an English sailor who happened to be in New York and who was brought in as interpreter for the blacks who only spoke Mende. Cinque is not reduced to Page 19 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture the physiognomic and pseudo-scientific illustrational half life of the other figures, but is allowed a countenance. His one visible eye, nose, and mouth are drawn in full using three dimensional shading, and his hair is fully represented. Yet what the illustration gives in terms of humanity with one hand, the text takes away with the other, for Cinque, (p. 216) unlike the other figures, is presented in the text not only through biographical notes but also through the racially inflected rhetoric of the phrenologist: The following is a phrenological description of the head of Cingue as given by Mr. Fletcher: “Cingue appears to be about 26 years of age, of powerful frame, bilious and sanguine temperament, bilious predominating. His head by measurement is 22 3-8 inches in circumference, 15 inches from the root of the nose to the occipital protuberance over the top of the head, 15 inches from the Meatus Anditorious to do. over the head, and 5 3-4 inches through the head indicating destructiveness. (Barber, 9) And so the charismatic leader of the group, and the major focus for media interest is un­ ceremoniously reduced to a specimen. One gets the feeling from reading this that the good Mr. Fletcher would have been happiest placing Cinque’s head in a jar of formalde­ hyde. In terms of the manipulation of the slave portrait, the case of the Amistad captives represents perhaps the most extreme form of objectification and dehumanization within the literatures of the slave narrative. In the final analysis the slave narrative did not generate a substantial archive of images focused on slave rebellion or slave resistance. As we have seen, its main areas of imagis­ tic focus and celebration concerned the resilience, power, and ingenuity that slaves demonstrated in finding nonviolent ways to gain their freedom. In this sense, the visual archive generated by the slave narratives is a liberationist, not a bloody, archive. These images are intent on showing the slave not as “running away,” but as determinedly insist­ ing on their right to a free life. They are also images that demand that the anonymous and disempowered little icons of the male and female runaway slave be replaced by lasting pictures of real, strong, intelligent, free beings, with names, identities, and occupations. It is in this context that it is fitting to end this analysis with a brief side glance at William Still’s magisterial Underground Railroad. This ungainly, formally eclectic, narratively compulsive work attempted to provide a sort of martyrological encyclopaedia of the American slave’s personal attainment of freedom. As such it is umbilically linked to the living core of the majority of slave narratives and features the majority of these texts in its pages. Its illustrations are a series of vignettes, little imagistic, magic, microcosms of the ordeals and ecstacies of the slaves who moved from bondage to freedom. These pic­ tures encapsulate the mythic essence that lies at the teleological heart of slave narrative. The imagery of slave narratives captured with a peculiar intensity and narrative purity the sensational processes involved in self-liberation: the movement from darkness to light, from a presumed nothingness to an assumed being, from projected inhuman status to the personal assumption of complete humanity, from impersonality to personality, from uncertainty to certainty, from slavery to freedom. Page 20 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture

References Aaron. The Light and Truth of Slavery. Worcester, MA: The Author, 1845. Armisted, Wilson. A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication of the Moral, Intellectual, and Religious Capabilities of the Colored Portion of Mankind; with Particular Reference to the African Race. Manchester and London: W. Irwin, 1848. Barber, John Warner. A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board; Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York; with Biographical Sketches of Each of the Sur­ viving Africans; Also, an Account of the Trials had on Their case, Before the District and Circuit Courts of the United States, for the District of Connecticut. New Haven, Ct.: E.L. & J.W. Barber, 1840. Beard, John R. The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Negro Patriot of Hayti. London, 1853. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko and Other Writings. 1688. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Bibb, Henry. The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Him­ self. New York: Published by the Author. 1850. Bradford, Sarah H. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Auburn [N.Y.]: W.J. Moses, print­ er, 1869. Brown, Henry Box. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. 1851. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Brown, John. Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England. Ed. Louis Alexis Chamerovzow. London: [W. M. Watts], 1855. Brown, William Wells. The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achieve­ ments. 4th ed. 1865. Salem, NH: Ayer, 1992. Craft, William. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. 1860. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Davis, Noah. A Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, a Colored Man. Written by Him­ self, at the Age of Fifty-Four. Baltimore: J. F. Weishampel, Jr., 1859. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Context, Criticism. Ed. Michael Shinagel. New York: Norton, 1994. Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In Frederick Douglass: Auto­ biographies. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of United States, 1994. Page 21 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture ——. My Bondage and My Freedom. In Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of United States, 1994. Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano and Other Writings. 1789. Ed. Vincent Caretta. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Gray, Thomas R. The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. Baltimore: T. R. Gray, 1831. Gilbert, Olive. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828. Boston: The Author, 1850. Hildreth, Richard. Archie Moore, the White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive. 1856. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1971. Campbell, Israel. An Autobiography. Bond and Free: Or, Yearnings for Freedom, from My Green Brier House. Being the Story of My Life in Bondage, and My Life in Freedom. Philadelphia: The Author, 1861. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. 1861. Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. (p. 218) Redpath, James, Ed. Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography. Boston: James Redpath, 1863. Remy, M. Saint. Vie de Toussaint L’Ouverture. Paris: Moquet, 1850 [No Author] The Royal African: or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe. Compre­ hending a Distinct Account of His Country and Family; His Elder Brother’s Voyage to France, and Reception there; the Manner in Which Himself Was Confided by His Father to the Captain Who Sold Him; His Condition While a Slave in Barbadoes; the True Cause of His Bring Redeemed; His Voyage from Thence; and Reception Here in England. Interspers’d Throughout with Several Historical Remarks on the Commerce of the Euro­ pean Nations, Whose Subjects Frequent the Coast of Guinea. To which is Prefixed a Let­ ter from the Author to a Person of Distinction, in Reference to Some Natural Curiosities in Africa; as Well as Explaining the Motives which Induced Him to Compose These Mem­ oirs. London: W. Reeve, G. Woodfall, and J. Barnes, [1750]. Stearns, Charles. Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself, With Remarks Upon the Remedy for Slavery. Boston: Brown & Stearns, 1849. Stedman, John Gabriel. Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Ne­ groes of Surinam. London: Joseph Johnson, 1796. Still, William. Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their efforts for Freedom, as related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Au­ Page 22 of 23

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The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture thor; Together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisers, of the Road. 1872. Rpt. Ebony Classics; Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1970. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. 1852. New York: Vintage Books/The Library of America, 1991. Trumbull, Henry. Life and Adventures of Robert, the Hermit of Massachusetts, Who has lived 14 Years in a Cave, secluded from human society. Comprising, An account of his Birth, Parentage, Sufferings, and providential escape from unjust and cruel Bondage in early life—and his reasons for becoming a Recluse. Taken from his own mouth, and pub­ lished for his benefit. Providence, 1829. Twelvetrees, Harper. The Story of the Life of John Anderson, the Fugitive Slave. London: W. Tweedie, 1863. Ward, Samuel Ringgold. Autobiography of A Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, & England. 1855. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968. Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London: A. Bell, 1773.

Marcus Wood

Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist and filmmaker; since 2003 he has also been Professor of English at Sussex University. For the last thirty years he has made art and written books about how the traumatic memory of slavery and colonisation have been encoded in art and literature. His books include Blind Memory (2000), Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (2003), and The Horrible Gift of Freedom (2010).

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900

Slave Narratives, 1865–1900   William L. Andrews The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.002

Abstract and Keywords Although the narratives written by former slaves after 1865 have attracted relatively few readers, between 1866 and the publication of Up From Slavery in 1901, 54 book-length narratives by formerly enslaved Americans appeared in print in the United States. The large majority of exslave narrators after 1865 were not nationally famous people or even participants in the antislavery movement. No single profession or economic group found the slave narrative more useful to its purposes than did the post-Civil War African Ameri­ can ministry. Many of these ministers also were or became educators, which comprise the second most dominant profession represented in the postwar exslave narrative. Most post-Civil War exslave narrators, especially those who chose the ministry and education as their professions, portray themselves as dedicated less to their own fulfillment in free­ dom than to their calling and duty as stewards of the welfare of a larger group, identified usually with a church or a school, though occasionally with a community or socioeconom­ ic class. Women entered the ranks of the slave narrative in unprecedented numbers be­ tween 1865 and 1900. A handful of working-class men converted the postwar slave narra­ tive into an opportunity to break into print, articulate their experience and goals, and earn some money. Largely self-financed and local in their impact, these working-class nar­ ratives portray black men who take pride in their accomplishments in freedom but who are under no illusions about the depth of racial animosity that impedes their upward struggle in the North. Representatives of an embryonic black middle class embraced val­ ues and aspirations similar to those of the working-class exslave narrators, though ex­ pression of these values and aspirations by evidently middle-class writers often lacked the passion and candor of working-class narrators. The post-Civil War exslave narrator, no matter his or her outlook on the future of the race in freedom, regardless of the degree of his or her personal success, refused to ignore what one called "the wrongs of our race" ei­ ther before or after slavery. The firm focus on the evil of chattel slavery that in antebel­ lum slave narratives easily crowded out analyses of the pervasiveness of racism in the socalled Free States yielded after 1865 to portrayals of slavery and racism as an inter­ twined national disease infecting North as well as South after the Civil War.

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 Keywords: slaves, Southern states, biography, social conditions, nineteenth century, African Americans, autobiog­ raphy, slaves’ writing, U.S. slavery, African American slave narratives

FROM the suppression of Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 to the end of the slavery era in 1865, the fugitive slave narrative became the most widely read genre of African American writing, far outnumbering the autobiographies of free people of color, not to mention the handful of novels published by African Americans before the Civil War. Most of the major authors of African American literature before 1865, such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, launched their writing careers via narratives of their ex­ perience as slaves. Since the appearance of Benjamin Quarles’s 1960 edition of the Narra­ tive of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which had been out of print for a little more than a century since its original publication in 1845, extensive study of the narratives of famous mid-nineteenth-century fugitives such as Douglass, Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth, Henry Bibb, and Henry Box Brown has helped to generate considerable interest in their lives and work. This scholarship has spurred efforts to re­ cover the autobiographies of neglected pre–Civil War figures such as Jeffrey Brace, William Grimes, and Moses Roper. By contrast, with the exception of Booker T. Washington’s classic Up from Slavery (1901) and, in the last two decades, Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868), the narratives of former slaves published after 1865 have attracted relatively few readers. The autobiographies of former slaves dominated the African American literary landscape throughout the nineteenth century, not just up to 1865. From the turn of the nineteenth century to the end of the Civil War, 87 slave narratives, an average of 1.3 narratives each year, were published in book or pamphlet form in the United States. Between 1866 and the publication of Up From Slavery in 1901, 54 more book-length narratives by formerly enslaved Americans, 1.5 narratives on average annually, appeared. Major contributors to the pre–Civil War slave narrative continued to publish autobiographies in the late nine­ teenth century. William Wells Brown brought out his final memoir, My Southern Home, in 1880 in Boston. Josiah Henson, whose 1849 narrative inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to create Uncle Tom, kept his name in the public eye with An (p. 220) Autobiography of Rev. Josiah Henson (“Uncle Tom”) from 1789–1881 (1881). Frederick Douglass launched his Life and Times into print in 1881, revising it in 1882 and in 1892. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Bondswoman of Olden Times appeared in 1875 and in expanded form in 1884, a year after Truth’s death. The large majority of ex-slave narrators after 1865, however, were not nationally famous people, or even participants in the antislavery movement. If they were publically known, it was likely because of their professional or occupational status within their own communities. The post–Civil War ex-slave narrative represented to a notable and unprecedented degree the length and breadth of postemancipation black America. The slave narrative after slavery was the most democratic literary genre adopt­ ed by African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before the abolition of slavery in the United States, most slave narratives were published in Boston, New York, London, and Philadelphia, big cities where the antislavery move­ ment was well organized and publishers and printers were readily available. Pre–Civil Page 2 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 War narratives depicted slave life primarily in the South, although a few fugitives granted space in the postescape portions of their stories to experiences in New England and, in a few cases, Canada or the British Isles. In the late nineteenth century, however, narratives of the lives of former slaves followed the migration patterns of black southerners seeking opportunity in the upper Mississippi Valley, the mid-Atlantic states, the Midwest, and far West. Narratives appeared from former slaves who had settled in St. Louis, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Chicago, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Louisville, Kentucky; Harrisburg, Penn­ sylvania; and Atlanta, Georgia, as well as in traditional centers for African American pub­ lication such as New York and Boston. Approximately three out of four postwar slave narratives were produced by men and women who did not fit the heroic rebel-fugitive profile of Douglass, Brown, Bibb, or Ja­ cobs in their famous antebellum autobiographies. Because most postwar slave narrators did not violently rebel against or engineer escapes from their enslavement, standards of exemplary behavior, in slavery as well as freedom, inevitably underwent revision after 1865 in order that a new type of ex-slave autobiographer could emerge. In response to their postwar circumstances, most ex-slave autobiographers express pride in having en­ dured slavery without having lost their sense of self-worth or purpose and without having given in to the despair that the antebellum narrative pictures as the lot of many who lan­ guished in slavery. Acknowledging that rare moral courage was required to engineer a successful escape from slavery, postwar narrators insisted that slaves who never took such a risky step could still claim a dignity and heroism of their own. Henry Clay Bruce, whose brother Blanche represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate, recalls in The New Man (1895): “There were thousands of high-toned and high-spirited slaves who had as much self-respect as their masters, and who were industrious, reliable and truthful….These slaves knew their own helpless condition” and understood that “they had no rights under the laws of the land.” Yet “they did not give up in abject servility, but held up their heads and proceeded to do the next best thing under the circumstances, which was, to so live and act as to win the confidence of their masters, which could only be done by faithful service and an upright life” (Bruce, pp. 38–39). When these “reliables,” (p. 221) as Bruce terms them, were “freed by the war, the traits which they had exhibited for gen­ erations to such good effect, were brought into greater activity, and have been largely in­ strumental in making the record of which we feel so proud to-day” (39). Bruce’s remarks implicitly reject the existential thesis of the antebellum slave narrative: namely, that because slavery was inimical to a slave’s intellectual, moral, and spiritual de­ velopment, rebellion and flight were necessary to the slave’s assertion and preservation of selfhood. Instead of either self-affirming rebellion or self-abnegating acceptance of chattel status, Bruce, like most postwar narrators, stresses that many slaves could and did choose “the next best thing” according to relative, rather than absolute, standards of value. There is ample evidence of forcible, as well as passive, resistance to mean-spirited masters in postwar ex-slave narratives, particularly among the working-class narrators. These testify to the fact that slaves pictured in the postwar narrative treasured and de­ fended their dignity as much as their counterparts did in the antebellum narrative. But in the postwar narrative, the measure of a slave’s dignity is much more pragmatic than exis­ Page 3 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 tential, more public than private, than it is in the most famous antebellum narratives. Thus while Douglass’s fight with the slave-breaker Edward Covey epitomizes the antebel­ lum narrative’s ideal of heroic black manhood, a postwar ex-slave narrator such as George Henry asserts in his Life of George Henry (1894) “that though black I was a man in every sense of the word” (23) by recalling his superlative achievements as a hostler, a ship’s captain, even an overseer, in slavery. In the postwar narrative, the right to claim a sense of empowering honor often derives from diligence in one’s duties and pride in a task well done, whether enslaved or free. In­ dustry, responsibility, perseverance, religious faith, and honesty say as much or more about a black man’s manhood and respectability as running away, especially if that man is also a family man, as most postwar ex-slaves describe themselves in their autobiogra­ phies. The success stories that “new men” like Henry Bruce and George Henry chronicle in their postemancipation years are designed to demonstrate that the course such men followed while enslaved prepared them well to seize opportunity in freedom and turn it to honorable account, both socially and economically. Formerly enslaved women took the same stance in their narratives. In her preface to Be­ hind the Scenes, Keckley embraced the principle of freedom of which she had been “robbed” from birth, but claimed a degree of consolation, as well as pride, in her convic­ tion that she, along with “the enslaved millions of my race,” had been part of a providen­ tial plan to rid the nation of slavery. Rather than denouncing slavery, which had been sanctioned by law only three years before the publication of Behind the Scenes, Keckley took a philosophical view of her 30 years in bondage. “Each principle,” in this case, the principle of freedom, “to acquire moral force, must come to us from the fire of the cru­ cible; the fire may inflict unjust punishment, but then it purifies and renders stronger the principle, not in itself, but in the eyes of those who arrogate judgment to themselves” (xii). For Keckley and her ex-slave literary compatriots after the Civil War, en­ during the “crucible” of slavery allowed black people to represent the “principle” of free­ dom and human rights so that even arrogant whites could recognize it. Moreover, such endurance also endowed freedwomen, as well as freedmen, with the right to remind America of (p. 222) their “unjust punishment” while also stressing the strength, purity, and hope undergirding their continuing struggle for freedom and opportunity in the newly United States. The abolition of slavery allowed a number of late nineteenth-century African American men to introduce themselves to white America through autobiographies that recounted their beginnings in slavery and their rise to respectability and leadership in the postwar era. No other single profession or economic group found the slave narrative more useful to its purposes than did the post-Civil War African American ministry. Many of these min­ isters also were or became educators, which is the second most dominant profession rep­ resented in the post-war ex-slave narrative. During the last 35 years of the nineteenth century, sixteen black ministers, including two female evangelists (Amanda Smith and an ex-slave identified only as Elizabeth), testified not only to their own sense of calling but to the uplift ideals of the churches, denominations, and schools they led. Just as the male Page 4 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 fugitive slave held discursive sway over black autobiography during the antebellum era, the slave-born male minister and educator claimed the responsibility of representing the race in autobiography through the late nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries. Most ministerial autobiographies picture their authors as leaders of a communal effort to realize in concrete form—a church, most often—the ideal of freedom articulated by the prophets of change in the antebellum slave narrative. Post–Civil War ministerial autobiog­ raphers regard institutions, especially those founded by freed people like themselves, as sources of black communal pride and power. This is only one of the ways in which post­ war slave narratives cut against the grain of their antebellum predecessors, which typi­ cally pit freedom-seeking individuals against oppressive institutions on the way to exalt­ ing a black individual’s quest for the power that will free him from slavery and all institu­ tions complicit with it. After 1865, however, former slaves who produce autobiographies focusing on their ministerial labors view institutions such as churches and schools as ex­ tensions of their community’s spiritual identity and authority in freedom. Instead of Douglass’s famous attacks on the hypocrisy of corrupt organized religion in his 1845 Nar­ rative and his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, Rev. David Smith proclaims at the end of Biography of Rev. David Smith, of the A.M.E. Church (1881): “Now, at the close of near­ ly a century of years, I stand, as it were, up in the dome of African Methodism. My ears are saluted with the noise of a mighty Christian army of the sable sons that have arisen out of the waters of Africa—an army comprising fifteen hundred traveling preachers, three hundred and thirty-six thousand members, and one publishing house, situated at 631 Pine street, Philadelphia. At this publication department the great organ of the A.M. E. Church is printed,—‘The Christian Recorder’—, which is the exponent and battle-axe of the race, exposing corruption in Church and State and defending the Christian manhood of the race” (96–97). In both of Douglass’s pre–Civil War autobiographies, the slave’s de­ termination to secure his “manhood” required acts of radical individualism, for example, fighting a slave-breaker in Maryland or refusing the communion of both a white and black Methodist church in Massachusetts because they accommodated racism. For many post­ war ex-slaves, however, and especially those in the ministry, African American institutions such as (p. 223) black churches and schools became the sign and bulwark of “the Christ­ ian manhood of the race.” In defense of their manhood and womanhood, many of the classic slave narratives of the 1840s and 1850s make a hallmark of self-expressiveness, particularly with reference to the author’s personal emotional woes and wounds while enslaved, in order to reinforce the fugitive slave’s claim to full humanity, sympathy, and justification for resistance and flight from enslavement. By contrast, most post–Civil War ex-slave narrators, especially those who chose the ministry and education as their professions, portray themselves as dedicated less to their own fulfillment in freedom than to their calling and duty as stew­ ards of the welfare of a larger group, identified usually with a church or a school, though occasionally with a community or socioeconomic class. Most of the ministers and educa­ tors wrote externally directed memoirs of what they accomplished for others rather than internally focused confessions of how they developed as individuals. Up From Slavery (1901) is probably the epitome of this vein of memoir that so identifies the author with an Page 5 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 institution that the text sometimes seems as much a biography of the latter as the autobi­ ography of the former. One reason for the sizable current readership garnered by the spiritual narratives of nine­ teenth-century black women such as Jarena Lee, Nancy Prince, Sojourner Truth, and Julia Foote is simply that these women’s narratives, even those from the post–Civil War era, bear interesting affinities to prewar slave narratives. Because self-anointed women preachers posed a significant challenge to the male-dominated black church, these women felt obliged to articulate a spiritual self-reliance inconsistent with the norms and conventions of most male ministerial narratives of the nineteenth century. For many of today’s readers the minority voices of the largely independent women evangelists of the nineteenth century generally speak more eloquently than do the autobiographies of their male ministerial contemporaries. What the ministers recalled about their own individual experiences in slavery provides noteworthy insight into these men, nevertheless. Their portrayal of slavery as, in many in­ stances, a kind of training ground in spiritual endurance and social leadership often speaks to the individual man and his sense of personal calling. For example, Rev. Elijah P. Marrs of Kentucky reports that in 1851 he was converted to Christianity at the age of eleven: “After my conversion and baptism I was permitted to attend Sunday-school and study the Word of God for myself. My master then removed all objections to my learning how to read, and said he wanted all the boys to learn how to read the Bible, it being against the laws of the State to write. We had to steal that portion of our education, and I did my share of it I suppose. Only a few of the white people would let their slaves attend the Sunday-school, hence I became an active member in it” (15). By the time Marrs was 21, the Civil War had begun “and ideas of freedom began to steal across my brain, and my mind was active with the probabilities of being able some day to put into actual practice the scattering thoughts of my earlier years. I would read the newspapers as I would bring them from the post-office, and I kept the colored population of the neighborhood well posted as to the prevailing news” (16–17). By September 1864, Marrs had recruited more than two (p. 224) dozen fellow slaves to join him in enlisting in the Union army, where Marrs rose to the rank of sergeant before being mustered out to commence careers as an educator and minister. A handful of postwar churchmen’s narratives shed revealing light on the preaching ca­ reers of their authors while they were still enslaved. The autobiographies of Rev. Elisha Green of Kentucky and Rev. Thomas H. Jones of Massachusetts review from a mid-1880s vantage point their work as erstwhile slave preachers in and around Paris, Kentucky, and the environs of Wilmington, North Carolina, respectively. Both men recall considerable success in drawing sizable audiences and saving souls among whites as well as blacks. Both men attest to a striking degree of autonomy and freedom when, as men of God, they had to confront resistant whites. Green, like Jones, takes pride in his gospel labors but makes clear that whites, at least initially, did not welcome his calling: “I began preaching in Paris, July, 1855. And to begin my ministry at this place was no small task. Indeed, it was, of course, in the midst of that foulest of crimes, ‘brutal slavery.’ Many of the whites Page 6 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 there thought me not capable of managing the ordinances and other pastoral duties of the church more than to preach. I would not submit to their opinions and said before I would be found so doing I would go home….They seeing in my actions that I possessed some quality of manhood, and that if I could not rule I would not be ruled, yielded to my purpose” (11). Once again, in Green’s case, devotion to the Christian gospel arouses and nerves the “manhood” of a slave, enabling him to “rule,” at least in the pulpit, despite his enslaved condition. Freedmen and freedwomen who did not feel a call to the ministry or to found churches and schools often turned to autobiography to answer a question posed succinctly to the reader of Lucy Ann Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (c. 1891): “if this sketch is taken up for just a moment of your life, it may settle the problem in your mind, if not in others, ‘Can the negro race succeed, proportionately, as well as the whites, if given the same chance and an equal start?’” (63–64). Although Delaney may have had especially in mind the wave of cradle-to-grave Jim Crow legislation sweeping the South in late 1880s and the 1890s, ex-slaves responded emphatically and affirmatively to this question almost as soon as Reconstruction in the South was launched in 1865. Keckley’s autobiography, strategically subtitled Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, was the first of several success stories by former slaves who deployed the familiar “before and after” structure of classic rags-to-riches American auto­ biographies to show how a disadvantaged slave could make a name for herself or himself in some honored field of endeavor. The title of Peter Randolph’s From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit (1893) epitomizes the wedding of individual self-improvement and community ad­ vancement that undergirds the progressive message of many post–Civil War slave narra­ tives. Heroic figures from the antebellum era, such as Douglass, Wells Brown, Truth, and Henson, produced late-nineteenth century memoirs in this vein, as did Keckley and Henry Ossian Flipper in The Colored Cadet at West Point; Autobiography of Lieut. Henry Ossian Flipper, U.S.A., First Graduate of Color from the U.S. Military Academy (1878), each of which was noteworthy enough to secure a white commercial publisher. Women entered the ranks of the slave narrative in unprecedented numbers be­ tween 1865 and 1900. Keckley and Truth drew the most attention, a consequence, more than likely, of their prewar activism and postwar connections to whites. But a variety of new voices brought multiple perspectives to bear on women’s struggles in slavery and their attainments in freedom. Mattie Jackson (1866), Millie-Christine McKoy (1869), Bethany Veney (1889), Octavia Albert (1890), Lucy Ann Delaney (1891), Amanda Smith (1893), and Kate Drumgoold (1898) brought first-person narratives before a public that, in the words of the preface to The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman, commend­ ed the freedwoman’s “endurance under hardship, her fidelity to trust, and, withal, her re­ ligious faith.” Such women became a “fit subject,” the author of Veney’s preface contin­ ued, “not only to impress the lesson of slavery in the past, but to inspire and deepen a sense of responsibility toward the wronged and persecuted race which she [Veney] repre­ sents” (6). Biographies of women born into slavery, such as the renowned Harriet Tub­ man (1869, 1886) and the obscure Silvia DuBois (1883) and Margaret Jane Blake (1897), reinforced the positive, though occasionally patronizing, images of once-enslaved black (p. 225)

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 women that pervade the post-Civil War slave narrative. Considering the paucity of female slave narratives during the slavery era, as well as slave women’s portrayal in the antebel­ lum narrative too often as victims lacking in agency, the female ex-slave narrative of the late nineteenth century represents a significant advance. In the postwar narrative we dis­ cover Jackson’s enslaved mother defying her white mistress by keeping a picture of Abra­ ham Lincoln in her quarters, Delaney’s enslaved mother suing her master to reclaim Lucy from sale, and Drumgoold’s resolving, after reading in the newspaper about “some one of our race in the far South getting killed for trying to teach,” that “I would die to see my people taught” (24). The words of these women attest to a diversity of social commitment and community purpose in the postwar women’s ex-slave narrative too little appreciated today. Ex-slaves whose reputations did not extend beyond their local communities still insisted on recognition and respect for their upward progress, socially and economically, as Harry Smith argued in Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States of America (1891): “Much credit is due Smith, born and remaining in slavery fifty years of his life, raised among the roughest element, never gaining the first letter of the English language, having practiced for years, gambling and drinking, and lost large sums of money from some of the most noted sporting men of the day. As his native state Kentucky ranks among the first in sporting, in the country. Since living in Michigan, he has been a strick [sic] temperance man, giving up gambling, and is an upright, honorable, law-abiding citizen. Although ad­ vanced in years, very few men twenty years younger can perform the work he can” (179– 180). Boasting that he was “very ingenious and far above the ordinary man, either col­ ored or white” (26) during his time in slavery, Smith voices in his dictated narrative a per­ spective largely unprecedented in African American autobiography before 1865, that of a black working-class male. Rarely heard from in the pre–Civil War slave narrative—one notable exception being the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1825)—a handful of working-class black men converted the postwar slave narrative into an opportunity to break into print, (p. 226) ar­ ticulate their experiences and goals, and earn some money. Unlike Douglass, Wells Brown, and virtually all the celebrated male fugitive slaves of the antebellum era, whose escapes from slavery catapulted them into white-collar status in freedom as professional lecturers, editors, and authors, the postwar narratives of working-class former slaves re­ count their transition from enslavement to freedom without a dramatic improvement in social or economic status. Largely self-financed and local in their impact, the narratives of Smith, a woodcutter and farmer in Michigan; John Quincy Adams, a waiter and coachman in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and the peripatetic William Webb, a woodcutter and farm hand, portray black men who take pride in their hard-earned accomplishments in free­ dom but who express no illusions about the depth of racial animosity still impeding their upward struggle in the North. “I am one of those that is trying to rise up, if I can” (15), Adams announces, his condition­ al “if” attesting to a degree of tough-minded realism about just how difficult rising up could be for a man whose class as well as color provided few tangible advantages. Es­ Page 8 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 chewing self-pity, Adams lays out a list of what is necessary for him and black men like him to enjoy a fuller measure of liberty: “What do we want. We want education; we want protection; we want plenty of work; we want good pay for it, but not any more or less than any one else; we want good trades, such as good mechanics’ trades; we just want a good chance to get them, and then you will see the down-trodden race rise up” (15). James Williams, a Maryland runaway who ended up a prospector in California, was not so sure about what freedom actually portended. In his 1873 narrative he utters platitudes on one page: “It is generally the case in whatever we undertake; if we strive to we can do it by perseverance” (41); and cynical denunciations on the next: “It is now evident that the two races cannot live together. This is a white man’s government” (44). Williams’s toil and frustrations as a working man led him to conclude that “the poor men of the United States do not get justice at law as the rich man does. We should have the best laws in these United States of any place on the face of the globe, but, we are far from it” (54–55). Norvel Blair’s 1880 autobiography, Book for the People!, provides a case in point, as crooked lawyers and lying politicians turn a productive black farmer into an outraged tri­ bune of the black working class. Blair, a self-professed “ignorant man of African descent,” exploited and cheated in Grundy County, Illinois, asks: “let’s see who is the worst, the Southern buldoser [sic], or the Northern cut-throat, or the cold blooded Northern Yankee lawyer” (11). A post-Civil War embryonic black middle class, reflected variously in the postwar narra­ tives of Keckley, Douglass, Wells Brown, and Delaney, embraced values and aspirations similar to those of the working-class ex-slave narrators, though often middle-class expres­ sion of these values and aspirations lacked the untutored passion and candor of workingclass narrators. Speaking from her position as an independent businesswoman with con­ nections to the white political elite in Washington, D.C., Keckley could “afford to be chari­ table” as she recalled “the bitter water” she had been forced to drink as a “victim of slavery” (xiii). Few working-class narrators had the means or disposition to take such a philosophical posture in the face of their own chastening experience in freedom as well as slavery. Some aspirants to middle-class status, perhaps mindful (p. 227) of their class ori­ gins, demonstrated their sympathies to the interests of the black rank and file. James L. Smith, a shoemaker in slavery and freedom, devoted part of his 1881 Autobiography to his rise to the status of property owner and independent small businessman in Connecti­ cut. But a memorable portion of his narrative recounts the author’s visit to Heathsville, in Virginia’s Northern Neck, where, in addition to calling on his much-reduced and needy former mistress (on whom he bestows a pair of shoes), he observes a major shift in class alignment in the town of his birth. Among whites “I observed but little improvement since the great rebellion; there have been but few houses built for the last thirty years.” How­ ever, “the condition of the colored people is improving very fast, for many of them are buying lands and building, and thus preparing homes for themselves. Their condition is much better than those who once owned them. The old ex-slave holders are dying off very fast. As they have no one to cultivate their large plantations, and can not do it them­ selves, they are obliged to divide them up and sell them to the freedmen” (102). Page 9 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 In the same year Douglass joined Smith in writing his Life and Times partly “for the en­ couragement of a class”—the freedmen and women—“whose aspirations need the stimu­ lus of success” (487), by which the Sage of Anacostia meant his own individual success, particularly in the post-Reconstruction era. By word and deed, Douglass maintained: “I have aimed to assure them [those who were freed by the abolition of slavery in 1865] that knowledge can be obtained under difficulties; that poverty may give place to competency; that obscurity is not an absolute bar to distinction, and that a way is open to welfare and happiness to all who will resolutely and wisely pursue that way” (487). Thus Douglass ad­ vised his black readers to cultivate “self-reliance, self-respect, industry, perseverance, and economy” (488), traditional markers of rugged individualism and class advancement, in their efforts to create a place for themselves in economies of the New South and the postwar North. James L. Smith stressed a mutuality of white and black responsibility for African Ameri­ can uplift: “We cannot save ourselves without aid and sympathy from others; without the protection of just laws and righteous judgment; others cannot save us without our aid— without the consecration of all our best faculties to the work before us” (112). Wells Brown’s My Southern Home, on the other hand, decried African American cultural short­ comings especially in the South and issued these self-help prescriptions: “We need more self-reliance, more confidence in the ability of our own people; more manly independence, a higher standard of moral, social, and literary culture….While the barriers of prejudice keep us morally and socially from educated white society, we must make a strong effort to raise ourselves from the common level where emancipation and the new order of things found us….The last great struggle for our rights; the battle for our own civilization, is en­ tirely with ourselves, and the problem is to be solved by us” (234). Most narratives of the emerging postemancipation African American middle class focus more on intraracial self-improvement than on white beneficence as the most effective means of racial progress. Up From Slavery would articulate perhaps the most persuasive and certainly the most popular, from the white point of view (South as well as North), ar­ gument for African American self-help as the key to their improved (p. 228) social, eco­ nomic, and political prospects at the turn of the twentieth century. Some formerly en­ slaved autobiographers anticipated Washington’s sunny outlook on American progress along racial lines. Compared to what he had endured as a slave, Elisha Green extolled the social climate of postwar America: “slavery prevented me from getting an education. I came up in an age of unreconciliation between men—when books in a black man’s hand were equal to a case of murder sometimes in this day. But I thank God that that day has past and the glories of a better one are upon us” (59–60). Rev. Peter Randolph proclaims at the end of his story: “Freedom and the right of franchise have come to the colored man through the terrible ordeal of war.” But as of 1893, and in likely reaction to the onslaught of aggressive white supremacy across the South, Randolph demanded to know: “shall the results of the war be recognized? This question the North must ask herself, and put it to the South, and demand an answer. Nowhere in our broad land—North or South—are free­ dom and citizenship accorded to colored people as to others” (137). Page 10 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 Working-class narratives and a handful of middle-class sympathizers in the postwar slave narrative generally take a skeptical view of white America’s commitment to freedom and equality, often arguing that the main barriers of African American advancement were due to white resistance, not black unpreparedness. Well before the abandonment of Recon­ struction, Adams hints darkly in 1872 that “if they had the chance they would soon estab­ lish slavery again. But it will never be in the United States. However it is all right, and we must expect such things” (43–44). By 1886, Rev. Thomas James perceived troubling trends even in his home city of Rochester, New York: “You ask me what change for the better has taken place in the condition of the colored people of this locality in my day. I answer that the Anti-slavery agitation developed an active and generous sympathy for the free colored man of the North, as well as for his brother in bondage. We felt the good ef­ fect of that sympathy and the aid and encouragement which accompanied it. But now, that the end of the Anti-Slavery agitation has been fully accomplished, our white friends are inclined to leave us to our own resources, overlooking the fact that social prejudices still close the trades against our youth, and that we are again as isolated as in the days before the wrongs of our race touched the heart of the American people” (23). The post-Civil War ex-slave narrator, no matter his or her outlook on the future of the race in freedom, regardless of the degree of his or her personal success, refused to ignore “the wrongs of our race” either before or after slavery. One of the most significant features of slave narratives after slavery, however, is the wide range of attention allotted to those “wrongs.” Some narrators have relatively little to say about what they suffered in slavery while others dwell at length on their struggles while enslaved, sometimes in ways that tend to balance the positive and the negative, sometimes in order to denounce emphati­ cally the entire institution and their experience of it. Equally varied are the responses of postwar ex-slave narrators as to what African Americans should do to address or redress “the wrongs of our race.” Some asked, some exhorted, and some demanded that whites take specific steps toward social, political, and economic reforms. To other narrators whites could not be expected or induced to do anything positive for (p. 229) blacks, leav­ ing black people to make decisions about a host of alternatives, which are themselves de­ tailed in considerable variety in the postemancipation narrative. Some postwar narrators downplay the “wrongs of our race” in favor of the opportunities available to black people. Other narrators, seeing opportunities dwindling, reconstruct their life stories to highlight their trials and frustrations as object lessons for a people in need of flexible and toughminded strategies for corporate survival rather than individual success. Unlike prewar slave narrators, who agreed on chattel slavery as the origin and chief manifestation of “the wrongs of our race,” the postwar narrators’ perceptions of wrong, whether endemic in slavery or enduring beyond it, were more numerous, nuanced, and complex than were those of their antebellum predecessors. After 1865, the firm focus on the evil of slavery that easily crowded out analyses of the pervasiveness of racism in the so-called Free States, except in Grimes’s pioneering account and in late antebellum narratives such as My Bondage and My Freedom and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, yielded to portray­ als of slavery and racism as an intertwined national disease infecting North as well as South after the Civil War. The postbellum narrative gave postemancipation America not Page 11 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 only a reassessment of the national crime that had led to the Civil War; slave narratives after slavery also gave white America a renewed introduction to those for whose freedom the war had purportedly been fought. In the widening range of life stories chronicled by former slaves after 1865, the question of whether or to what extent the cause of freedom had actually won remained in open, compelling, and unresolved debate.

References and Further Reading Albert, Octavia V. Rogers (Octavia Victoria Rogers). The House of Bondage, or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. 1890. Introd. Frances Smith Foster. New York: Oxford Universi­ ty Press, 1988. Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: Uni­ versity of North Carolina Press, 1988. Andrews, William L. “Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Elizabeth Keckley and Frederick Douglass,” Black American Literature Forum 23 (Fall 1989): 5–16. ——. “The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro–American Literary Realism 1865–1920,” Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Selected Papers of the English Institute, 1987. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1989. 62–80. —— “The Politics of African-American Ministerial Autobiography from Reconstruction to the 1920s,” African-American Christianity. Ed. Paul Johnson. Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1994. 111–133. ——, ed. Slave Narratives after Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Barton, Rebecca Chalmers. Witnesses for Freedom. New York: Harper, 1948. Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb. 1849. Ed. Charles J. Ha­ gler. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Binder, Wolfgang. “‘O, Ye Daughters of Africa, Awake! Awake! Arise’: The Functions of Work and Leisure in Female Slave Narratives.” Ed. Serge Ricard. Les Etats-Unis: Images du Travail et des Loisirs. Aix-en-Provence: Univ. de Provence, 1989. 127–144. (p. 230) Blackmon, Douglass A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Blair, Norvel. Book for the People! To be Read by all Voters, Black and White, with Thrilling Events of the Life of Norvel Blair, of Grundy County, State of Illinois. Joliet, IL: the Author, 1880. Blight, David W. Slaves No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 2007.

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 Brace, Jeffrey. The Blind African Slave, or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nick-named Jef­ frey Brace. 1810. Ed. Kari Winter. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Bradford, Sarah Hopkins. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. Auburn, NY: W. J. Moses, 1869. ——. Harriet, the Moses of Her People. New York: George R. Lockwood, 1886. Brignano, Russell. Black Americans in Autobiography: An Annotated Bibliography of Auto­ biographies and Autobiographical Books Written since the Civil War. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984. Brown, Henry Box. Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. 1849. Ed. John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Brown, William Wells. Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1847. ——. The American Fugitive in Europe. Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1855. Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Bruce, Henry Clay. The New Man. Twenty-nine Years a Slave. Twenty-nine Years a Free Man. York, PA: P. Anstadt, 1895. Cohen, William. At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Delaney, Lucy Ann. From the Darkness Cometh the Light; or, Struggles for Freedom. St. Louis, MO: J.T. Smith, 1891. Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written. Hartford, CT: Park, 1881. ——. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske, 1892. ——. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. Ed. William L. Andrews. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. ——. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845. Ed. Benjamin Quarles. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1960. ——. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845. Eds. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Drumgoold, Kate. A Slave Girl’s Story. Brooklyn: The Author, 1898. Page 13 of 17

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 Dubois, Silvia. Silvia Dubois, (now 116 years old): a Biografy of the Slav Who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom. Ed. Cornelius Wilson Larison. Ringoes, NJ: Larison, 1883. Elizabeth. Elizabeth, a Colored Minister of the Gospel Born in Slavery. Philadelphia: Tract Assoc. of Friends, 1889. Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives. New York and London: New York University Press, 1996. Flipper, Henry Ossian. The Colored Cadet at West Point; Autobiography of Lieut. Henry Ossian Flipper, U. S. A. 1878. Ed. Quintard Taylor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. (p. 231) Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Foote, Julia. A Brand Plucked from the Fire. 1879. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. William L. Andrews. Blooming­ ton: Indiana University Press, 1986. Foster, Frances Smith. “African American Progress-Report Autobiographies.” Redefining American Literary History. Ed. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. New York: Modern Language Association, 1990. 270–283. ——. “Autobiography After Emancipation: The Example of Elizabeth Keckley.” Multicultur­ al Autobiography: American Lives. Ed. James Robert Payne. Knoxville: University of Ten­ nessee Press, 1992. 32–63. ——. Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Fulton, Doveanna S. Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Gardner, Eric. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Liter­ ature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Gates, Henry Louis and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. The African American National Biography. 8 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Green, Elisha Winfield. Life of the Rev. Elisha W. Green. Maysville, KY: Republican, 1888. Grimes, William. Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave. 1825. Ed. William L. An­ drews and Regina E. Mason. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 1997. Henry, George. Life of George Henry. Providence, R.I.: The Author, 1894. Henson, Josiah. The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Cana­ da. Ed. Samuel A. Eliot. Boston: A. D. Phelps, 1849. —— and John Lobb. An Autobiography of Rev. Josiah Henson (“Uncle Tom”) from 1789– 1881, 1881. Ed. Robin Winks. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969. Hughes, Louis. Thirty Years a Slave. Autobiography of Louis Hughes. Milwaukee: South Side, 1897. Jackson, Blyden. A History of Afro-American Literature, Volume One: 1746–1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. Jackson, Mattie Jane. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson. Lawrence, MA: Sentinel, 1866. Jacobs, Harriet Ann. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861 Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. James, Thomas. Life of Rev. Thomas James, by Himself. Rochester, NY: Post Express, 1886. Jones, Thomas H. The Experience of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for FortyThree Years. 1885. North Carolina Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Keckley, Elizabeth Hobbs. Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868. Lee, Jarena. The Life and Religious Experience of Mrs. Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady. 1836. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. William L. Andrews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Levering, Sarah R. Memoirs of Margaret Jane Blake of Baltimore, Md. Philadelphia: Innes, 1897. Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Knopf, 1979. (p. 232) Marrs, Elijah Preston. Life and History of the Rev. Elijah P. Marrs. Louisville: Bradley and Gilbert, 1885. McCarthy, B. Eugene and Thomas L. Doughton, eds. From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 McCaskill, Barbara and Caroline Gebhard, eds. Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African Ameri­ can Literature and Culture, 1877–1919. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Millie-Christine. The History of the Carolina Twins, Told in “Their Own Peculiar Way” By “One of Them.” 1869? Conjoined Twins in Black and White: The Lives of Millie-Christine McKoy & Daisy and Violet Hilton. Ed. Linda Frost. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. O’Donovan, Susan Eva. Becoming Free in the Cotton South. Cambridge, Mass., and Lon­ don: Harvard University Press, 2007. Prince, Nancy. A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince. Boston: The Au­ thor, 1850. Randolph, Peter. Sketches of Slave Life. Boston: The Author, 1855. ——. From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit: The Autobiography of Rev. Peter Randolph. Boston: James H. Earle, 1893. Richardson, Heather Cox. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Roper, Moses. Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery. 1848. North Carolina Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews. Chapel Hill: Uni­ versity of North Carolina Press, 2003. Smith, Amanda. An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist. 1893. Introd. Jualynne E. Dodson. New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1988. Smith, David. Biography of Rev. David Smith of the A. M. E. Church. Xenia, OH: Xenia Gazette Office, 1881. Smith, Harry. Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States of America. Grand Rapids, MI: West Michigan, 1891. Smith, James L. Autobiography of James L. Smith. Norwich, CT: The Bulletin, 1881. Truth, Sojourner. Narrative Of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of Olden Time. Ed. Frances W. Titus. Battle Creek, MI: The Author, 1884. ——. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave. 1850. Ed. Nell Irvin Painter. New York: Penguin, 1998. Veney, Bethany. The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman. 1889. Ed. B. Eugene Mc­ Carthy and Thomas L. Doughton. From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Nar­ ratives. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

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Slave Narratives, 1865–1900 Wallace, Maurice. “Constructing the Black Masculine: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the Sublimits of African American Autobiography.” Subjects and Citi­ zens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill. Eds. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 237–262. Washington, Booker Taliaferro. Up from Slavery. 1901. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Webb, William. The History of William Webb. Detroit: Egbert Hoekstra, 1873. Williams, James. Life and Adventures of James Williams, a Fugitive Slave. San Francisco: Women’s Union, 1873.

William L. Andrews

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina. He is the author of and editor of numerous books, including The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-Ameri­ can Autobiography, 1760-1865, and The Norton Anthology of African American Liter­ ature.

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives

“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narra­ tives   Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.009

Abstract and Keywords Reviewing scenes from canonical narratives of slavery, this essay analyzes sexuality as en­ coded in the disciplining and display of enslaved bodies in exhibitionary spaces (i.e., on the floor, at auction, stripped and suspended for whipping, etc.). While visual, pictorial, and theatric renderings of slave subjection lend themselves to voyeuristic consumption, they also contain an ethical imperative to witness. This essay attends to the life-world of slaves made perceptible through an ocular register that incorporates and implicates read­ ers in momentary acts of such witnessing. It proceeds by showing the ways in which firstperson accounts of enslavement juxtapose spectacular and mundane depictions of slave bodies in use and in pain in order (1) to reveal the institutionalization of sadism in slavery’s quotidian apparatus, (2) to expose scopic terror as standard practice within the disciplinary regime of slavery, and (3) to challenge culturally dominant notions of racial­ ized sexual difference that undegirded the institution and supported its expansion. This essay emphasizes ultimately the ways in which slave narratives utilize the rhetorical po­ tency, the political immediacy, and the consumptive pleasure of sight to transform dis­ parate individual readers into a galvanized community of first-hand witnesses to slavery’s everyday terror. Keywords: sexuality, scopic terror, theatricality, testimony, witnessing

IT is noteworthy that William Lloyd Garrison’s “Preface” to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845/2004) exceeds the standard function of au­ thentication. Going beyond a simple attestation of his personal familiarity with Frederick Douglass, Douglass’s authorship of Narrative, and the veracity of the events therein re­ counted, Garrison instructs the implicitly solitary nineteenth-century white northern reader in the proper method of experiencing Douglass’s powerful tale of tyranny and tri­ umph in the Slave South. Garrison exemplifies the suitable response to Douglass’s autobi­ ography as he recounts his first encounter with Douglass’s live narration.

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives [T]he extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory, completely taken by surprise—the applause which followed from the beginning to the end of his felicitous remarks. I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment; certainly my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by it, on the god-like nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear than ever. There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly “created but a little lower than angels—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety” (1845/2004, 4). According to Garrison, the details of Douglass’s enslavement are awe-inspiring and illumi­ nating. Garrison is stirred both by the story and by the sight of the speaker to an even more fervently committed anti-slavery stance. I call attention to Garrison’s strategy of vi­ sualizing slavery to illuminate a common textual practice in antebellum narratives of African American enslavement, one in which pictorial prose and visual iconography have significant ideological and narratological utility for slavery’s veracious documentation and for political mobilization. As first-hand testimonies to slavery’s monumental disregard of (black) humanity, slave narratives carry within them an implicit mandate (p. 236) for read­ ers to act, to abolish—not with the wavering sentimentality of a sympathetic reader but with the passionate and ethical outrage of an eyewitness. This essay thus reckons with the slave narrative’s dual generic composition as story of survival and as theater of horror in antebellum U.S. literary and political culture. By the mid-nineteenth century, the slave narrative was a formal and popular literary genre. It was designed not only to document and publicize the evils of slavery in support of the abolitionist movement but also to generate capital to help finance it. In order to sell well, slave narratives had to appeal to audience expectations. Scenes of sadistic horror were a standard feature and main attraction of the narrative. Typically, first-person ac­ counts of slavery departed from the central narrative of the author’s life to describe, vividly and pictorially, heinous crimes committed against other slaves, which the authors had themselves beheld. Murder, mutilation, torture, thwarted escape, and (insinuated) rape were both horrifying and titillating to genteel audiences and became necessary ele­ ments to drive the popularity and sales of slave narratives. Important to note, however, is that even as they trafficked in the macabre, appealing to readers’ prurient interests in slavery’s underbelly, slave narratives presented irrefutable testimony of the totalized ex­ ploitation and deep psychological pain of enslavement and, by transforming readers into witnesses, placed them under the ethical obligation to effect its end. As experts on worldhistorical trauma and the ethics of bearing witness, Robert Brinkley and Steven Youra contend, “To receive the words of a witness is to find that one has also become a witness, that one’s responses are there for others to witness as well. Once the transmission be­ gins, one cannot stand outside its address” (1996, 123). By communicating the injury and, furthermore, the ethical injunction to behold, authors of slave narratives initiated the transmission of witnessing upon which abolitionism relied.

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives It is in precisely this transmission of witnessing that Garrison engages by staging the shared reception of Douglass’s life story. By invoking a live audience and combining his own sensory perceptions with spatio-visual phenomena, Garrison draws readers of Douglass’s Narrative into an imagined collective as an audience for a play—or, more pre­ cisely, participants in an abolitionist rally—in which Douglass’s life in bondage unfolds in a series of enchanting, if harrowing, pictures. Like a savvy master of ceremonies or a sea­ soned pedagogue, Garrison attunes readers to the proper perceptual register for inter­ preting—and responding to—the picture-scenes unfolding before them. In a textual ma­ neuver that both deploys and disarticulates Hortense Spillers’s (2003) brilliantly named pornotrope, Garrison both envisions and exhibits the beautiful, commanding, eloquent, “god-like,” though trembling, slave. Outraged and aroused, the militant white abolitionist summons readers of Douglass’s Narrative into the gripping scene of his initial encounter with Douglass, one in which the totalized sociopolitical, fiscal, and juridical degradation of enslavement signals and is signaled by the surface value and sexual surplus of African American embodiment. As if the thrill were communicable, Garrison performs—and there­ by models—the requisite conversion from reader to listener to spectator to witness. The title of this essay is taken from the primal scene in Douglass’s life and in his narra­ tive: the brutal beating of Aunt Hester. Douglass laments: “I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall (p. 237) forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with aw­ ful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery. It was a most terrible spectacle” (1845/2004, 20–21; emphasis mine). I have argued elsewhere that the beating of Aunt Hester signifies not simply her brutal rape by a jealous slave owner but, more generally, the shaping of slave subjectivity through susceptibility to the manifold vi­ olences of life on the slave plantation, particularly the sexual abuse and reproductive ex­ ploitation of enslaved black people (Abdur-Rahman 2006, 227–228). Rape and coerced concubinage augmented the population of the enslaved and guaranteed, thereby, the very means of production and profit-making at the heart of New World slavery. As it was a main feature in the daily catastrophe of slavery and as it exiled African Americans from the domain of socially intelligible and civically entitled citizen-subjects, sexuality func­ tioned as a crucible in the lives of the enslaved and as a main point of interest for readers of their narratives. Notably, in Douglass’s recollection, sexual violence and what I am call­ ing scopic terror operated dually, centrally in the formation of slave subjectivity: he was doomed to witness and to participate. Routinized displays of corporeal debasement and sexual vulnerability operated in tandem with racialized notions of sexual pathology to de­ termine the very meaning of enslavement. For Douglass, incorporating readers into the transmission of witnessing sheds light on the process by which slaves were made—even as the transmission of witnessing supported the political aims of the slave narrative by publicizing the intimate abuses of plantation life. In narratives of enslavement accounts of sexual violation (whether endured or observed) express the pain of bodily dispossession and social/racial subjection, functioning as powerful metaphors for the condition of cap­ tivity itself and for the numerous violations engendered thereby. Moreover, the macabre Page 3 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives parade of ravaged bodies filling the pages of slave narratives reveal the extent to which both slavery and slave narratives function as theaters of horror, with familiar and opera­ ble codes for telling and for witnessing. Reviewing scenes from canonical narratives of slavery, what follows is an analysis of sexu­ ality as encoded in the disciplining and display of enslaved bodies in exhibitionary spaces (i.e., on the floor, at auction, stripped and suspended for whipping, etc). As I show in my opening discussion of Garrison’s “Preface,” while visual, pictorial, and theatric render­ ings of slave subjection lend themselves to voyeuristic consumption, they also contain an ethical imperative to witness. My reading attends to the life-world of slaves made percep­ tible through an ocular register that incorporates and implicates readers in momentary acts of such witnessing. I proceed by showing the ways in which first-person accounts of enslavement juxtapose deftly spectacular and mundane depictions of slave bodies in use and in pain in order to (1) reveal the institutionalization of sadism in slavery’s quotidian apparatus, (2) to expose scopic terror as standard practice within the disciplinary regime of slavery, and (3) to challenge culturally dominant notions of racialized sexual difference that undegirded the institution and supported its expansion. This essay emphasizes ulti­ mately the ways in which slave narratives utilize the rhetorical potency, the political im­ mediacy, and the consumptive pleasure of sight to transform disparate individual readers into a galvanized community of first-hand witnesses to slavery’s everyday terror.

Black Theatricality and (or on) the Auction Block (p. 238)

In order to theorize the significance of the visual—specifically the stunningly visual, in which language is rendered momentarily ineffective or obsolete—it is important to first understand the interplay between revelation and reticence in slave testimonies, particu­ larly in narrating the sexual and reproductive lives of enslaved persons. Despite the sug­ gestive potency of sexual violation for anologizing the deep personal despair and endur­ ing trauma of slave subjection, it is often in matters of sexuality that authors of slave nar­ ratives contend with discursive foreclosure. Generally, in first-person testimonies of New World slavery, one scene in which the pictorial and the theatric supplant simple narrative recall is in depictions of the slave auction. Promising the complete utilization of pur­ chasable persons for uses and illicit pleasures untold, the auction block functioned under the regime of institutional slavery as both a slave market and an unregulated brothel. The sexual underbelly of the slave market is everywhere implicated in the muted but pic­ turesque representations of slave sale in narratives of enslavement. In his landmark study of the antebellum slave market, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Ante­ bellum Slave Market, Walter Johnson explores the significance of slave sale in the materi­ al and psychological experiences of the enslaved. It was on the auction block, Johnson contends, that “broad trends and abstract totalities thickened into human shape” (2001, 8). The auction block gave the meaning of enslavement literal and spatial form. At auction black bodies, white prerogatives, and hard cash coalesced into rituals of exchange and Page 4 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives consumption that were performed unambiguously on stage. For the enslaved, the auction block threatened permanent familial rupture and potentially worse iterations of individual slave experience. Given its incredible symbolic, experiential, and monetary significance, a glimpse of the auction became a standard feature in slave narratives. Whether the author has been auctioned herself, lost a family member to sale at auction, or simply wishes to present a full account of slave experience, most canonized slave narratives dramatize this harrowing event. I turn now, for exemplification, to the auction scene, which very nearly opens The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831/1988) and, in effect, inaugurates Prince’s life in slavery. It is her narrative’s primal scene. Prince recounts: My mother, weeping as she went, called me away with the children Hannah and Dinah [Prince’s sisters]….We followed my mother to the market-place where she placed us in a row against a large house, with our backs to the wall and our arms folded across our breasts. I, as the eldest, stood first, Hannah next to me, then Di­ nah; and our mother stood beside, crying over us. My heart throbbing with grief and terror so violently that I pressed my hands quite tightly against my breast, but I could not keep it still, and it continued to leap as though it would burst out of my body…. At length, the vendue master, who was to offer us for sale like sheep or cattle, ar­ rived, and asked my mother which was the eldest. She said nothing, but pointed to (p. 239) me. He took me by the hand and led me out into the middle of the street, and, turning me slowly around, exposed me to the view of those who attended the vendue. I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size—as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts. I was then put up to sale. 1831/1988, 4) Prince provides a painstaking and detailed recollection of her experience at the slave auc­ tion and its particular devastation to black families, especially women and children. What is immediately notable about the slave auction is its dual publicness (a site of sale) and privateness (a site of illicit trade in flesh). This is evidenced foremost by the absence of white women from the auction. As the slave auction concerns the economics of slavery, it is properly “men’s” domain. As Walter Johnson argues, “By law and by custom, white women had little business being in the slave market….The slave market was a site of per­ ceived sexual and social disorder, not any place for a white lady to be” (2001, 89–90). Black women and girls are, however, present, and their presence at the scene/site divests them of normative gender. In other words, the public—and necessarily theatric—display and examination of black female persons renders them inadequate in terms of hegemonic norms of womanhood even as enslaved black women are resignified for unnamed and un­ bounded, but explicitly female, sexual labor.

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives Prince’s narration of her sale at auction opens with a focus on her mother. Without irony or bitterness, Prince describes the painful complicity of the enslaved mother leading her children to the site of their sale, arranging them neatly for presentation and purchase. Evident in her neat and careful arrangement of her children and her weeping are the en­ slaved mother’s love and her loss. Neither Prince nor her mother speak; the woman and her young daughter are too grief stricken. In moments like these, speech is futile. It is the failure to utter a single word that reveals the devastating toll of being sold. The narration of this moment thus becomes one of description, punctuated with meaningful silence that pays homage to the solemnity of familial dissolution and the despicable sale of human be­ ings. The auction was a public event with routine and predictable procedures; it was also an exciting, sexualized spectacle. Prince notes that she is spun slowly, which insinuates her potential, multidimensional utility. Under the presumed cover of assaying property, men are allowed to engage in acts of lewd tactile handling. Despite the insinuation that her treatment is sexually violating, and that she is improperly and prematurely sexualized by virtue of being brought to public sale, Prince is careful to avoid insinuating that she is for sexual service. The rhetorical strategies of aporia and understatement are common in representing slavery, particularly its sexual dimensions, as authors attempt to shield themselves and members of their race from accusations of innate sexual degradation. Re­ gard for one’s own chastity is a common feature of slave narratives penned by women. Prince’s use of the simile “as a calf or a lamb” to describe the method by which she was tactically inspected/invaded implies a bland sexual disinterest on the part of her handlers. Nonetheless, her self-positioning as a lamb or a calf—youthful, innocent, unknowing, and yet a potentially fertile creature—in the hands and under the (p. 240) purview of a butcher bespeaks the destruction that awaits her. Prince thus alludes to sexual enslavement as a distinct and pervasive purpose of slavery. In the end, Prince’s body gives the testimony her tongue cannot—she conceals her chest. Heavy reliance on the pictorial and the picturesque textualizes the excision of the en­ slaved from modes of literary signification—considering, for example, the legislative man­ date against slave literacy and legal testimony—even as it recuperates them within the domain of the social by staging “scenes of subjection” within the hegemonic order of slav­ ery. Legal slavery secured every slaveholder’s individual discretionary and otherwise un­ bounded commodification and consumption of enslaved persons. Walter Johnson gives us, for example, the case of Bruckner Payne, who purchased a young, black woman presum­ ably to assist his wife with sewing. The young woman was soon returned to the slave mar­ ket from which she was purchased by her owner for some supposed defect and died a mere two weeks later, the result of severe “brutalization.” The implication here is that the woman was purchased for sadistic sexual use and eventual sacrifice. The fact that Bruck­ ner Payne, who purchased her only on a trial basis, did not need to give a truthful ac­ count of his wishes when he purchased her or of his abuses when he brought her back nearly dead exemplifies what embodied black slavery meant in its most basic form. En­ slaved persons were proprietary benefit and pleasure of the individual slaveholder. Slave­ holders frequently purchased slaves for illicit and/or deranged uses. Those uses required Page 6 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives no articulation; they had neither to be rendered in language nor subjugated to the regula­ tion that discursivity necessarily entails. And what was not spoken was not subject to the governance of social order. Thus, the particularity of the uses to which slaveholders sub­ jected their human property exceeded the provinces of language, legality, custom, and law. Sites of professed unspeakability within slave testimonies are notable sources of meaning in that, acting as both trope and narrative device, silence provides a usable supplement to what is manifestly narrated. As Michel Foucault explains, “Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies” (1978, 27). According to Foucault, vol­ untary omission and other meaningful silences neither breech nor nullify communication. In fact, the interplay between the utterance and the meaningful silence reveal the social relations of the speakers. “There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say,” he continues: [Instead,] we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required of them in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (1978, 27) Strategic silence is a powerful rhetorical device for conjuring what is indirectly refer­ enced or merely insinuated because silence is itself an element or particular mode of communication. Moreover, silence can be a powerful form of resistance when used by the oppressed in defense against those whose domination is assisted and legit­ (p. 241)

imized through language. In other words, by resisting subjectivization via discursive pro­ duction, enslaved persons could assert the primacy of individual, embodied, and interior­ ized selves that necessarily exceeded the terms used to define—and to enslave—them. Be­ cause the sexual dimension of slave life was cloaked in a veil of silence created and pro­ tected by slave statutes and repressive cultural conventions, enslaved subjects had to ne­ gotiate prohibitions on their speech to provide potent and enduring testimony against the institution. They did this in part by convening a community of witnesses to scopic terrors so ghastly and yet so routine in the system of bondage that they left onlookers frequently and quite literally speechless.

Sexual and Scopic Terror: Slavery as Theater Representations of sexuality in slave narratives function both epistemologically and mimetically to expose the sadistic protocols and quotidian operations of institutional slav­ ery. Whether in terms of the sexual and reproductive exploitation of enslaved black per­ sons or in terms of those enslaved persons’ defiant acts of sexual autonomy, depictions of sexuality in slave narratives constitute a representational apparatus that necessitates Page 7 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives specific writing and reading practices. In particular, readers are made aware of the fun­ damental vulnerability and serviceability of the slave’s body to the master’s whim by the sheer frequency with which slave bodies are presented in subjugated poses or mangled decomposition in slave narratives. To get at the fundamental violation of enslavement and its innumerable abuses, authors of slave narratives engage in what I have elsewhere theo­ rized as textual masochism, the willful and theatric display of the subdued or the violated slave in order to highlight the intrinsic sadism of slavery and of slaveholders (Abdur-Rah­ man 2006, 231). I continue my reading of Mary Prince’s History, turning my attention to another scene that has become standard in the canonical slave narrative, the sexualized beating of an enslaved black woman. Prince recalls: [Mr. D____] would stand by and give orders for a slave to be cruelly whipped, and assist in the punishment, without moving a muscle of his face; walking about and taking snuff with the greatest composure. Nothing could touch his heart—neither sighs, nor tears, nor prayers, nor streaming blood; he was deaf to our cries and careless of our suffering. Mr. D____ has often stripped me naked, hung me up by the wrists, and beat me with the cow-skin, with his own hand, till my body was raw with gashes. Yet there was nothing remarkable in this; for it might serve as a sample of the common usage of slaves…. (1831/1988, 10) Though the scene purportedly reveals an aspect of her own suffering as she is savagely beaten, Prince directs the reader’s attention principally to Mr. D____. In particu­ (p. 242)

lar, she emphasizes his performance of mastery. Notably, as he orders, witnesses, and partakes in the brutal castigation of the slave, he shows no guilt, compassion, nor any dis­ cernible emotive response. In fact, he surveys the scene with a composed and icy de­ meanor that belies the savagery of the beating, even as he orchestrates it and alone can bring about its end. Each howling plea of the suffering slave and each ringing tear in her flesh signifies and in this very moment solidifies the white slave master’s subjectivity, his particular and legally authorized sovereignty. Notably, Prince’s narration does not dwell on her nakedness, nor does it explicitly name as such the sexual sadism clearly enacted in the ritual of stripping, binding, suspending, and beating of an enslaved woman. The sexual depravity of the event is, nonetheless, everywhere implicated in its performance. As Kimberly Juanita Brown succinctly puts it, “Willing or not, aggressive or submissive, the slave body is the sexual body, imprinted with the fixations of hegemonic desire and branded with the signification of all-encom­ passing acquiescence” (2007, 45; emphasis in the original). Prince exposes her own tor­ tured body to expose a common procedure in slavery, a routinized form of torture used to ensure slave compliance. The account is mainly visual, emphasizing the composition of bodies and spatial positioning—the setting of a stage. There is no dialogue, and no expla­ nation of Prince’s internal psychic processes is granted. Our attention is thereby diverted away from the shaping of the enslaved persona through ritualized acts of shame and bodi­ ly torture to the subjectivization of the master-subject by virtue of those very processes. Page 8 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives In her seminal essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hort­ ense Spillers’s describes poignantly the psychic and social formation of the master-sub­ ject vis-à-vis the brutalization of captive slaves, focusing specifically on the pleasure rela­ tion obtaining in it. She posits: This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: (1) the captive body as the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; (2) at the same time—in stunning contradiction—it is re­ duced to a thing, to being for the captor; (3) in this distance from a subject posi­ tion, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of “oth­ erness”; (4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a poten­ tial for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general “powerlessness.” (2003, 206) As Spillers makes clear, the social and political situation of slaves is emblematized by their sexual positioning. Specifically, slaves’ fundamental disempowerment—their en­ forced disappearance from the realm of the social, the economically self-sustainable, and the politically recognizable—reinforced and was reinforced by a wide open and vulnerable sexuality. In other words, the sexual subjectivity of enslaved persons, in particular its out­ ward-directed “pansexual potential,” reflected both the political status of (p. 243) black people prior to legal abolition and the racial difference that putatively justified their en­ slavement—their being for others. As “being[s] for the captor,” the labor, production, hu­ man capacity, and pleasure-making ability of slaves supplied the architecture of master’s identity and his society. Or, to state the case plainly, the establishment of each slave own­ er as a sovereign unto himself via the structural disenfranchisement and the bodily dis­ possession of the enslaved black person was both the fundamental point and the funda­ mental ruse of American slavery. It is important to note that bloody spectacles of slave subjection were designed not only to establish but more specifically to showcase the master’s dominance. In this way, slav­ ery proceeded not simply through technologies of terror but through technologies of ter­ roristic viewing. Before proceeding in this particular discussion, I must acknowledge that much has been made about the ethical and intellectual responsibility of scholars to avoid pandering to prurient interests in slavery’s spectacular sadism. Most prominently, Saidiya Hartman opens Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Cen­ tury America, arguably the most authoritative text on this subject, by declaring her re­ fusal to reproduce scenes of obscene terror. She explains: At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between wit­ ness and spectator. Only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whip­ ping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terri­ ble….

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives Therefore, rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its af­ termath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned. (1997, 3–4) Hartman’s decision to take up “the ghastly and the terrible” operations of slavery by re­ producing and examining not the most gruesome expressions of slavery’s horror but its quotidian manifestations is incredibly instructive. In fact, I want to go so far as suggest­ ing that, since the publication and wide circulation of Hartman’s seminal book, critics who write about slavery and its representation in a variety of cultural forms from the nineteenth century onward must now grapple with the very choice that Hartman put be­ fore herself and articulated in the opening pages of her brilliant and quite unparalleled text. Even as I heed Hartman’s call for greater respectfulness toward the bodies and the suffering of black people, I want to recognize two important points: (1) textual masochism operates as a specific, utilizable narrative procedure in the slave narrative and (2) under the coercive force of New World slavery there was no meaningful distinction between the terrible and the quotidian in the daily lives of the enslaved. Not only did authors of slave narratives intentionally depict the ruined bodies of slaves as an (ultimately generic) textu­ al maneuver to foster abolitionist sentiment among readers, but they also communicated the experience of slavery by converting readers into witnesses of spectacular horrors that occurred with such frequency that they acquired, in effect, the status of the mundane. Again, Prince writes of her own awful whipping, “there was (p. 244) nothing remarkable in this; for it might serve as a sample of the common usage of slaves” (1831, 1988, 10). Finally, it is important to recognize spectacular violence as a standard feature of slavery’s apparatus. I refer here to the theatrical display of white mastery through routine public enactments of the destruction of the black body. In this way, slave torture anticipates lynching—as the destruction of one black body is meant to represent, terrify, and subdue the entire witnessing black community. Frederick Douglass provides in his Narrative a poignant example of terroristic viewing as a disciplinary procedure. He narrates the mur­ der of an enslaved black male, named Demby, who was killed by wretched overseer, Mr. Gore, for running away from him in fear of punishment. Mr. Gore then, without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood. A thrill of horror flashed through every soul upon the plantation, excepting Mr. Gore. He alone seemed cool and collected. (1845/2004, 36–37) Notably, Douglass provides a ghastly but surface description—that is, without emphasis on the internality of the subjects of the scene. Mr. Gore evinces the same cool and distant demeanor after mercilessly killing Demby that Prince observes of her master during whippings. As readers, we read/see Demby’s body stand, then fall. We read/see his disin­ tegrated corporeal matter rise to the surface of the water. Finally, we share the “thrill of Page 10 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives horror” of the enslaved onlookers in the scene, and thereby join their community of horri­ fied witnesses, which, I argue, is the very point of Douglass’s textual reproduction of the despicable murder of Demby. When interrogated by Colonel Lloyd about the murder of Demby, and thus the decrease in his slave property, Gore reasons that Demby “had become unmanageable. He was setting a dangerous example to other slaves,—one which, if suffered to pass without some such demonstration on [Gore’s] part, would lead to a total subversion of all rule and order up­ on the plantation….the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves and the en­ slavement of the whites” (1845, 2004, 36). Under the regime of slavery the master’s dom­ inance over enslaved persons was perpetually at risk because the supremacy of the white slaveholder was neither a natural nor an ethically justifiable, perpetually sustainable so­ ciopolitical and economic arrangement. It was, rather, held in place by judicial precedent, customary procedure, the legal disenfranchisement of African Americans, and routine public spectacles of black demise. The overseer Gore acknowledges the precariousness of slave mastery. He, moreover, readily admits that torture, terror, and terroristic viewing worked as corrective measures to procure slave compliance. For writers of canonized slave testimonies, such as Frederick Douglass and Mary Prince, these same measures as­ sume the status of evidence in their narrative reconstructions of life in bondage.

And Worst of All: Sexuality and the Circula­ tion of Corpses (p. 245)

An essay that analyzes sexuality under the regime New World slavery as well as its the­ atric reproduction in the codified genre of the slave narrative would be incomplete with­ out a consideration of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861/2004). In fact, it would not be an overstatement to say that of the many extant slave testimonies and the few prominent and canonized slave narratives Incidents provides the most devel­ oped and generative exposition on sexuality’s primacy in the structuration and mainte­ nance of racial slavery. For Jacobs the negation of personhood secured by chattel status is best characterized, if not analogized, by the loss of basic sexual freedom: the right to ex­ perience and exercise longing, the right to legally recognized bonds of intimacy, the right to possess progeny and to have them recognized as legitimate heirs. Jacobs’s tale of bondage is narrativized as a struggle for sexual autonomy. Her journey is one that moves from sexual harassment, sexualized abuse, sexual compromise, and finally to sexual free­ dom and redemption. Incidents is, furthermore, one of the first African American literary texts to theorize explicitly the sexual politics of race-based social asymmetries. It is im­ portant to reiterate here that Hartman’s critical refusal to examine or to reproduce those ghastly (generally sexualized) spectacles recorded in slave narratives risks overlooking an important aspect of their narrative design and their political purpose. As I argue in the previous section, intimate and violent displays of damaged slave bodies are presented strategically by narrators. Working with and through the voyeurism of readers, narrators willfully and sophisticatedly harness the representational power of sexual difference to Page 11 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives highlight the evils of the institution in support of their efforts to abolish American slavery. Noting that Jacobs deploys transgressive erotics toward liberatory ends, this final section examines how the generic, muted features of the African American slave narrative allow readers to see sexuality on the slave plantation, and in so doing, to understand the essen­ tial sadism that undergirds the very logic and machinery of human bondage. Jacobs opens her chapter, entitled “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders,” by providing a fairly detailed description of a nearby plantation owned by a wealthy slaveholder, pseu­ donymously called Mr. Litch. Jacobs’s fascination with this particular plantation has to do with its tremendous size and abundance of enslaved persons. She notes that the planta­ tion boasts its own whipping post and jail. In her description of Mr. Litch’s plantation, Ja­ cobs foregrounds its carceral features and disciplinary procedures. In so doing, she ex­ poses the brutality of slavery, even in its most systematic and impersonal manifestation. “[W]hatever cruelties were perpetuated on there,” she announces, “they passed without comment.” Jacobs recognizes the impotence of language to provide adequate description, justification, or emotive response to the standard procedures of this (p. 246) slave planta­ tion. Here, the spectacularly awful is commonplace, and speechlessness is thematized. Ja­ cobs narrates: A freshet once bore his wine cellar and meat house miles away from the planta­ tion. Some slaves followed, and secured bits of meat and bottles of wine. Two were detected; a ham and some liquor being found in their huts. They were sum­ moned by their master. No words were used, but a club felled them to the ground. A rough box was their coffin, and their internment was a dog’s burial. Nothing was said (1861/2004, 181–182) Jacobs then proceeds to provide a virtual tableau of stomach-turning cruelties that were perpetuated regularly on various neighborhood plantations: all-night floggings, mutilation by dogs, death by starvation, child theft, bodily decomposition, improper or altogether ab­ sent burial, etc. Distinctly pictorial, the retellings operate through an ocular register that makes the reader want to turn away, to stop reading, to avoid envisioning the trite offens­ es, despicable punishments, and finally decayed flesh that fill this chapter. Jacobs’s litany of plantation abuses has a clear reparative function: to name and to give witness to quo­ tidian horrors that were so commonplace that they warranted neither reflection nor com­ mentary but which were in and of themselves—and certainly for the nineteenth-century, white, northern reader—spectacular and inhumane. Importantly, it is never clear from Jacobs’s list of horrid plantation occurrences whether or not she herself witnessed firsthand any of them. This observation is noteworthy, as wit­ nessing is conferred in Incidents, as in African American slave narratives generally, not through spectatorship but through the transmission of testimony. As is Jacobs herself, readers are legitimated as viewers by participating in Jacobs’s narrative circulation of harrowing pictures. She concludes her list by declaring, “I could tell of more slaveholders as cruel as those I have described. They are not exceptions to the general rule” (1861/2004, 185). Through her vivid descriptions of mutilation and murder and the Page 12 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives pictorial circulation of black corpses, Jacobs disavows ultimately any finite distinction be­ tween the awful and the everyday in slavery. In a maneuver that returns the narration to its overarching preoccupation with sexuality, Jacobs insinuates that sexual corruption both epitomizes and outdoes all of the cruelties heretofore listed. She declares: No pen can give adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers. When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or her sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will. (1861/2004, 187) Jacobs thus concludes what is arguably the most gruesome chapter of Incidents with an understated reference to the rampant sexual abuse and reproductive exploitation that were endemic to embodied black slavery. Those earlier scenes of torture, dismember­ ment, and bodily decay serve as an anteroom in a theater in which sexual enslavement, coerced concubinage, and mediated reproduction take center stage, exceeding all of the other cruelties of slavery. (p. 247)

To conclude, the exhibition of suppliant, suffering, or ruined black bodies operate in Inci­ dents as in other African American slave narratives to call our attention to the embodied and the sexual dimensions of enslavement, particularly as the various uses to which en­ slaved bodies were put exceeded both nineteenth-century conventions on public speech and the capacities of language itself. Appeals to the visual, the pictorial, and the theatric in slave narratives challenge the hegemony of written word on behalf of a population that was legally denied access to literacy and literary expression. Writers of slave narratives sought to challenge the commodification and totalized exploitation of enslaved black per­ sons by emphasizing the hurt of bodily and sexual assault. In so doing, they convened and expanded a community of readers/witnesses who, with better comprehension of black en­ slavement, could and did assist in devising ethical, rhetorical, and legal strategies to bring about the abolition of New World slavery.

References Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Ante­ bellum African American Slave Narratives.” African American Review 40.2 (2006): 223– 237. Robert Brinkley and Steven Youra. “Tracing Shoah.” PMLA 111.1 (1996): 108–127. Brown, Kimberly Juanita. “Black Rapture: Sally Hemings, Chica da Silva, and the Slave Body of Sexual Supremacy.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35. 1/2, (2009): 45–66. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. 1845. New York: Modern Library, 2004. Page 13 of 14

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“This Horrible Exhibition”: Sexuality in Slave Narratives Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pan­ theon Books, 1978. Hartman, Saiyida V. Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861. New York: Modern Library, 2004. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Har­ vard UP, 2001. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. 1831. Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Spillers, Hortense. Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman

Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Brandeis University

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism

“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism   DoVeanna S. Fulton The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.021

Abstract and Keywords Exploring slave narratives written by women, this essay argues that in their narratives enslaved women situate themselves and the women around them at the center of active resistance to slavery and confirm the efficacy of the slave narrative form and black femi­ nism to meaningfully represent themselves and engage in public debates on slavery and racial and gender equality. Focusing particularly on the intimate relationships shared by black women with their white mistresses or employers, the author examines narratives by Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, and Mattie Jackson as representative narratives that substantiate a black feminist standpoint in which the narrators exhibit critical analyses of their labor such that work and economics are only one measure in a larger system of sub­ jective valuation and personal worth. Moreover, these narratives document relations be­ tween black and white women in the urban cultural landscape where their intimate rela­ tions reveal complex interracial gendered interdependencies that proved black women’s self-worth in slavery and freedom. Keywords: black feminism, labor, black women, white women, intimate relationships, self-worth, human dignity, urban space, interracial, gender, slave narratives, slavery, equality, domestic novel, Cult of True Womanhood, Har­ riet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, Mattie Ja

ENSLAVED women used their pens and voices to enter the public discourse on slavery by documenting their slave experiences. More important, in narratives written by them­ selves or related to amanuenses, black women defined themselves and constructed their lives as shaped by and in spite of enslavement. While women’s slave narratives reveal rape, sexual exploitation, and familial separation in far more direct and intimate encoun­ ters than most males experienced or narrated—as well as similar physical abuse and de­ humanizing labor practices that males did experience—enslaved women’s narratives situ­ ate themselves and the women around them at the center of active resistance to slavery. Moreover, with narrative finesse the texts disclose agentive subjects who “challenge gen­ dered assumptions about interracial power, desire, purity and alliance,” as P. Gabrielle Foreman (2009) argues, and affirm identity formations grounded in human dignity and self-worth informed by their subject positions of women with the power to produce labor, Page 1 of 13

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism physically and intellectually. In her discussion of black women’s writings that trouble no­ tions of racial identification, Foreman examines the trope of the mulatta that crosses racial boundaries and questions racial ideologies (2009, 6). From a broader perspective, I suggest that, whether mulatta or not, by virtue of the fact that they are at the intersec­ tion of race and gender categories, black women’s narratives confront racial and gen­ dered assumptions. These narratives offer readers analyses of slavery and American so­ ciopolitical landscapes from a black feminist standpoint, whereby black women’s lives and experiences are centralized in the critical assessment of the worlds in which they live. In her groundbreaking text, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, the most influential scholarship in black feminist theory, leading black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins (2000) identifies controlling images that stereotype African American women as mammies, matriarchs, and jezebels. Yet the narratives of enslaved women counter these images. “These voices of African American women are not those of victims but of survivors. Their ideas and actions suggest that not only does a self-defined, articulated black woman’s (p. 249) standpoint exist, but its pres­ ence has been essential to black women’s survival” (Collins 2000, 93). The narrators con­ firm the efficacy of the slave narrative form and black feminism to meaningfully represent themselves and engage in public debates on slavery and racial and gender equality. As many scholars have shown, most slave narratives produced by men portrayed women slaves as passive, helpless victims of physical and sexual abuse. In her pioneering article, “In Respect to Females…Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Nar­ rators,” Frances Foster (1981) illustrates that men’s slave narratives overwhelmingly de­ pict women as helpless victims of physical abuse, rape, and moral degradation. This de­ piction was so prevalent that it became one of the conventions of slave narratives: other conventions included the initial “I was born…” statement, the apology for their lack of lit­ erary skill, the narration of childhood innocence until they experience an event that rais­ es their consciousness of slavery, the telling of horrors witnessed in slavery, their determi­ nation to escape, and finally freedom in the North. Many white readers of slave narra­ tives came to expect these elements because they affirmed racist notions of blacks as un­ educated and intellectually inferior to whites and thus unable to create literary texts out­ side the bounds of these criteria. Conversely, Foster argues, “From their narratives it is repeatedly clear that slave women saw themselves as far more than victims of rape and seduction. Though they wrote to witness slavery’s atrocities, they also wrote to celebrate their hard won escape from that system and their fitness for freedom’s potential bless­ ings” (1981, 67). In concert with the portrayal of powerless victims, women slave narra­ tors faced the prevailing gender ideal of the “Cult of True Womanhood” that demanded “true” women to be pious, domestic, submissive, and pure. Cultural historian Barbara Welter details the ideals of the Cult of True Womanhood as “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife— woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power” (1966, 152). According to nineteenth-century race and gender ideology, black women were inherently incapable of meeting these ideals, thus rendering their membership in the Cult of True Womanhood Page 2 of 13

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism impossible. In her extended analysis of the Cult of True Womanhood and black women’s exclusion from it, Hazel Carby notes, “Any historical investigation of the ideological boundaries of the cult of true womanhood is a sterile field without a recognition of the di­ alectical relationship with the alternative sexual code associated with the black woman. Existing outside the definition of true womanhood, black female sexuality was neverthe­ less used to define what those boundaries were” (1987, 30). In this context a woman who wanted to “tell [her] free story,” to paraphrase scholar William Andrews (1986), was com­ pelled to construct a narrative that appealed to an audience of primarily white readers while undermining race and gender assumptions about their personhood and experi­ ences. Prior to 1861 slave narratives produced by women numbered far fewer than those by male narrators. In fact the bibliography The Pen Is Ours, compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond, includes only nine narratives published before 1861 either written or related by former enslaved African American women. Collins posits that the (p. 250) minimal number of enslaved women’s voices “heard from is less a statement about the ex­ istence of black women’s ideas than it is a reflection of the suppression of ideas that do exist” (2000, 93). Unlike the dearth of narratives recounting African American women’s lives published in the antebellum period—just prior to, during, and after the Civil War— literary productions by black women increased substantially. Although Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is the most well-known slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) has become the most widely read narrative by an enslaved woman. For many years scholars assumed Incidents was a fictional narrative written by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. However, through her extraordinarily dedicated research scholar Jean Fagan Yellin proved this assumption false. Yellin’s work documents Jacobs’ authorship and attests to the facts of each real-life figure that Jacobs characterizes. Unfortunately, its initial publi­ cation was overshadowed by the start of the Civil War, a fact prompting Frances Smith Foster to speculate that “had the manuscript been published in 1858 when it was fin­ ished, its author might have been granted an audience with President Lincoln,” as was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ([1852] 1981), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1993, 117). Using the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs combines the forms of the slave narrative and the domestic novel to create a unique text in which she details the horrors of the slave ex­ perience while presenting a determined woman with a clear sense of self-worth and hu­ manity, nurtured by her parents, grandmother, and a supportive community and actual­ ized through exercised agency as a sexual being, mother, anti-slavery activist, and labor­ er. With the declaration, “My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each,” Jacobs acknowledges the authority accorded to her master by the slave institution (1861, 81). However, she recognizes her empowerment through fortitude and purpose developed and sustained by a wide variety of resources and experi­ ences. Scholars Nina Baym (1978) and Jane Tomkins (1985) have elucidated the general plot and cultural and literary significance of what Baym calls “women’s fiction” and Tomkins calls “sentimental fiction.” Baym describes the basic plot as “the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain Page 3 of 13

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world…. At the outset she takes herself very lightly—has no ego, or a damaged one, and looks to the world to coddle and protect her….To some extent her expectations are reasonable— she thinks that her guardians will nurture her….But the failure of the world to satisfy ei­ ther reasonable or unreasonable expectations awakens the heroine to inner possibilities. By the novel’s end she has developed a strong conviction of her own worth as a result of which she does ask much of herself. She can meet her own demands, and, inevitably, the change in herself has changed the world’s attitude toward her, so much that was formerly denied her now comes unsought” (Baym 1978, 19). It is this plot structure that Jacobs modifies in Incidents. In slavery and freedom Jacobs labored as a care-giver for white children of slave owners and employers. The narrative demonstrates her overt consciousness of the value of her la­ bor to both her owners/employers and to herself. For example, once she escapes North, Jacobs works as a nurse for the family of Nathaniel Willis (whom Jacobs names (p. 251) Mr. Bruce in the narrative). Although she finds Mrs. Willis “a kind and gentle lady” who offers intellectual conversation and opens her library to Jacobs, it is abundantly clear to Jacobs that her most immediate concern is performing her duties so that “by dent of labor and economy, I could make a home for my children” (1861, 169). Her clarity of purpose does not overshadow her sense of self-worth and human dignity. While traveling with the Willis family, Jacobs refuses the hotel’s demand that she stand behind the child’s chair to feed her at the dining table. After she decides to have their meals delivered to their rooms, the staff rebels and the other black servants complain that she is getting pre­ ferred treatment. Jacobs responds, “My answer to that was that the colored servants ought to be dissatisfied with themselves, for not having too much self-respect to submit to such treatment; that there was no difference in the price of board for colored and white servants, and there was no justification for difference of treatment. I staid [sic] a month after this, and finding I was resolved to stand up for my rights, they concluded to treat me well” (1861, 177). She concludes this chapter with the declaration, “Let every colored man and woman do this, and eventually we shall cease to be trampled under foot by our oppressors” (1861, 177). By adapting the narrative forms of the slave narrative and do­ mestic novel, Incidents exemplifies the black feminist standpoint through Jacobs’s critical analysis of southern slavery, labor conditions, human rights, and racial discrimination in northern locations that expose the terrors of enslaved women’s lives and the hypocrisy of the rhetoric of freedom in the North. The narrative action in Incidents not only illustrates black feminist principles, Jacobs writes the text fully conscious of the intersections of black women’s human dignity and la­ bor and the manner in which her physical labor impinges upon the intellectual labor of writing the narrative. In letters to her friend and confidant, feminist activist Amy Post, Ja­ cobs laments the quality of her writing and proclaims, “God did not give me that gift but he gave me a soul that burned for freedom and a heart nerved with determination to suf­ fer even unto death in pursuit of that liberty which without makes life an intolerable bur­ den” (1861, 236). In another letter she writes, Page 4 of 13

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism [M]y friends Mr. and Mrs. Brackett is [sic] very anxious that I should go to their home and write. [T]hey were here and spent a day and night with me and saw from my daily duties that it was hard for me to find much time to write. [A]s yet I have not written a single page by daylight. Mrs. W[illis] don’t know from my lips that I am writing for a book and has never seen a line of what I have written. I told her in the autumn that I would give her Louisa [sic] services through the winter if she would allow me my winter evenings to myself but with the care of the little ba­ by and the big babies and at the household calls I have but a little time to think or write. (1861, 238) Jacobs’s writing constraints and determination to finish the narrative evince her aware­ ness of the race, gender, and class positionality she occupies in knowledge production that challenges multiple political landscapes—legislative, geopolitical, and sociopolitical. Moreover, the letters reflect interracial, intragender relational dynamics (p. 252) black women encountered with their white employers or mistresses in labor production. Al­ though Jacobs holds Mrs. Willis in high esteem, she is careful and suspect of Mrs. Willis’s reciprocal regard once she learns of Jacobs’s slave experiences. The possibility of garner­ ing Willis’s disdain, or being dismissed from her position, is a cognizant reality Jacobs faced. Yet her confidence in the value her self-worth and life experience to effect change trumps the apprehension of losing Willis’s appreciation of Jacobs’s personal integrity. The dilemma of establishing and maintaining her personal dignity and humanity that Ja­ cobs confronts is evident in many slave narratives authored by women. Owing to nine­ teenth-century race and gender ideology, black women’s value as human beings—both during slavery and after emancipation—was repeatedly questioned by whites. Slave nar­ ratives and other historical evidence confirm many nineteenth-century white women held black women’s humanity suspect as well. Yet their labor and the products of their labor were constantly sought after as profitable commodities. Angela Davis writes, “Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been considered genderless as far as slaveholders were concerned” (1983, 5). Even though, as Davis points out, slave women performed agricultural work alongside men— and, as Sojourner Truth proclaimed, sometimes worked as much as any man—enslaved black women performed and articulated their labor as circumscribed by their gender. Birthing, nursing, and rearing children, cooking and preparing food, making and launder­ ing clothes, cleaning and maintaining homes, black women’s labor and lives sustained the institution of slavery and the people both subject to and beneficiaries of slavery. Work deemed “women’s work” was essential to the social, industrial, and economic conditions of slavery. In addition to agricultural and domestic labors, enslaved women worked in fac­ tories and mills. “By 1860 more than 5000 slaves, most of them women, worked in cotton and woolen mills under white supervisors” (Wertheimer 1977, 118). Black women recog­ nized their significance and that their labors substantiated their human dignity and worth.

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism In Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, Eliza­ beth Keckley (1868) relates her slave mistress’s critique that Keckley will never be “worth her salt.” This phrase resonates because it questions Keckley’s essential humanity as a sufficient, capable being. Although the phrase may have multiple cultural and colloquial references—for example, salt as salary paid to soldiers during Roman times, or the small amount of salt in baked bread, one of life’s basic necessities—“worth her salt” indicates the value of a human being measured in currency or on a minute scale. In the context of slavery, this phrase points to the market value placed on a slave’s worth. According to Xiomara Santamarina, “Keckley’s literary reformulation of [B]lack female agency along the lines of labor emphasizes, above all, the dignity of her labor in all its aspects: slave, free, interracial, and profoundly gendered” (2005, 143). In their narratives of slavery and freedom, black women demonstrate how their labors can be interpreted as agentive acts that affirm their value: personally, socially, institutionally, and economically. The narra­ tives of slavery and freedom of Elizabeth Keckley (1868) and Mattie J. Jackson (1866) substantiate a black feminist standpoint in which the narrators exhibit (p. 253) critical analyses of their labor such that work and economics are only one measure in a larger system of subjective valuation and personal worth. Of equal importance, these narratives document relations between black and white women in the urban cultural landscape where black women’s labor commands white women’s wealth, sometimes their respect, but rarely their regard as equals. Keckley’s and Jackson’s narratives, both set in major U.S. cities, demonstrate black women as agents of their own labor, which fosters fluidity and autonomy in the face of repression and domination. These women exploited urban spaces that afforded interactions with multiple clients, employers, and slave owners, interactions that yielded freedom, agency, and economic sustenance. Yet their relations with white women reveal complex interra­ cial gendered interdependencies that proved black women’s “salt” in slavery and free­ dom. Urban spaces offered some nineteenth-century black women opportunities to control their labor and thus control their lives. The multiple locations and demands for labor found in cities provided possibilities for freedom that rural spaces did not. Barbara Wertheimer documents black women’s labor in slavery and writes, “City slave women worked a wide variety of jobs, as chambermaids, vendors, nursemaids, hairdressers, seamstresses, laundresses, and servants…. The possibilities for learning to read and write, as well as the opportunity to acquire training in a trade; improved in the city, for the more skilled a slave, the more she could command for her master in hiring out” (1977, 120). For both enslaved and free women of African descent, life in cities af­ forded economic and social opportunities as well as vulnerabilities to worker exploitation in the nexus of labor, products and the marketplace between black women and their white women client-employers or slaveholders. Moreover, the intimate relationships often developed between these women contributed to entangled trades.

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism Elizabeth Keckley’s experiences with society women in St. Louis, Missouri and Washing­ ton, D.C. expose this complex exchange and the machinations that black women per­ formed to succeed in these environments. In her postbellum slave narrative, Keckley of­ fers limited information on her life during slavery. In fact, only the first three chapters are devoted to this period. The following twelve chapters concentrate on her experiences in Washington, D.C. as the modiste for Mary Todd Lincoln and other politicians’ wives, in­ cluding Varina Davis, wife of then-Senator and soon-to-become Confederate President Jef­ ferson Davis. Despite the truncated description of her enslavement, Keckley situates her abilities to perform tasks effectively and her conscientious work ethic at the center of her slave narrative. Although she does not ignore the common slave experiences many women encountered such as rape and physical abuse, Keckley defines her subjectivity by the value her labor produces and her abilities as an economic resource. Scholars Carolyn Sorisio and Xiomara Santamarina have examined what I call Keckley’s economics of the self as both ownership and her right to enter public discourse. Sorisio argues, “As the na­ tion began its path toward what many hoped would be a radical reconstruction, Keckley’s book carves out a space for herself as an African American woman claiming her right to participate in the public postbellum commodity culture not as property, but as propri­ etor” (2000, 21). Adding to this argument, I suggest Keckley’s narrative uses the mobility afforded in the urban spaces of St. (p. 254) Louis and Washington, D.C. as a metaphor for her upward mobility in Washington society, albeit a mobility “behind the scenes.” Enslaved in St. Louis, Keckley earned wages as a dress designer and maker for the “best ladies” in the area. While Virginia Meacham Gould posits that the difference between plantation slavery and urban slavery was that planters and farmers relied on slaves for producing income and urban slaveholders relied on the goods and services produced by slaves, Keckley’s master depended on her income as a dressmaker (1996, 180–180). Her wages fed her master’s household of 17 members for over two years. Although her mas­ ter agreed to manumit Keckley and her son for $1200, she could never build savings be­ cause of the demand to support his family. However, when finally she decided to travel to New York, by “taking the cars,” to raise the money to purchase their freedom, one of those “best ladies” intervened. The aptly named Mrs. Le Bourgois tells her, “Lizzie, I hear that you are going to New York to beg for money to buy your freedom. I have been think­ ing over the matter, and told Ma it would be a shame to allow you to go North to beg for what we should give you. You have many friends in St. Louis, and I am going to raise the twelve hundred dollars required among them…. Don’t start for New York now until I see what I can do among your friends” (emphasis in original; 1868, 54–55). With this initia­ tive, the funds are raised and Keckley and her son are freed. This incident demonstrates Keckley’s mobility and value within the context of her local urban space. Instead of travel­ ing to New York to raise funds—and, arguably, as the country’s major location of commod­ ity exchange, New York was the ultimate auction block—Keckley’s relationships with the “best ladies” of the city prove an immediate resource and spare her the experience of traveling by rail to solicit funds from strangers. Thus her movement from slavery to free­ dom occurs where it justifiably should, in the location where she is enslaved. This loca­ tion is significant because it flies in the face of antebellum slave narratives in which free­ Page 7 of 13

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism dom is gained in the North and enslaved people’s right to own themselves and human val­ ue are never recognized by whites in the South. If we think of the movement from slavery to freedom as an upward trajectory, then Keckley’s narrative undermines this notion and demonstrates a mobility in which one does not have to abandon the Southern location in the pursuit of freedom. Once she gains her freedom, however, Keckley does leave St. Louis. She offers readers a figure of resourceful married woman who is not constrained by patriarchal norms. She writes, “All this time my husband was a source of trouble to me, and a burden. Too close occupation with my needle had its effects upon my health, and feeling exhausted with work, I determined to make a change. I had a conversation with Mr. Keckley; informed him that since he persisted in dissipation we must separate; that I was going North, and that I should never live with him again, at least until I had good evidence of his re­ form” (1868, 63–64). The straightforward, dispassionate tone in which she relates this event conveys her standards of morality, efficiency, and determination. Although she writes they had a conversation, actually she informs him of her decisions and declares her independence. Keckley refuses to become caught in what Patricia Hill Collins calls the “in love and trouble tradition” in which many black women find themselves (2000, 183). In her study of marriage among African Americans in the antebellum period, Foster (p. 255) “challenges assumptions about freedom and enslavement, love and marriage, pro­ tecting and providing until death does part,” noting that antebellum writings by African Americans indicate a belief “that neither social status nor physical passion should be rea­ sons to marry” (2010, 32, 35). Foster maintains that “the literature shows that if antebel­ lum African Americans had the right to choose their mates, they judged it a privilege worth protecting” and that they were “picky, very picky” (2010, 36). Keckley’s decision to leave her husband is in line with this reasoning. She presents a black feminist analytical standpoint by placing herself at the center of the relationship and the decisions she must make to sustain her wholeness. Again, this experiential and narrative act is in contradis­ tinction to slave narratives produced by males in which women serve and define them­ selves in relation to others. That Keckley parallels this agentive act alongside the act of moving North suggests her mobility from burdened, unhappily married woman to a selfdetermined, whole subject is an upward movement toward freedom. In fact, Keckley does not move North, she moves east “in the spring of 1860, taking the cars direct for Baltimore” (1868, 64). Significantly, she takes a direct rail from one urban space to the next, bypassing all rural spaces in between. As newly freed from both en­ slavement and spousal dissipation, Keckley moves quickly and efficiently, as her mode of transit implies, into the position of self-actuated businesswoman. Initially, she attempts to begin a school training young black women in her system of cutting and fitting dresses. After six weeks with no success, Keckley moves to Washington, where she finds employ­ ment and quite quickly builds a clientele among Washington’s elite women. She informs readers: “I rented apartments in a good locality, and soon had a good run of custom” (65). Not only does this “good locality” facilitate her business, it offers her a ready location from which to move from skilled laborer to businesswoman employing over ten assistants and intimate confidant of “First Ladies” of the North and South. This movement can only Page 8 of 13

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism happen in the urban space where Keckley travels between her personal residence and place of business to the Davis home and Lincoln White House. Moving from her personally defined space into the intimate domestic space of public fig­ ures transforms Keckley from a skilled wage earner to member of the domestic space who performs myriad tasks: from hairdressing to nursing to laying out young Willie Lincoln’s body after his death. Santamarina maintains, “The manner in which Keckley’s role as skilled dressmaker translates into a ‘diversified’ source of miscellaneous labor for the whole Lincoln family attests in part to the lack of specificity, or boundaries, that marks the deeply racial and gendered aspects of her labor” (2005, 154). Santamarina points out white workers’ resistance to the familial relations fostered by domestic service, seeing it as devaluing skilled trade labor. “Keckley,” she writes, “subverting this equation of familial service with low status, exploits Mary Lincoln’s exploitation of her racial and gendered economic susceptibility” (2005, 154). This subversion moves Keckley from paid wage laborer to intimate “friend,” a transformation that she embraces. It is this intimacy that allows her further subversion in subtle ways. Instead of devaluing her skilled labor, Keckley’s work performing “miscellaneous labor” for the Lincolns actually becomes more valuable because she does not only define herself as a (p. 256) laborer or worker but as an intimate “friend” who shares confidences with Mary Lincoln and participates in the joys and sorrows of the White House. Despite the intimacy Keckley maintains between Mary Lincoln and herself, the narrative reveals the friendship was less reciprocal than the term suggests. Mary Lincoln consis­ tently requests, and even demands, Keckley give her time, her service, and herself to sat­ isfy the Lincolns’ needs and desires. Keckley never discusses her personal or private life or conditions in the White House. In fact, the narrative suggests Mary Lincoln displays a decided lack of interest in Keckley’s life. Nevertheless Keckley subverts the one-sided re­ lationship with subtle narrative construction. In the chapter on the death of Willie Lin­ coln, the Lincoln’s second son, Keckley describes the boy’s character and his mother’s de­ votion to him. She then relates the death-bed scene and the following mourning period. Yet right in the middle of this description, Keckley tells readers of her son’s death on the battlefield in the Civil War. She asserts, “It was a sad blow to me, and the kind womanly letter that Mrs. Lincoln wrote to me when she heard of my bereavement was full of gold­ en words of comfort” (1868, 105). Instead of providing the letter or an excerpt of it, as readers could expect—especially given the excess of letters and legal documents inserted throughout the rest of the narrative—Keckley follows this paragraph with the elegy to Willie Lincoln written by poet and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis. This narrative con­ struction is interesting because the juxtaposition suggests the elegy is not only to Willie Lincoln, it is to Keckley’s son as well. Thus Mary Lincoln’s “kind womanly” words are re­ placed by the well-known poet’s lyrical prose in which the manly characteristics of brav­ ery and courage are highlighted. Of additional interest in this narrative choice is that the poet is the same Willis who employed Harriet Jacobs in New York, whom Jacobs did not trust because she found his commitment to abolition suspect. Ironically, then, by juxtapo­

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism sition Willis pays homage to Keckley’s son, a casualty of the Civil War who gave his life in the fight against slavery. Moreover, this juxtaposition intimates her anger at both Mary Lincoln’s callousness and the public response to Keckley’s and Lincoln’s relationship. Keckley’s narrative intent is to establish publicly her personal relationship with Mary Lincoln in a manner that autho­ rizes Keckley to resuscitate Mrs. Lincoln’s reputation—and by extension her own—by ex­ plaining Mrs. Lincoln’s motives for selling her wardrobe in what became known as the “Old Clothes Scandal.” Unfortunately, not only does the public interpret her intent direct­ ly opposite Keckley’s aim, her reputation is severely damaged as a result of publishing the narrative. “We can interpret Keckley’s work,” Sorisio argues, “as exposing the underlying anger, the unconscious or covert wrath, she may have felt for Mary Todd Lincoln in par­ ticular, or for white ladies in general. If the public’s wrath against Keckley is overt, Keckley’s wrath against some members of the public may be covert and private. Behind the Scenes becomes, then, among other things, a means by which Keckley can go public with her anger” (Sorisio 2005, 21). Thus this narrative juxtaposition indicates Keckley’s anger and establishes her dignity, which this interracial interdependent relationship would undermine. As opposed to the representation of a savvy businesswoman that Keckley presents, slave girl Mattie Jackson (1866) relates instances of abuse and protection, respectively, (p. 257) by white women benefactors of the slave girl’s labor. Jackson’s St. Louis experience dur­ ing the Civil War facilitated her efforts to undermine and ultimately escape her slave mistress’s authority and cruelty. The abuse and cruelty of her mistress, Mrs. Lewis, rivals that of any slaveholding woman found in American literature. Lewis not only beat her slaves, her demands for Mattie’s mother’s labor as cook and general housekeeper cause the death of Mattie’s infant brother. Yet St. Louis, occupied by Union troops, provides op­ portunities for Mattie’s and her mother’s multiple escape attempts—in which they finally succeed—as well as discursive subversion of Mrs. Lewis’ political literacy and public con­ fidence. Jackson’s narrative is the only known text by a black woman that relates military action in St. Louis and the seizure of Camp Jackson. Both she and her mother, Ellen Jack­ son, act as war messengers to Mrs. Lewis, who refuses to credit their knowledge. Jackson recalls, I told my mistress that the Union soldiers were coming to take the camp. She replied that it was false, that it was General Kelly coming to reenforce Gen. Frost. In a few moments the alarm was heard. I told Mrs. L. the Unionists had fired upon the rebels. She replied it was only the salute of Gen. Kelley [sic]. At night her hus­ band came home with the news that Camp Jackson was taken and all the soldiers prisoners…. She was much astonished, and cast her eye around to us for fear we might hear her. Her suspicion was correct; there was not a word passed that es­ caped our listening ears. (2009, 108)

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism Although Mrs. Lewis fails to give credence to her reporting, Jackson’s knowledge is more accurate and thus her discursive authority is more effective than Mrs. Lewis’s assumed authority as slave mistress. Similarly, Ellen Jackson’s literacy proves far more worthwhile and meaningful to the Jack­ sons and Mrs. Lewis as it undermines the slaveholder’s knowledge and substantiates Ellen Jackson’s intellectual acumen. Once again, the proximity of Union soldiers in the ur­ ban space facilitates this exchange. Jackson recounts, My mother and myself could read enough to make out the news in the papers. The Union soldiers took much delight in tossing a paper over the fence to us. It aggra­ vated my mistress very much. My mother used to sit up nights and read to keep posted about the war. In a few days my mistress came down to the kitchen again with another bitter complaint that it was a sad affair that the Unionists had taken their delicate citizens who had enlisted and made prisoners of them—that they were babes. My mother reminded her of taking Fort Sumpter and Major Anderson and serving them the same and that turn about was fair play. (2009, 108) Clearly, Ellen Jackson’s literacy serves her well. In contrast to Mrs. Lewis’s vapid com­ ment based on sentiment without context, Ellen responds by situating the St. Louis event in the larger events of the war and offers an assessment based on fact and justice. Mattie Jackson’s narrative intervention locates Ellen’s insight in the framework of litera­ (p. 258)

cy and objective evaluation rather than the reactionary vacuity that Mrs. Lewis exhibits. Ellen Jackson relies on a multifaceted literacy that combines both reading and geopoliti­ cal knowledge about St. Louis and the larger Civil War arena. In his essay, “Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt,” Philip Troutman confirms that insurgent literacy “exposes the ways people and knowl­ edge moved in and out of what we usually think of as bounded spaces of American slav­ ery and even within the most tightly controlled spaces of incarceration, the holding cells of the domestic slave trade” (2005, 204). Although they were bound by slavery in the Lewis household, Ellen Jackson’s insurgent literacy challenges that bond and provides a model for her daughter’s subjective definition. Keckley’s and Jackson’s narratives counterbalance one another and suggest racialized la­ bor relations in the urban landscape were far from monolithic. Keckley’s relationships with white women in St. Louis and Washington were neither entirely favorable nor were they wholly exploitative. While Jackson’s interaction with Mrs. Lewis most often included abuse, she and her mother managed to assert their authority as intellectual beings em­ powered to assess the world and determine their own lives. The urban spaces in which these women lived and worked assisted in their empowerment. These locations and rela­ tions offered multivalenced qualities in which black women, through physical labor and discursive practice, proved their worth and human value. Narratives of enslavement by women present scholars and readers with an array of op­ portunities to understand the complex material and discursive realities that black women met and represented in American slavery. Despite the multitude of narratives, the central Page 11 of 13

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism defining principles of the texts remained the same: the innateness of black women’s hu­ manity and freedom and that their perspectives on the world were equally valid and valu­ able. These theoretical principles are at the core of black feminist criticism. The narra­ tors critically assess the world around them from their own subjective positions and artic­ ulate self-distinctions informed by their experiences, which are hallmarks of black femi­ nist praxis. By coalescing the literary form of the slave narrative with black feminism, these texts manifest power and authority that confirm the declaration that there is, in­ deed, might in each.

References Andrews, William. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiogra­ phy, 1760–1865. Urbana: U Illinois P., 1986. Print. Baym, Nina. Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820– 1870. Ithaca: Cornel UP. 1978. Print. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP. 1987. Print. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. 2000. Print. (p. 259) Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books. 1983. Print. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. New York: Penguin Books. 1986. Print. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Cen­ tury. Urbana: U of Illinois P. 2009. Print. Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1993. Print. ——. ‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Marriage and the Making of African America. New York: Oxford UP. 2010. Print. ——. “‘In Respect to Females…’: Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Fe­ male Narrators.” Black American Literature Forum. 15.2 (1981): 66–70. Web. March 6, 2011. Jackson, Mattie J. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson in Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts: Three African American Women’s Oral Slave Narratives. Ed. DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor and Reginald Pitts. SUNY P. 2009. 99–129. Print. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. (1861). Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 1987. Print.

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“There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. 1868. Ed. Frances Smith Foster. Urbana: U of Illinois P. 2001. Print. Meacham Gould, Virginia. “Urban Slavery—Urban Freedom: The Manumission of Jacquline Lemelle.” More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1996. 298–314. Print. Santamarina, Xiomara. Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 2005. Print. Sorisio, Carolyn. “Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath.” African American Review. 34.1 (2000): 19–38. Print. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly. 1852. Ed. Alfred Kazin. New York: Bantam Books. 1981. Print Tomkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford UP. 1985. Print. Troutman, Philip. “Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt.” The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. Ed. Walter Johnson. New Haven: Yale UP. 2005. 203–233. Print. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” American Quarterly. 18.2 (1966): 151–174. Web. March 6, 2011. Wertheimer, Barbara Mayer. We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America. New York: Pantheon Books. 1977. Print Yellin, Jean Fagan, and Cynthia D. Bond. The Pen Is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910 With Secondary Bibliography to the Present. New York: Oxford UP. 1991. Print.

DoVeanna S. Fulton

DoVeanna Fulton, Arizona State University

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives

“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Perfor­ mance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives   Maurice O. Wallace The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.020

Abstract and Keywords This chapter discusses the emergently economic inflections of the term and meaning of manhood in the slave’s narrative. It focuses on the proprietary preoccupations, or “pos­ sessive hope,” of the exslave upon Emancipation and his concern to actualize manhood’s economic shadings in business, marriage, and property ownership. Counterposing the material meaning of manhood in the slave’s narrative to the sentimental notions of heroic or affective manhood, this chapter posits manhood in the slave’s narrative as an incorpo­ ration of black men legibly into the concrete economic and social life of the nation. More specifically, it defines black manhood as the condition accruing to those who claim prop­ erty rights over their own bodies, labor, acquired possessions, and dependents as free black men and wage earners. Keywords: emancipation, manhood, property rights, marriage, incorporation, possessive hope

The joy of the friends was very great; when they heard that I was alive they soon managed to break open the box, and then came my resurrection from the grave of slavery. I rose a freeman… —Henry Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written By Himself (1851) I seized Covey hard by the throat, and as I did so, I rose. —Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) BY the time the Manchester (UK) outfit of Lee and Glynn published the first English edi­ tion of Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown in 1851, the story of Brown’s fantastic escape from bondage to freedom was already a popular one in U.S. abolitionist circles. Two years earlier, Brown made off from Virginia inside a crate “three feet one inch wide, two feet six inches high, and two feet wide,” conveyed north by an unsuspecting courier (Brown [1851] 2008, 85). Almost as soon as he was resurrected from his wooden tomb and breathing the life-giving air of liberty, members of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Soci­ Page 1 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives ety who had received the concealed fugitive in Philadelphia pressed him for a book-length account of his adventure. Late in 1849, with the market for slave narratives in the United States expanding, Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself, With Remarks Upon the Remedy of Slavery joined three other popular works, Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb, The Life of Josiah Henson, and the fourth edition of the Narrative of William W. Brown, all published that year. Told from a conventional first-person perspective, Narrative of Henry Box Brown mostly hid the fact that it was a book composed by a hand other than Brown’s. Although Charles Stearns, a Boston printer and radical abolitionist, probably transcribed the story directly from an illiterate but performatively practiced Brown, what is clearer is (p. 261) that Stearns took significant liberties in representing Brown’s story to its wide U.S. and Eng­ lish audiences. Perhaps Brown was sensitive to the license Stearns took narrating his life and flight in a voice not entirely, or often recognizably, his. Hearing his Narrative read aloud repeatedly by Stearns (as he almost certainly did during their tour of Massachu­ setts and Rhode Island in October and November 1849) must have struck Brown with a special oddness. It was surely Brown’s story, but it was just as often Stearns’s voice, highflown and moralizing, issuing from its pages. Who knows but that Brown himself felt acutely the very tension, inherent in the double voice narrating Brown’s escape, between the ex-slave’s possession of his own account (Brown’s right to his own representation of facts, in other words) and the control of those facts (their foregrounding, backgrounding, or interpretation) by ventriloquizing white voices such as Stearns’s? This is not to doubt that the original partnership of Brown and Stearns was a rewarding one. In only two months with Stearns, Brown’s 1849 Narrative sold 8,000 copies (Ruggles 2003, 65). But the relationship between them may have come to resemble too nearly the mocking partnership by which the formerly enslaved Brown, afforded certain earnings from his hire in a tobacco manufactory, nevertheless had “the greater portion…stolen from [him] by the unscrupulous hand of [his] dishonest master” (76). Worse still, Brown’s master would also sell off Brown’s wife and children. The shadow of white fiduciary dis­ trust cast by these injustices was surely long enough to touch Stearns. After months of compositional cooperation, followed by a promotional tour landing both fugitive and amanuensis at a different stop each day for 31 consecutive days, Brown may have come to require a greater independence of fortune and experience than he had touring with Stearns, who must have seemed as much a rival narrator as a business partner and book promoter. Whatever his motivation, Brown parted with Stearns not long after their tour ended in the final months of 1849. If he realized, traveling with Stearns, that being a lecturer “was an occupation at which he could succeed,” as Jeffrey Ruggles posits (2003, 65), then the ex­ perience had to have convinced Brown too that lecturer and author were not dissimilar talents. By April 1850, not yet six months after the tour’s end, Brown announced that a new edition of his year-old Narrative was “all ready” (Ruggles 2003, 126). When it was fi­ nally published months later by a Manchester printer, the “First English Edition” of the Page 2 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself declared its self-authorizing independence from Stearns titularly. In contrast to the sweeping title of the 1849 edition, Brown’s terser 1851 title signaled a sudden proprietarial concern. “Written by Himself” revised the earlier edition’s long-winded subtitle with emphatic, unaffected economy. Brown’s determination to tell the story of his life in slavery and freedom independently is of a piece, I submit, with the warring tension Robert Stepto famously observed obtaining uneasily between the narrative proper of Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself and its two authenticating documents: a “Preface” by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and a letter of attestation from the popular New England orator and jurist, Wendell Phillips. Although there is no obvious indication that Douglass actively sought to wrest control of his narrative from Garrison’s interests in it, Stepto is keen to suggest that “[i]n (p. 262) light of…the friction that developed between Garrison and Douglass in later years, we might be tempted,” nev­ ertheless, “to see Garrison’s ‘Preface’ at war with Douglass’s tale for authorial control of the narrative as a whole” (Stepto 1991, 18). More than that, we might say, extrapolating from Stepto, that immanent to all slave narratives is a contest involving “other voices which are frequently just as responsible for articulating a narrative’s tale and strate­ gy” (3), voices vying with the ex-slave’s own for the command of his life’s presentation (and, thus, its symbolic possession) to a free white public. The 1849 Narrative of Henry Box Brown is another case in point. With its devout preface and an equally exhortative anti-slavery manifesto for an appendix (both Stearns’s compositions), and an extract from an address by Unitarian minister Sam’l J. May added for good godly measure, Brown’s 1849 Narrative enacts the struggle for voice, authority, and self-possession that is, according to Stepto, the slave narrator’s reliable second contest for freedom. Stearns’s and May’s near-fanatical moralizing against slavery’s sin and the damnable pretense of northern innocence so fully over­ whelm the central tale’s telling that Brown seems to have lent little more than testimonial value to the narrative’s notoriety. Both within the narrative proper and its frame, then, white voices predominate. But Brown’s 1851 Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown upends the power of white hands on his public life and its literary portrayal. In both voice and form, and in distinct contrast to the narrative’s first printing stateside, the 1851 Nar­ rative represents the ex-slave’s ultimate triumph over his guarantor’s marionette-control of him at the public lectern. Although the preface to Brown’s revised narrative maintains the authenticating imperative of white addenda regularly obtaining to traditional slave narratives, the narrative proper closes with the imprimatur “Henry Box Brown. Finis” (Brown 1851, 96), giving the ex-slave himself the final, self-authorizing word on his life journey to freedom. Brown’s two autobiographies and the struggle for authorial control waged between the lines of narration and off-stage behind the public scene of the book tour, may appear odd­ ly incongruous with this essay’s declared theme: power, property, and manly performativi­ ty in the slave’s narrative. But, it is precisely in the contest between black and white men over individual property rights, a contest emblematized by the problematical politics of Page 3 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives production and promotion surrounding Brown’s two books, that black men’s most strenu­ ous claims to manhood in the slave’s narrative lie. It is not only the legal and moral right to the ownership of their own voices the ex-slave narrators seek in their assertions of re­ sistant male power, however. It is the imagined claim to ownership of their own bodies and labor, and just as crucially that of black women and children, that the freedomdreams of black men in the literature of the ex-slave also contain. In this essay, I focus on four representative works evidencing this claim. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture (1798), Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1850), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), and, as I have shown, Narrative of the Life of Hen­ ry Box Brown (1849; 1851) all represent the proprietarial preoccupations of black man­ hood as a counterclaim to the manhood rights of white men in antebellum America. This hardly surprises, since, in a sense, the whole history of manhood in America, black and white, has been a proprietarial affair.

Freedom, Economy, and the Possessive Hope of Black Manhood (p. 263)

Between 1820 and 1860, as the political economy of an increasingly machinic culture be­ gan transforming growing numbers of white men from planters into entrepreneurs, man­ agers, and professional men, “manhood” came to name an economic condition fundamen­ tally. A white male middle-class managerialism typified its expression as its economic character reinforced, and was reinforced by, its reliable racial complexion, a Mobius rela­ tionality with roots in an even earlier era. Although her book National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men never fails to illuminate the racist reflexes involved in the “ideological coor­ dination of nation, manhood and whiteness” in the Constitutional era, Dana Nelson also lays bare the anxious economic rivalries of white men that the racially exclusionary exer­ cise of so-called “manhood rights” helped camouflage and assuage (1998, xi). From the nation’s early period, Nelson shows, white men whose interests were largely consolidated by revolutionary political activity “were increasingly encountering fellowmen not as citi­ zen but competitor in an unstable, rapidly changing, postwar market economy” (6). The invention of a national manhood, and of an affective, imagined fraternalism underwriting it, not only obscured competitive economic relations but displaced the anxieties surround­ ing white men’s competition onto others—none more intensely than women and blacks. To the extent that the transition to a market economy in the post-Revolutionary era actu­ ally gave rise to, and came more and more to hinge upon, the introduction of white women’s labor, it was white women’s proper management by white men that also helped, despite competing economic interests, bind ties among men. With white women emerging upon the scene of paid labor, white men, Nelson writes, “struggled to reconstitute male power, training attention toward their market interactions with other men” as the mean­ ing of manhood came to be understood at once through economic independence and, of course, sexual difference (1998, 36). Indeed, according to Nelson, men of the day often Page 4 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives characterized a man’s economic failure as “evidence of effeminacy” (37). Against this in­ exorably gendered history of early U.S. capitalism, black men’s manhood hopes were deeply fraught from the first. Although slavery’s overthrow meant the bondsman was legally free, the practice of free­ dom could hardly have been imagined by the ex-slave (or others) apart from its gendered expression within economic and social frameworks. That is, inasmuch as the rights to vote, hold elected office, serve on juries, or enlist in the military—manhood rights, all— hinged upon the prior right to be a man (which is to say, to inhabit that historical catego­ ry in economically and socially legible ways), the ex-slave’s political future lay squarely in a new “manlier” relation to labor in the postslavery economy than was possible for white women. His chattel status abolished by edict and amendment, the unpropertied freedman was thus left to an “unstable, harried class, living [solely] on (p. 264) sufferance of the law” (Du Bois 6). Legal emancipation, therefore, delivered him to social limbo as freedom’s announcement accomplished little on its own to make concrete sense of it in the social reality. Although Lincoln urged the freedmen “in all cases when allowed, [to] la­ bor faithfully for reasonable wages,” his Emancipation Proclamation implicitly acknowl­ edged the limited efficacy of freedom’s legal administration (i.e., “when allowed”) to real­ ize emancipation’s fullest promise. Lincoln cast the law’s limit in irreducibly economic terms, proving the broader truth about the history of liberty in the United States; namely, as Jay R. Mandle has written, that Freedom is always a matter of degree….Freedom for African Americans after the Civil War…should not be defined simply by the existence of [new law or] a [free] market for black agricultural labor in the South. Instead freedom should be mea­ sured by the extent to which African Americans, like other individuals in the coun­ try, were free to seek out and secure employment… (1992, 21–22) Mandle, an economic historian, echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) more than a half-century earlier. Du Bois wrote, “The emancipation of the man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black” (16). Similarly, Mandle underlines the ten­ sion between words and work, law and labor in the wake of emancipation. One might say, following both, that this dissonance between the ex-slave’s elevation to citizenship in 1868 and the concomitant fact of his dispossession is precisely what has troubled the meaning of manhood in African American life and history. As Du Bois put it, “[B]lack men were not men in the sense that white men were and”—given the inferior investments of property and political protection in him—“could never be, in the same sense, free” (5). In the slave narratives I have chosen to foreground here, the meaning of freedom for black men is bound up with a decidedly modern commitment to what Eva Cherniavsky has called “incorporation” or “incorporated embodiment.” By this she means a “privi­ leged form of embodiment for a modern social and economic order” (2006, xvii), one hinging significantly on a discernibly proprietary right to claim exclusive control over one’s own body and person, especially for the purpose of entering into self-interested re­ Page 5 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives lations with others under the rule of capital. In Smith, Bibb, Douglass and Brown, Cherniavsky’s limnings of the deep structures of masculine incorporation are evidenced in stark relief. In fact, it is exactly because the slave’s condition is so centrally defined by his dispossession “within a capitalist formation characterized by invasive market rela­ tions,” as Cherniavsky says, that narratives like Smith’s, Bibb’s, Douglass’s, and Brown’s may be relied upon to reveal, vividly, the deeper ways that “the framing of self-determina­ tion as self-ownership, [and] of rights as property rights, informs the delineation of freedom” (xvii) as a manhood project, one ensnared in the unforgiving tar and pitch of emancipation, incorporation and modern capital. In this sense, these narratives surface what I think is apt to call “the possessive hope of African American freedom” in the slave narrative tradition. This “possessive hope” names a proprietarial dream-wish and man­ agerial drive subtending the slave’s will to freedom and (p. 265) self-determination. Its economic concern for self-proprietorship, especially, cannot but cast the struggle for free­ dom as a protracted striving for the social coherence of manhood and blackness against their historical incongruity over two centuries.

Race, Manhood, and the Proprietarial Uncon­ scious Earlier reflections on manhood and early African American writing have tended to em­ phasize depictions of manly affects that identify black manhood with classical notions of the heroic. One of these, Richard Yarborough’s “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Mas­ culine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’” (1990), makes an inventory of the traits associated with manhood’s nineteenth-century ontology: it seems the familiar ad­ mixture of “nobility, intelligence, strength, articulateness, loyalty, virtue, rationality, courage, self-control, courtliness, honesty and physical attractiveness” (162) congealed in the nineteenth century to establish an enduring portrait of what manhood, black or white, ought to look like. In several slave narratives such as those by Bibb, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, Solomon Northup, James Pennington, and, crucially, Douglass’s Narrative (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), black manhood’s affective performance is on brilliant display. But what manhood is precisely, what it signifies at its epistemic core in these works, seems harder for critics to articulate. Yarborough posited that “the term manhood comes to stand for a crucial spiritual commodity” in nineteenth-century life, a will to power “that one must maintain in the face of oppression in order to avoid losing a sense of self-worth” (1997, 160). Today, more than twenty years later, Yarborough’s position is as prominent as any since. More recently, Dana Nelson, too, traced the meaning of manhood in the earliest years of the nineteenth century to a racial­ ly-inflected “spirit” of controlled aggression and restraint in contrast to the uncontrolled aggression prejudicially ascribed to Indigenous men. But neither abstraction of manhood’s meaning into a “spiritual commodity” or characteristic “spirit” of civilized sub­ jects is sufficient alone to identify manhood’s basic condition. So long sentimentalized, there is little about such affective notions of manhood to differentiate them from those as­ sociated with the epic hero in classical literature. Under this foreshortened view, man­ Page 6 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives hood gets on as if it has been, or could be, wholly removed from a (homo)sociality, poli­ tics, or ideology of material relations. While Yarborough and Nelson articulate affective manhood succinctly, admittedly both ar­ gue past its sentimental limits. Yarborough, for example, appeals to the sociologist Robert Staples’s Black Masculinity: The Black Man’s Role in American Society, a text which might be said to have inaugurated the present critical interest in the intersectionality of race and manhood when it was published in 1982, to argue an important, if still yet con­ servative, point about the essential meaning of manhood: namely that manhood, as Sta­ ples puts it, “has always implied a certain autonomy over and mastery of (p. 266) one’s environment” (qtd. in Yarborough 1997, 162). To the extent that the environments inhab­ ited by black subjects, in particular, have rarely, if ever, escaped a racial history or poli­ tics, Staples’s observation may be a more strictly sociological than naturalistic one, de­ spite its Darwinian echoes. And, thus, also more pointedly materialist, potentially, in sig­ nification. Similarly, a none too vague historical materialism subtends Nelson’s further ar­ ticulations of the variety of manhood that she says arose between the 1780s and the 1850s. In that period, she explains, white manhood worked to harmonize the competing political, economic, and professional interests of white men to form a racial hegemony of manly managerialism in public and private spheres governed by the social logic of the marketplace. Thusly did affective understandings of American manhood come to also be linked to, and imaginatively realized by, an economic organization of American social life and survival. Although Yarborough and Nelson are powerfully suggestive critics of manhood’s nine­ teenth-century economic unconscious, critic David Leverenz’s considerations of the same are, in a word, systematic. In Manhood and the American Renaissance, he outlines three ideologies of U.S. manhood between 1820 and 1860. The patrician paradigm, full of elite merchants, lawyers, and landed gentry, established manhood in property ownership, pa­ triarchy, and dedicated exercises of citizenship. The artisanal tradition, more democrati­ cally conceived, valorized freedom, pride in craft, and less anxious exercises in citizen­ ship (voting, as against, say, holding office). Later, the entrepreneurial ideal fetishized competitive individualism, business, and aggressive materialism. Accordingly, it main­ tained “a brutal struggle for dominance, not freedom, at its core” (Leverenz 1989, 25). Each of Leverenz’s outlines not only reflects the economic underpinnings of manhood’s evolving meaning over a half century, but in their discrete succession tracks the unfolding of U.S. capitalism itself and, unavoidably, the political economy of slavery that at once set the stage for and animated it. Slavery, of course, “developed within, and was in a sense exploited by, the capitalist world market,” as Eugene Genovese established almost 50 years ago (1965, 4). Its crucial place in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American economic development was powerfully enabled by two intersecting phenomena: first, as economic historian Gavin Wright notes, an obsessive concern for property rights in economic and legal discourses fetishized the possessive power of men, while in legal discourse the appropriation of the condition of the bondsman to common-law conceptions of property traditionally ascribed to nonhuman Page 7 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives possessions resulted in the “full alienability of slave property in the market” (2006, 7). As chattel, therefore, excluded by his very condition from the possessive state, the bonds­ man became both the guarantor of white manhood and the very image of black manhood’s impossibility. So bound up with property rights obsessions and other economic anxieties was the idea of manhood at midcentury, that is, that the slave bore no ontologi­ cal potential for manhood in his alienated (which is to say, fully possessed) condition un­ der the law. Freedom, then, unfolded a far deeper mystery not lost on its most earnest as­ pirants. “I was now my own master,” Frederick Douglass wrote, on escaping slavery in Maryland to New Bedford, Massachusetts (N 118). It was title in his own self as much as a new independence Douglass’s “mastery” also (p. 267) attested to. One might say that Douglass’s is but the most clearly representative of the doubly dialectical and proprietari­ al preoccupations of so many slave autobiographers. As the most vital of freedom’s social consequences and the strongest guarantee of its lived entitlements, manhood (often, in the idiom of mastery) fills substantial space in texts of men’s slave narratives particularly. Consistent with a history and politics according to which, as Michael Kimmel explains, the American man’s “sense of himself as a man was in constant need of demonstra­ tion” (2012, 32), few did not connect the stolen or purchased freedom of their narrators to a display of manliness aimed at establishing black men’s constitutional fitness for the free life by consistently casting themselves as black possessive subjects and heroic sur­ vivors.

Narrating Black Manhood: Money, Marriage, and the Manly Ideal Although the Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture was published well ahead of the boon years of the slave narrative’s popularity in the United States, its 1798 publica­ tion did not lag far behind that of Benjamin Franklin’s seminal Autobiography of 1791. If Franklin was “the first American prototype of the Self-Made Man,” as Kimmel avows (2012, 16), he was not without rival for that distinction in Venture Smith. James Horton describes Smith’s narrative as “the iconic story of a self-made man who struggled against the greatest odds to become a successful entrepreneur” (2010, xi). Hardly a more faithful version of Leverenz’s “patrician paradigm” of American manhood exists in black letters. The son of a wealthy Guinea prince, Smith was still a boy when a neighboring tribe invad­ ed his tribe, took him captive, and sold him to European slave traders. One of them, “with his own private venture,” Smith explains, purchased the young captive “for four gallons of rum, and a piece of calico” (2010, 13. Emphasis mine). His very name announced his con­ dition in slavery, his alienation and commodity-life. While Smith’s defiance of the slave condition in Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture is altogether equal to Douglass’s manly assertions more than 50 years later, the patrician ideal from which the social logic of slavery derives is never far from Smith’s freedom dreams. So in contrast to Douglass’s bare-knuckle refusal to cower to Covey, who “seemed now to think he had me and could do what he pleased” (N,118), Smith acquiesces to Mumford, “voluntarily Page 8 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives caus[ing] myself to be bound…and carried before my young master that he might do what he pleased with me” (16). Unlike Douglass, Smith is little concerned for the affective dis­ play of manhood described by Yarborough. In Smith, manhood is hardly the matter of muscle or manly resolve it is in Douglass. It is, as we shall see, mainly a matter of money, mobility, and property ownership. One of the most remarkable features of Smith’s short narrative is the wide arc of move­ ment mapping his journey from slavery to freedom. In the slim space of (p. 268) little more than 30 pages, Smith covers 400 miles from Guinea to the coast, crosses the Atlantic to Barbados and Rhode Island, and is conveyed to masters in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Sweeping though they seem, Smith’s passages obey a narrow commercial logic. Conse­ quently, he does not so much travel as he is traded across international and domestic markets. Surmising, in one instance, that his master had designs on “convert[ing] me into cash” and “speculat[ing] with me as with other commodities” (2010, 21–22), Smith is sealed into crushing, commercial objecthood in slavery, revealing no greater degree of self-consciousness in Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture than his commercial value in pounds. Far from exulting in the fact of his freedom, at manumission Smith chafes at the price placed on him, an exorbitant “seventy-one pounds two shillings.” Figures prepossess Smith’s imagination. So fully, in fact, that whereas Henry Louis Gates emphasized literacy as the founding trope of African American literature (genuflecting before Phillis Wheatley, Olauduah Equiano, Frederick Douglass), Smith signals in another direction. The privilege his Narrative admits to numeracy over literacy is so pronounced that a crucial analogy might obtain owing to it: what literacy is to freedom in Wheatley, Equiano, and Douglass, numeracy is to mastery and the patrician ideal in Smith. A few lines are sufficient to con­ vey Smith’s numerical obsession. I hired myself out at Fisher’s Island, and earned twenty pounds; thirteen pounds six shillings of which my maser drew for the privilege, and the remainder I paid him for my freedom. This made fifty-one pounds two shillings which I paid him. In October following I went and wrought six months at Long Island. In that six month’s time I cut and corded four hundred cords of wood besides threshing out seventy-five bushels of grain, and received of my wages down only twenty pounds, which left remaining a large sum….I returned to my master and gave him what I received of my six months labor. This left only thirteen pounds eighteen shillings to make up the full sum for my redemption. My master liberated me, saying that I might pay what was behind if I could ever make it convenient….Being thirty-six years old, I left Col. Smith once for all. (2010, 24) In Smith, freedom is no immaterial dream. It is a living quantity, measurable in terms of ownership and production. Nor is slavery in Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Ven­ ture that kind of spatial containment we know the southern plantation and its disciplinary devices were fashioned to enforce. As a slave, Smith is a remarkably mobile subject, an observation underscoring black freedom as something other than unregulated (black) Page 9 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives movement across regulated (white) geography. Physical captivity is less Smith’s experi­ ence of slavery than the discomfiture of his ceaseless circulation everywhere as a com­ modity “with other commodities.” For Smith, freedom is a doubly ontological and econom­ ic ambition, the achievement of which is secured in this slave narrative by the transfor­ mative power of his meticulous purse to turn the slave into a master. But numeracy fitted Smith for more than economic self-mastery in the inchoate market culture of the turn of the nineteenth century. It also fit him, manfully, to contract for mastery over others. Though the accomplishment of becoming, inalienably, his own property and mas­ ter “is a privilege” Smith avows “nothing else can equal” (31), his autobiography does not end without also accenting a baronial drive to property in others. Although Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture does not fail to call attention to Smith’s affective mas­ culinity, it is never highlighted to merely affective ends. Where Smith might otherwise ex­ tend his boast of superior physical strength, for example, he regularly passes up the op­ portunity, preferring a proud reflection on the profitability of being master above muscu­ lar self-regard. “In the space of six months,” he crows in one instance, “I cut and corded upwards of four hundred cords of wood. Many other singular and wonderful labors I per­ formed…which would not be inferior to those just recited” (25). In manly terms, however, (p. 269)

these displays hardly measure the personal or commercial value of land, family, and trust to the security of the Smith’s free personhood and incorporation. So the other labors, he says, “I must omit” (25). In their place is still more of Smith’s accountancy: In the aforementioned four years what wood I cut at Long-Island amounted to sev­ eral thousand cords, and the money which I earned thereby amounted to two hun­ dred and seven pounds ten shillings. This money I laid up carefully by me….. It will here be remembered how much money I earned by cutting wood in four years. Besides this I had considerable money, amounting in all to near three hundred pounds. (2010, 25, 26) Bordering on acquisitive, Smith strikes a sharp contrast to other ex-slave narrators. The emancipation of his wife and three children at narrative’s end comes not as the jubilant outcome of a cunning escape plot, as happens in other narratives. Rather, it comes as the literal payout of compulsive investing. There is little effort at dressing up the transaction­ al nature of the project of family reunion, in fact. Smith’s language is baldly commercial. At Ram-Island, he “purchased Solomon and Cuff, two sons of mine, for two hundred dol­ lars each” (26). Precisely four years later, “being in my forty-fourth year,” Smith recounts, “I purchased my wife Meg, and thereby prevented having another child to buy, as she was then pregnant” (27. Emphasis mine). The materialist motivations of his efforts plainly ex­ posed, Smith adds easily, “I gave forty pounds for her” (27). When Smith’s oldest son, Solomon, a young man hired out to service at sea, succumbs suddenly to scurvy, the father’s grief is also expressed in pecuniary terms. “In my son, be­ sides loss of life, I lost equal to seventy pounds,” Smith’s lament ends (26). Smith also re­ lates having “purchased” three other men—one “negro man” for $400, another for £25, and a third man “for no other reason than to oblige him” at £60 (26). Their buying is still Page 10 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives more evidence of the proprietarial sensibility prevailing throughout A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture. It is the selfsame structure of manly feeling which de­ clares at the book’s conclusion, “I am now possessed of more than one hundred acres of land, and three habitable dwelling houses” (31). Smith’s possession of houses and land, (p. 270) as well as his title in men, realizes a manly ideality, discernibly patrician in its conceits, of which Smith is as representative as any white man in his day. If Smith was the colonial era’s model black burgher, then by the third decade of the new century the burgher’s model manhood was under threat by a new, emergently middleclass model of American manhood. Between 1825 and 1835, as Kimmel makes most clear, manhood was “no longer fixed in land or small-scale property ownership” (2012, 18) like that achieved by the acquisitiveness of Venture Smith. Instead, a rising middle-class man­ hood formed around competitive individualism and a will to dominance over against a more democratic will to freedom. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), especially, bear the imprint of precisely this manly recoding. Like Smith nearly a half century earlier, Douglass is concerned in his narratives to establish his manhood in freedom according to “the rights and privileges of patriarchy, which include ownership of…wives and children,” as Deborah McDowell famously pointed out about Douglass (1991, 200). “Central to Douglass’s condemnation,” she writes, “is slavery’s legal denial of family to slaves” (200). At bottom, this too, of course, is an economic protest by Douglass, as much a matter of class respectability as testimony to an originary claim to civilization and modernity. Much attention has already been paid to Douglass’s quest for the manly ideal in his auto­ biographies of 1845 and 1855, to be sure. And not a few critics have taken seriously Douglass’s own sense that his “battle with [the overseer] Covey was the turningpoint” (N, 89) in his determined ambition to achieve his own manhood. The brawl with Covey is not unimportant to my argument here about power, property, (black) manhood and slave narratives—as a matter of fact, from a certain point of view, the fight with Cov­ ey might be said to represent the ur-trope of black masculinist writing and self-expression —but the pages dedicated to Douglass overcoming Covey are far too many to risk redun­ dancy by repeating their arguments here. Instead, I want to highlight what follows Douglass’s pronouncement of manhood and, especially, his concern to establish his man­ hood in deeply material terms. More specifically, I mean to point to the domestic impera­ tive in Douglass’s post-Covey career as an extension and expression of “the rights and privileges of patriarchy” defining postpatrician manhood in the United States from early to mid-century. Douglass was four years from his fight with Covey when he made off from Baltimore to New York, his second attempt at freedom. Stealing away by train to Havre de Grace, Maryland, then ferrying across the Susquehanna River to board a second train to Wilm­ ington, Delaware and a steamer headed for Philadelphia, Douglass boarded a night train there and landed furtively in New York on September 4, 1838. Presuming safety there, he immediately wrote to Anna Murray, a free black woman in Baltimore and his intended wife. Murray joined a “homeless, houseless, and helpless” Douglass days later and the Page 11 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives two quickly married (N, 113). “New York, September 15, 1838” (N, 114) read the mar­ riage certificate’s final official entry. Douglass’s reproduction of the certificate in Narra­ tive intimates the importance Douglass placed on the marriage contract in hopes of reme­ dying his dispossessed situation (“homeless, houseless, and helpless”). (p. 271) His want for “an exact copy” (N, 114) of the document grafted onto the pages of Narrative exactly where, in his autobiography’s unfolding, he crosses into freedom (rather than copied into the appendix where one might expect it) supports historians Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris. They observe that as black people exited slavery in New York, “in quick succession and with enormous enthusiasm, [they] married, reconstructed their families, established inde­ pendent residences, secured wage employment, purchased property, joined churches, at­ tended schools, and created a host of associations and organizations” (2005, 17. Empha­ sis mine). If the swiftness of Douglass’s move to marry once he arrived in New York is to be trusted, then Berlin and Harris have shined their critical light on not only a reliable or­ dering of the historical protocols of incorporated embodiment by blacks, but quite plausi­ bly on marriage as the first work of freedom. To ex-slave narrator Henry Bibb, if marriage was not exactly the first work of freedom, it surely followed freedom close on its heels. In his 1850 Narrative of the Life and Adven­ tures of Henry Bibb Bibb remarked upon the “many fugitive slaves who have been en­ abled by the aid of an over-ruling providence to escape to the free North with those whom they claim as their wives,” noting how quickly the newly free wed under the law ([1850] 1969, 78). As legal regard for the union of slaves did not exist on the plantation, “as soon as they get free from slavery,” Bibb goes on, “they go before some anti-slavery clergy­ man” to marry formally before God and government (78). Bibb made much of the move­ ment by blacks to marry under sanction of the law, affirming the honor of the race by its example: “I presume there are no class of people in the United States who so highly ap­ preciate the legality of marriage as those persons who have been held and treated as property,” he concludes (164). The history of emancipation and the post-bellum period, it seems, agrees with Bibb. In her illuminating article “Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction-Era Regulation of African American Marriages,” Katherine Franke asserts that “the ability to marry was a powerful­ ly important aspect of freedom and of acceptance into civil society” for the formerly en­ slaved (1999, 252–253). Revoicing Bibb’s first-person narration in scholarly terms, Franke looks back upon the documentary history of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil War pen­ sion claims and argues persuasively that “[t]he struggles of abject groups,” like formerly enslaved persons, “to emerge from the obscurity of the legal margins into the mainstream of civil society often materialized through demands for legal recognition by the state and inclusion in the dominant legal and political institutions of society”(254). As it concerns marriage specifically, however, the ex-slave’s valorization of marriage’s legal and political power of incorporation (Cherniasvsky) is equally in the interest of economic survivability. On this view, it is hardly surprising that Douglass writes of receiving the marriage certifi­ cate reproduced in his Narrative along with “a five-dollar bill from [his abolitionist friend]

Page 12 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives Mr. Ruggles” (N 114). Both certificate and paper bill, I mean to suggest, are forms of le­ gal tender. Money and marriage collided in the “larger cultural transformation of the relationship be­ tween production and reproduction” described by Franke (1999, 292). Marriage helped define and control the proper sphere of the family unit and to regulate reproduction so as to mark its difference from the world of wage labor and the production (p. 272) of goods. As historian Amy Dru Stanley put it, it helped, in other words, “to fence in the dependen­ cies of the home, to stop them from permeating and contaminating the marketplace where labor power was bought and sold” (1996, 86). Marriage gave strong moral valida­ tion to a new economic arrangement between black men and women, one “supplied,” as Dylan Pennington has shown, “by a basic change in the power relations within their [slave] marriages” (2003, 180). In freedom, marriage secured more than status for Fred­ erick Douglass and Anna Murray. Their certificate was also a contract between them, a le­ gal accord establishing, in effect, Murray’s structural (if not always actual) dependence upon the independent promise of Douglass as legal principal and free market actor. The implied arrangement was soon set in sharp relief. Quitting New York on the heels of their wedding, Douglass and Murray arrived in New Bedford penniless. In no time, though, Douglass was working for “nine dollars a month; and out of this rented two rooms for nine dollars per quarter and supplied my wife—who was unable to work—with food and some necessary articles of furniture” (MB 350). The terms of their “status-contract” being thusly met, Douglass came to regard his new inde­ pendence, that which is “beyond seeking [the] friendship [i.e. patronage] or support of any man,” as, in his words, “the real starting point of something like a new existence” (MB 349, Emphasis mine), not the fight with Covey. Douglass’s exulting, “I can work! I can work for a living…I have no Master Hugh to rob me of my earnings” (MB 349) marks the new moment and paints him in stark contrast to Murray, “who was unable to work.” Clearly, Murray’s dependency on Douglass is as productive of the new state of indepen­ dence Douglass relishes as Douglass’s freedom from the extortions of Master Hugh is. Structurally speaking, then, marriage, not physical resistance, settles the quest for man­ hood in Douglass (a quest set in motion, but not completed, by the clash with Covey), as it binds the manful independence of the free wage-earner to an economic authority over hearth and home as husband and father. As if to underscore this very point, Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, edits out the marriage certificate reproduced in Narrative and includes instead a transcription of the ex-slave’s manumis­ sion papers, verification of the “commercial transaction” to which, avowed Douglass, “I owe my exemption from the democratic operation of the fugitive slave bill of 1850” ([1855] 1969, 375) and tender for entry into the free society. The papers “placed… in my hands” (375) were as currency, in other words, a paper note denominated at £150, “the sum paid for my freedom” (375). Houston Baker has observed the identical function for the certificate of manumission reproduced in Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative. “The certificate is, in effect, an economic sign which competes with and radically qualifies the Page 13 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives ethical piousness of its enfolding text. The inscribed document is a token of mastery, sig­ nifying its recipient’s successful negotiation of a deplorable system of exchange” (1984, 36). But if the marriage certificate established the structural conditions of Douglass’s manhood as if by contract, then the manumission papers replacing it in My Bondage and My Freedom does the marriage contract one better: More assuredly than the marriage certificate, Douglass’s freedom papers not only certify that selfsame (p. 273) indepen­ dence the marriage contract implied, but monetize it, allowing that the further price of his manhood was in his own industrious hands. Backgrounded though it has often been in the critical literature, nothing about my em­ phasis on the links between money or marriage and manhood in the slave narratives is veiled to those who care to study manhood’s material meaning closely enough. An eco­ nomic understanding of American manhood might be nowhere more clearly dramatized, in fact, than in the personal narratives of men (and some women) ex-slaves like Bibb who go from chattel property to incorporated personhood in less than a lifetime. Hear Bibb: Dear Sir:—I am happy to inform you that you are not mistaken in the man whom you sold as property, and received pay for as such. But I thank God that I am not property now, but am regarded as a man like yourself. ([1850] 1969, 155) Within the tight frame of this riposte, to be “like” his former master is, of course, to pos­ sess the rights and means of property and purchase. Could Bibb have had anything else in mind but this very sense of masculine sameness (“like yourself”) obtaining to his own free self as he professed, “I believe now, that every man has a right to wages for his la­ bor; a right to own his wife and children; right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and a right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience” (66)? Merging the rhetorics of law, economics, and religious faith, Bibb’s is perhaps only the baldest expres­ sion of everyday American manliness at mid-century conveyed in material terms. More precisely than his contemporaries, Bibb cast marriage, specifically, not according to cur­ rent sentimental sensibilities entirely but according to the materialist imperatives de­ manded by the manly condition as well. Although it was the better-known William Wills Brown who pointed out that “it is very common among slaves” to talk of marriage, and indeed “to be married” (213), it was Bibb who laid its politics dramatically bare. Bibb’s own engagement he described as a “con­ tract [that] should not be considered binding” (164). Then, when he married, the union was, crucially, “in accordance with the laws of God and our country” (164). No slave nar­ rator was ever more legalistic than Bibb. But a broader politics of marriage animates Bibb’s narrative, one that has revealingly little to do with law in a strict sense. The wider discourse on marriage in Bibb (as also in well-known narratives by William Wells Brown, Henry “Box” Brown, William and Ellen Craft, and Harriet Jacobs, to name a few) reveals black manhood as the new condition obtaining to black men upon whom the cultural and materialist logic of nineteenth-century matrimony has conferred the right to black women’s bodies and their domestication, the law wresting this entitlement from white men’s prior claims under slavery. A trafficking in black women, one might say, then, was Page 14 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives to persist past the plantation, animating the black male struggle for a parallel freedom with white men. In bondage, it is “to the will of her master” that the slave’s “wife” must submit on pain of punishment or worse, Bibb objects. “She can neither be pure nor virtuous….She (p. 274) dare not refuse to be reduced to the state of adultery at the will of her master” (([1850] 1969, 164). Although his complaint is against irreligion, Bibb’s outrage at the slave woman’s stolen sex is at bottom more than only moralistic. In the strange syntactic calcu­ lus that closes chapter XVIII of Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, in fact, the clearest expression of the proprietarial dream-wish of nineteenth-century black American manhood is made to surface under the pressure of close reading: “But thanks be to God, I am now free from the hand of the cruel oppressor, no more to be plundered of my dearest rights; the wife of my bosom, and my poor suffering offspring” (164). Whether Bibb intended his “dearest rights” to be one among three unique dispossessions of the slave, or meant that phrase to signify a discrete category (“rights”) composed by two dispossessions, the slave’s wife and children, comes down to how one adjudicates the task of the semicolon in nineteenth-century punctuation practices. On the strength of that usage history, one might infer from Bibb, without grammatical disloyalty, a glad restitu­ tion of the “dearest rights” of a free man, viz., his direct and unmediated entitlement to the lives and labor of his wife and children as property rights much like those attending to Venture Smith’s purchases of houses and land. On this view, black manhood may be said to have been shaped by a common historical trafficking in (black) women in U.S. slave narratives alongside propertied white men committed to deeply economic notions of independence and manhood.

Conclusion Establishing one’s person (or one’s race, for that matter) a “man” (and not a “woman” or lady race), deserving of the rights and protections that affirm and guarantee the free con­ dition, was among the first exigencies of emancipation, particularly for the male slave narrator. Deprived of the right (or logic) of property in even their own persons as slaves, Henry “Box” Brown, Venture Smith, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Bibb represent that urgent search as fugitives and, finally, ex-slaves. Theirs reflect a common quest for that social context according to which freedom is made visible and concretely meaningful—in a word, material. The quest is figured as a drama of ascent to economic independence and possessive individualism. Recountings of “I rose”-triumphalism in Henry “Box” Brown and Frederick Douglass not only dramatize the strenuous recovery of liberated black self­ hood from the white-knuckle clutches of chattel servitude, they are a common trope for what Baker once called in Equiano “an active, inversive, ironically mercantile ascent” to mastery over the slave condition (1984, 37). In the slave narratives, the meaning of manhood is specific. It is irreducibly economic and fiercely competitive. To be sure, manhood is a rivalry affair between men, black men vy­ ing with white men, for the gendered prerogatives of property and free personhood with­ Page 15 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives in a political economy made postslavery by Constitutional reform but not state recon­ struction. Manhood is mastery, then, in nearly every way that term signifies. It is a pos­ sessive freedom-dream and, as the contest between Henry “Box” Brown and Charles (p. 275) Stearns dramatizes forcefully, part of the unavoidable struggle for the very right to tell an ex-slave’s story and own it free and clear.

References Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984. Print. Berlin, Ira and Leslie M Harris, eds. Slavery in New York. New York: The New Press, 2005. Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup. Ed. Gilbert Osofsky. New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1850] 1969. Brown, William Wells. Narrative of William Wells Brown: A Fugitive Slave Written by Him­ self. 1847. Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky. New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1847] 1969. Print. Brown, Henry. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. 1851. Ed. John Ernest. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008. Print. Cherniavsky, Eva. Incorporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics of Capital. Min­ neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006. Print. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. 1845. Ed. David W. Blight. Boston: Bedford, 2003. Print. ——. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Dover, 1969. Print. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. 1935. Introd. David Lever­ ing Lewis. New York: The Free Press, 1998. Print. Franke, Katherine M. “Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of African American Marriage.” Yale Journal of Law & Humanities 11 (1999): 251–309. Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York: Pantheon, 1965. Print. Horton, James. Forward. Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom. Ed. James Brewer Stewart. Amherst: Univ. of MA Press, 2010. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2012. Page 16 of 17

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“I Rose a Freeman”: Power, Property, and the Performance of Manhood in the Slave Narratives Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989. Print. Lincoln, Abraham. The Emancipation Proclamation. January 1, 1863. National Archives & Records Administration. Web April 13, 2012. Mandle, Jay R. Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience since the Civil War. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Print. McDowell, Deborah E. “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-Amer­ ican Narrative Tradition.” Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass. Ed. William L. Andrews. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1991. 36–58. Print. Nelson, Dana D. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998. Print. Pennington, Dylan C. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003. Print. Ruggles, Jeffrey. The Unboxing of Henry Brown. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2003. Print. Smith, Venture. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture Smith. Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom. Ed. James Brewer Stewart, Amherst: Univ. of MA Press, 2010.

(p. 276)

Stanley, Amy Dru. “Home Life and the Morality of the Market.” The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880. Eds. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1996. 74–96. Print. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. 2nd ed. Ur­ bana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991. Print. Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American Economic Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2006. Print. Yarborough, Richard. “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave.’” Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Eds. Anne Goodwin Jones and Susan V. Donaldson. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1997. 159–184. Print.

Maurice O. Wallace

Maurice O. Wallace, Duke University

Page 17 of 17

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives

Family and Community in Slave Narratives   Brenda E. Stevenson The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.018

Abstract and Keywords This essay is a survey of the attitudes, ideals, and experiences described by enslaved blacks regarding their family and community lives. It seeks to answer the following: How did enslaved people speak of family and community in their ancestral homes and in other parts of the Black Atlantic? What persons were included? Who was excluded? How valu­ able were these “connections” to the enslaved? How were they formed? How were they destroyed? How did they function? How did they change over time, place, and circum­ stance? Were they a source of resistance? And did they endure? The essay draws on a va­ riety of narrative sources, including the published accounts of eighteenth-century Africans James Albert Gronniosaw and Ottobah Cugoano, a Phyllis Wheatley poem, the reminiscences of black loyalists and Nat Turner, the iconic nineteenth-century writings of Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, and Harriet Jacobs, and the invaluable 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) collection. Keywords: slave community, slave family, WPA collection, Black Atlantic, Ottobah Cugoano, Nat Turner, James Gronniosaw, resistance

WHEN the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewer finally had the opportunity to speak with aging former slaves Ben and Emma Simpson in Texas, she found something of a goldmine and a huge contradiction. The elderly couple could not have given more dif­ ferent accounts of their times as enslaved people. Their descriptions of their families and communities as youth echoed some similarities. But by the time that Ben was a full-time hand, his life, and those of his family and his community of friends and fellow workers, had changed dramatically from what he had known as a child and from that of his spouse (Tyler and Murphy 1997, 11; B. Simpson, Texas WPA, 1941, n.p.; E. Simpson, Texas WPA, 1941, n.p.). Ben, whose parents had been smuggled from Africa after the legal end to the slave trade in 1808, told a story of familial dispersal and loss, communal alienation, and psychologi­ cal, physical, and sexual abuse. If ever slavery was the essence of brutality, as Kenneth Stampp proposed possible in his mid-twentieth century groundbreaking monograph The Peculiar Institution (1956), it was the experience Ben Simpson testified was his life as a Page 1 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives slave of Georgia born farmer, horse thief, murderer, and sadist Alex Stielazen (aka Simp­ son). As an adolescent and young adult, Ben witnessed Stielazen murder his African mother, rape his sister Emma, and force her to have sex with the other enslaved men he owned before he sold her at the age of 15, just before she was to give birth. Branded, chained up day and night to other slaves, routinely starved, barely clothed and made to sleep outdoors, once freed (three years after general emancipation), Ben was then a “wild man,” “[a]fraid of everybody,” and he had no family or community that he could call his own (Tyler and Murphy 1997, 11; B. Simpson, 1941, n.p.). Ben’s wife, Emma Simpson (not to be confused with Ben’s sister Emma whom he never saw again once she was sold), described a quite different familial experience as a slave. Born in Texas, her family also had been divided and sold when she was a child, but they were able to reunite when the Civil War ended. In contrast to Ben’s monstrous master, Emma described her mistress as “just a plum angel” and her master as “good,” “very (p. 278) religious,” and “jolly” (E. Simpson, 1941, n.p.). Emma confessed that she worked hard, both in the house and in the cotton field, but her master made certain her family and enslaved community had more than adequate food, clothing, and shelter. Their owner also allowed them to rest on Saturdays, when the families and the enslaved community could wash their clothes and “clean out our quarters.” Saturday evenings, everyone gath­ ered for “negro dance, banjo pickin,’ story telling, ring games.” On Sundays, their owners took them to church meetings. Emma even recalled the community coming together on Christmas to receive candy, nuts, and a big dinner (E. Simpson n.p.). Within the bounty and the balance that were the stories of Mr. and Mrs. Simpson were opposite, and perhaps oppositional, accounts of slave family and community life as depict­ ed in narratives. The differences they insisted upon do not alienate either from the spec­ trum of family and community life found in all genres of slave narratives—those, like the 2,000 or so produced by the WPA some 70 years after black chattel slavery had ended; or written during the earliest years of enslavement, such as the famed eighteenth-century account The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789); or composed during the decades of the nineteenth century before the Civ­ il War, such as Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831); Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, A Slave (1845); Henry Brown’s Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (1851); Eliza Picquet’s Octoroon (1861); and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); or even those 55 or so produced in the first decades after emancipation, such as Octavia Roger’s The House of Bondage (1890); Henry George’s The Life of Henry George (1894)’ Isaac Mason’s The Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (1893); or Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery: An Au­ tobiography (1901). Methodologically, different genres of narrative propose some difficulty when trying to speak comprehensively of important emerging themes. It can be even more of a challenge when trying to discern a consensus of ideas, ideals, or lived experiences. The enslaved population was notoriously diverse upon arrival. Their entrance at various stages of the nation’s, and the institution’s, development; their assignment to a vast territory strung Page 2 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives along the eastern seaboard, the piedmont and the trans-Mississippi West; their involve­ ment in varied economic sectors on countless sized and organized rural estates and in ur­ ban arenas; their formal control by miscellaneous local, state, and federal bodies of legis­ lation, as well as the palpable control of their sundry masters, overseers, and drivers are only the most significant characteristics that differentiated the lives and perspectives of those persons, male and female, young and old, African and creole, whose stories might be recounted in the narratives that emerged over three centuries. At the heart of any discussion of slave family and community, of course, are questions of definition and label as well as some important queries concerning membership, value, and maintenance. How, in fact, did enslaved people speak of family and community? What persons were included? Who was excluded? How valuable were these “connections” to the enslaved? How were they formed? How were they destroyed? And, did they endure? Enslaved people counted many persons among their kin. Family to them could be nuclear, extended, even communal or fictive. While most family members were racially black, a significant minority was biracial and multiracial. A few even considered whites to be part of their families. Family derived from ancestral blood and marital bonds, as well as from long-term residential and communal encounters and cooperation. Families and (p. 279)

communities sometimes were so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. The boundaries between the two often were determined by generation and locale, as well as by African ideological antecedents of family and community that had some lasting influence. The earliest narratives left by Africans enslaved in the Americas were written in the eigh­ teenth century, at the height of the Atlantic slave trade. These men and women signify the most important black Atlantic intellectual elites of their generations, having gained both western literacy and the wherewithal to actually publish—both feats of tremendous ac­ claim. Their narratives are particularly significant because they form the blueprint—in tone, scope, and theme—for those of creole blacks. Moreover, these early narratives indi­ cate most clearly what social and psychological conditions had to be in place for “Africans” to recreate kin and communal bonds once ties were severed with their natal kin. Most famous of these eighteenth century texts, certainly, is that of Olaudah Equiano. Also known as Gustavus Vassa, Equaiano published, in 1789, a comprehensive autobiographi­ cal account of his life in Africa, as an enslaved person in Virginia, England and the Caribbean, and as a free man in the Atlantic world. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African Written by Himself (Equiano 1998) has been somewhat controversial (Caretta 2005; Walvin 1998), but it remains an invalu­ able text. It is particularly so because Olaudah gives such lush detail of his social life in Africa and throughout the Atlantic world. By example of his own great success and evolu­ tion as an “African Briton,” Olaudah seemingly hoped to convince the British colonial world of the inherent equality of his black race with white Europeans. He must have un­ derstood that family and community, as the bedrock of “civilization” in Europe, the Ameri­ cas, and western and central Africa, had to be well defined and judiciously described as Page 3 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives equally important to Africans and their societies as to Europeans, if his abolitionist agen­ da was to succeed. The result was that Equiano crafted an ambitious mandate that re­ mained a model for nineteenth and twentieth century slave narratives, but also one that was influenced by earlier published accounts that he, no doubt, had read. The first of these works that would have been available to Equiano were those of Ayuba Suleiman Di­ allo, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and Ottobah Cugoano. The brief account of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, also known as Job Ben Solomon, who was born and raised in the Bondu region of Senegambia before he was enslaved and sold to a planter in Maryland, was written and published in 1734. That year, Job was freed, trav­ eled to London, and was able to return to his family and community in West Africa. Thomas Bluett traveled to London with Job, recorded his biography, and had it published there, selling the short, but important, narrative for one shilling a copy (Bluett 1734). Bluett relied on his own series of conversations with Diallo when composing the biography of the Muslim holy man that included some detail of kin relations before his capture. Diallo’s family was elite, patriarchal, extended, and polygamous. He was the grandson of the past King of Futa and his father was the high priest. Fathers were re­ sponsible for passing on skill and knowledge to their sons, as did Diallo’s—teaching him (p. 280)

Arabic and the Koran. Adult sons, in turn, aided their fathers with their work. Diallo, for example, served as a subpriest to his father and traded for him in distant markets. Both males and females married early. Job was 15 when he married his first wife, who was 11. Fathers arranged marriages, and the groom’s father had to provide a hefty dowry. Once married, women remained veiled for three years and were expected to be pious and mod­ est. Polygamous husbands divided their time equally between their wives’ households. Job’s first marriage produced three sons; his second wife had a daughter. Communities celebrated the important occasion of a child’s birth with naming ceremonies. Husbands and wives could separate, but only with substantial reason and sometimes with serious consequence to the wife, if she initiated the division (Bluett 1734, 14–16, 40–42). Job’s community in Boonda was hierarchical, and one’s age, family, gender, and occupa­ tion determined one’s social status, choice of a marriage partner, and wealth. Not surpris­ ing, Job complained bitterly of his lack of community in Maryland, which left him unable to speak or worship without interruption. Eventually, Diallo was able to talk to a local African elder who knew Jallof, affording Job the opportunity to at least tell his story, but not the chance to form a family or community. He was determined to return to his West African home, a dream that was miraculously fulfilled because of Job’s father’s who arranged for him to be sent back home. Diallo’s ability to return to his West African fami­ ly and community during the height of the slave trade era distinguished his narrative, and experience, from most others. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw was born in Bornou in northeastern Nigeria. He was enslaved first in the Gold Coast and, after arriving in Barbados, was sold twice to men who resided in New York City. Like Diallo, Gronniosaw was raised a Muslim. He gained his freedom through his master’s will and eventually came to live in England. There, Al­ Page 4 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives bert published A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As Related by Himself in 1770, primarily to earn income for his impoverished family. Family and community, indeed, played significant roles in his narrative, as it had in Diallo’s (Gronniosaw 1770). Gronniosaw defined family membership primarily as those who were his blood and mari­ tal kin. Although he came to marry and have children as a free man of the servant class in England, Ukawsaw never forgot his family in Bournou, particularly his parents, grandpar­ ents and his favorite sister. Along with these blood and marital kin, Gronniosaw viewed others as fictive kin, particularly members of one master’s family who educated and freed him, those Methodist ministers and missionaries who instructed him in Christian belief, and whites in England and Holland who helped him when he was in dire financial need. For Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, community included those Atlantic world people, white and black, slave and free, male and female, who (p. 281) shared his philosophical and religious worldviews and whom he believed he could rely on to help him navigate and survive the difficulties of his life. He described them variously as “dear and valued friends,” “kind and indulgent” of him, “pious,” “worthy,” “good,” and “gracious” (Gronniosaw 47, 53, 55, 58). Ukawsaw was born of noble blood, the grandson (through his maternal line) of the King. As the youngest of six children, he felt particularly close to his mother, and believed that she too favored him. An introspective child, but one nonetheless who had friends and dot­ ing family members and, no doubt, a community that recognized his high social status, he yearned to learn more of the world, particularly the spiritual world. It was Ukawsaw, then, who initiated his travel to the Gold Coast with a trader in search of greater spiritual insight. This trip resulted in his enslavement in the Americas. Gronniosaw offered a detailed account of his natal kin that does not refrain from exposing internal familial and communal conflict. He was, in his estimation, an “outsider” in Bournou because of his constant reflection (Gronniosaw 37). Even though the adolescent asked to leave the community of his birth, he was not so alienated from them that he hoped to be permanently separated. “Indeed,” he noted, “if I could have known when I left my friends and country that I should never return to them again, my misery on that occasion would have been inexpressible”(Gronniosaw 37). Gronniosaw’s depictions of his West African family and community are those of tight knit, highly structured, stratified social and cultural institutions in which individuals knew their station and how to behave in it. In his family, for example, power located at the pin­ nacle was held by his grandfather, the King, then flowed downward to his father, mother, older siblings, and finally servants. It was a rich social world where children were to obey their elders and, in turn, parents and older kin supported their children materially and emotionally. Family members were expected to be close, and although children were not to question their parents, mothers and fathers were not tyrants. The values and behaviors of Ukawsaw’s larger Bournou community mirrored those of his family. Friends were sup­ posed to be kind and loyal, while community members demonstrated public respect for Page 5 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives operative political and social hierarchies and worshipped and marked other important communal events together. Gronniosaw lost his Bornou family of birth when he reached the Gold Coast and came in­ to the territory of a rival king, who sold him to a Dutch trader. He was sold for “two yards of check” cloth. Aboard ship, he was made to shed the physical trappings of his family, community, and royal lineage—his gold jewelry—and give them to the ship’s captain. Lost and propertied in a hostile world completely unknown, Ukawsaw quickly began to equate “fond” or “kind” treatment with familial, or at least communal, attachment. “My master grew fond of me,” he recalled of the captain, “and I loved him exceedingly” (Gronniosaw 40). Indeed, upon first boarding the slave ship, Gronniosaw was so emotionally distressed at the thought of being killed by the Gold coast trader that “as soon as ever I saw the Dutch Captain, I ran to him, and put my arms round him, and said, ‘father, save me’” (Gronniosaw 40). The captain transported the slave boy to Barbados, where he sold him. This Dutch captain would become the first in a (p. 282) series of white patriarchal fig­ ures whom Ukawsaw would designate as “kin,” or at least “community.” Most important of these “father” figures in Ukawsaw’s narrative was his third, and final master, the Reverend Freelandhouse. As a domestic in this Dutch American household, Ukawsaw was in constant contact with his master’s family and their culture, particularly their religious beliefs. The Freelandhouse family provided Ukawsaw with both a formal and Christian education. With “favored” slave status, however, Gronniosaw found himself in conflict with the Freelandhouse slave community. The other enslaved men and women may have regarded Ukawsaw as a threat, not just because of his privileged position, but because they may have believed him to be untrustworthy. They may have discovered, for example, that Gronniosaw had violated a widespread tenet of the enslaved black commu­ nity when he caused trouble for a venerable community member in his previous holding —“Old Ned.” As a result, Ned was brutally whipped and lost his place, both in his master’s esteem and in the domestic slave community. This taint certainly might have fol­ lowed Ukawsaw to his new slave community and seriously hindered his ability to become a welcomed member. Other attributes too may have hindered his acceptance, particularly his place of birth. Relatively few enslaved Africans in North America were born and raised in Bornou. Gronniosaw might have found fellowship with those Africans who, like himself, had been reared Islamic in faith, but he shed, at least outwardly, his original be­ lief system soon after arriving in New York. Thereafter, he sought friends, fictive kin, and romantic interests among Christians, black and white (Gronniosaw 41–42). Still, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw never lost the memory of his African home, family, and com­ munity. He repeatedly asserted that he missed, loved, and wanted to return to them. At the death of his master, Gronniosaw was freed. He did not return to Bornou, however, but instead became a seaman and later a servant in Holland and England, where he married. As a husband, Gronniosaw exhibited what would have been conventional ideals of gender behavior in England, America or his place of birth. He believed that it was his duty, as husband and father, to provide for the financial stability of his family. Even though his Page 6 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives wife, Betty, often worked, after marriage she typically did so only when Ukawsaw was un­ employed or underemployed. “I did not mind [starvation] for myself at all,” he noted “but to see my dear wife and children in want pierced me to the heart” (Gronniosaw 55). While he believed it was his duty to care materially for his family, he considered it his wife’s du­ ty to care lovingly for their children, their home, and him. One recalled scene provides an adequate portrait of his ideal of domestic bliss: I went immediately and bought some bread and cheese and coal and carried it home. My dear wife was rejoiced to see me return with something to eat. She in­ stantly got up and dressed our babies, while I made a fire, and the first nobility in the land never made a more comfortable meal. (Gronniosaw 57) Gronniosaw married Betty, an English servant woman with children, against the wishes of his “friends” or community. He was determined, however, to choose his own wife. She was, he concluded, “a blessed partner” given to him “from the Lord.” Marriage, in his estimation, was a contract between a willing couple and God; and neither kin nor (p. 283)

community should interfere. He chose Betty, he admitted, because she was a kind, indus­ trious, pious and a sincere partner, a “gracious, good woman who took great pains to cor­ rect and advise me.” It was not an easy transition to English life, James admitted. He must have regarded Betty, though materially poor, as rich in cultural knowledge and, as such, indispensable in his successful acculturation (Gronniosaw 51–54). The mid and late eighteenth century London of Gronniosaw had a substantial black popu­ lation, slave and free, African and creole. Those drawn to the developing movements to end the African slave trade, extend rights to free blacks, and end chattel slavery in the Americas were a close knit core of men and women who, along with white British aboli­ tionists and colonizationists, met frequently, lectured widely, petitioned Parliament, ap­ peared before the bar, and wrote and published accounts of the barbarity of the slave trade and the institution. Gronniosaw, who had great difficulty just surviving financially, probably was not an intimate member of this activist community until his autobiography appeared. Others were inspired to write their narratives after reading his and as a result of being part of these early freedom movements. Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slav­ ery and Commerce of the Human Species first appeared in print two years prior to that of his London friend and freed African peer, Olaudah Equiano. Ottobah was a Fanti from Ghana born about 1757 and enslaved in Grenada. Equiano was an Igbo, enslaved in West Africa, Virginia, Montserrat, and on ships that traveled throughout the Atlantic. So close were these early African abolitionists and literary artists in England that Ottobah was friend and neighbor to Ignatius Sancho, who also had been enslaved in Grenada and whose letters were published posthumously in 1782 (Sancho 1782). Ottobah read both the published account of Gronniosaw and found occasion to meet and befriend Phyllis Wheatley when she visited London in 1772 (Cugoano 1998, 102). Page 7 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives Wheatley, who had been born in the Gambia in West Africa and enslaved as a child in Massachusetts in about 1760, was, by the time she visited London, already something of a black literary sensation in North America. It was in London, however, that she found the wherewithal to publish her book of poems, becoming the first African slave woman to do so. Years later in 1789, Wheatley’s “abolitionist” poem appeared in a London paper, publi­ cizing, as well as any traditional narrative, her lament for the loss of her African family and underscoring the pain she suffered as well as that endured by her family and commu­ nity of birth: I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate/, Was snach’d from AFRIC’s fancy’d happy seat; /What pangs excruciating must molest, /What sorrows labour in my parents’ breast/Steel’d was that soul and by no mis’ry mov’d/That from a father seiz’d his babe belove’d:/Such-such my case; and can I then but pray/Others may never feel tyrannic sway? (Wheatley, n.p.) (p. 284)

This theme of loss of one’s black family and community is one of the most signifi­

cant found in narratives across time, place, genre and the gender of authors. It was echoed by Gronniosaw, Cugoano, Equiano, Sancho, and others, including Mary Prince. Prince was born a slave in about 1788 in Bermuda, but later married a free black man in Antigua. It was only through her travel to England that she gained her freedom, but would have had to sacrifice it in order to return to her spouse in the Caribbean. She left slavery, and her family, behind and became the first creole black woman to publish her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, in 1831 (Prince 1831). It was a searing account of physical savagery that firmly placed, in the public imagination, the sufferings of enslaved women on equal, if not elevated, footing to that of enslaved men. Ottobah Cugoano was raised in the house of a Fanti King, as the child of one of the King’s “companions.” He described his childhood as an idyllic one where he enjoyed “peace and tranquility” (Cugoano 92). It was while visiting his uncle that Ottobah was taken. He eventually was sold, he remembered, for the price of “a gun, a piece of cloth, and some lead” (Cugonao 94). The loss of his family and Fanti community was traumatic and endur­ ing: “Let it suffice to say that I was lost to my dear indulgent parents and relations, and they to me. All my help was cries and tears, and those could not avail; nor suffered long, till one succeeding woe, and dread, swelled up together” (Cugoano 95). It is especially in Ottobah’s descriptions of his capture and Middle Passage experience that his audience begins to glean his ideas of community, family and gender roles. Cugoano’s narrative introduced themes of an operative Pan African community and the experience of communal betrayal. His expressed notions of community began with that of his Fanti people, but by the time he came to discuss the conditions of his enslavement, Ot­ tobah included all Africans involved in the slave trade—both the enslaved and those who helped to enslave—as part of his expansive community, Perhaps he did so to convince his audience that he was a fair critic of the trade, condemning not only Europeans, but also Page 8 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives Africans who participated. “But I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen,” he wrote, “that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion who were the first cause of my exile and slavery” (Cugoano 105). “Those kidnappers and slave pro­ curers, called merchants, are a species of African villains,” he admitted, “which are great­ ly corrupted, and even vitiated by their intercourse with the Europeans,” Wicked and barbarous as they certainly are, I can hardly think, if they knew what horrible barbarity they were sending their fellow creatures to, that they would do it. But the artful Europeans have so deceived them, that they are bought by their inventions of merchandise, and beguiled into it by their artifice. (Cugoano 105) This “horrible barbarity” that Cugoano referred to had specific implications for family. Sale and loss occurred not just at the point at which the middle passage began, but at its end. It was then that the last vestiges of physical contact with African born kin or commu­ nity members who also might have been captured, or new friendships and (p. 285) bud­ ding community ties that were created during the passage, were ended. Within this graphic scene, marked by “shame” and despair, Cugoano attested to the close familial ties between parents and children and husbands and wives that were lost forever to a “wretched fate” of separation, “hunger, nakedness, hard labor, dejection and despair” (Cugoano 147–148). The stable communities and loving families that some enslaved had known in Africa, in Ottobah’s estimation, were destroyed, forever. Lost too, he suggested, were important gender conventions. Two of the most vital were the ability of men to protect their women and the right of women to retain their sexual purity. In place of these tenets, the enslaved men in the Middle Passage were “chained and pent up in holes,” while the “dirty, filthy sailors” “take the African women and lie upon their bodies” (Cugoano 1998, 94). This un­ dermining of the gendered order he had known as a Fanti had dire consequences, he as­ serted, for those enslaved on his ship trying to create a new community. A majority on board, including the women and children, had planned to “burn and blow up the ship, and to perish all together [as a community] in the flames.” “But,” he added, “we were be­ trayed by one of our own countrywomen, who slept with some of the head men of the ship” (Cugoano 94). Not only did the revolt fail, and many of those implicated whipped or killed, but the black communal tie that was being woven certainly was loosened, if not lost. Olaudah Equiano echoed and elaborated on most of the ideas, ideals, and experiences of family and community his black friends and peers depicted. The family of birth that Equiano described, as had his fellow black London writers, was a stable one with respon­ sible fathers, caring mothers, and a responsive, supportive, extended kin network and community. He was born an Igbo (“Eboe”), also of a distinguished family. According to Equiano, marriages in his home could be monogamous, but many were polygamous. The community expected women to be virgins when betrothed and to remain faithful once married—adulterous wives could be punished with death. Equiano took with him this em­ Page 9 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives phasis on female chastity and male defense of it. Like Ottobah, he was horrified by the “almost constant” rape of black females, including children, in the slave trade by white clerks and crewmen at sea and by masters and overseers on land (Equiano 1998, 258, 263). He was equally horrified by his inability to prevent this abuse (Equiano 258). Other important female gender prescriptions Equiano’s Igbo community enforced were grace­ fulness, modesty, and alertness (Equiano 199). Marriage marked the beginning of adult responsibility and the support of new family members and ties. Equiano’s Igbo community and extended family provided substantial donations at the time of marriage, and the groom’s relations gave “gifts” to the bride’s (Equiano 199). Each male head had an enclosed allotment of land on which to house his family. Women performed household labor, child care, and socialization, although some had domestic slaves. Olaudah recalled that his mother was loving, doted on him, and taught him the “arts of agriculture and war” (Equiano 211). She also was a market woman, sometimes taking her son along when she traveled to trade. Equiano also had a close relationship with his sister, who was captured along with him. Equiano’s community, as those of Gronniosaw and Cugoano, was highly struc­ tured with servants and slaves at the bottom. His father made certain to teach his son the (p. 286)

significance of his high status. Male elders, titled “Embreche,” served as the governing body (Equiano 198). It was a community in which, ideally, joint efforts provided food, housing, and military protection. Adults and children, male and female, for example, were supposed to work together both as agriculturalists and as defensive warriors. All sectors of his society participated in numerous feasts and celebrations, so much so that Olaudah described them as a “nation of dancers, musicians and poets” (Equiano 198–199). Equiano mourned deeply the loss of his parents, other kin, and community members once he was captured and enslaved, even though he readily reached out to create social ties with others. If Olaudah’s narrative does nothing else (and it accomplishes many things), it is a testament to the social resilience of many enslaved Africans, even while they actively, even desperately, sought ways to return home. Stolen from his family at the age of 11, Olaudah Equiano was a slave in several West African households before arriving on the coast for transatlantic sale. He remembered two families in particular that struck him as similar to his own linguistically, with comparable domestic tools and duties, a mistress who reminded him of his own mother, and children who were about his own age. In one such family, he admitted, after about two months, “I began to think I was to be adopted… and was beginning to be reconciled to my situation” (Equiano 216). He would not be so fortunate. Middle passage, though brutally disorienting and violent, gave Equiano another brief op­ portunity to form community bonds. In the hold of the ship, he found persons of his “own nation” (Equiano 219), and later bonded with those who were not sold in Barbados but were transported further to Virginia with him. Upon arrival in North America, Olaudah lamented his final separation from those fellow slaves who could have offered him “the small comfort of being together, and mingling their suffering and sorrows” (Equiano 223). Page 10 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives Equiano’s time in Virginia was brief and miserable. Soon sold again, this time to a ship’s captain, he spent the next several years enslaved at sea and in England. Like Gronniosaw, Wheatley, and others, Equiano became attached to those who were kind and helpful, black and white—a shipmate who became a “kind interpreter, an agreeable companion, and a faithful friend,” a captain who was considerate, mistresses who had him formally educated and baptized, and a fellow Igbo slave youth (Equiano 226–227, 236, 242). As England, its language, people, and culture, along with seafaring life, became more fa­ miliar to him, Equiano began to create a community. The person he initially grew most close to was an English master who reminded him of his father and who, in Equiano’s es­ timation, treated him as a son. He taught Equiano lucrative skills as a barber, instructed him in Christianity, and promised the two would never separate—a powerful incentive for kin-like loyalty from a slave who had already endured so many familial separations. Equiano was devastated by his master’s betrayal (Equiano 248–249). His treachery, how­ ever, only magnified Olaudah’s determination not to forget his home, his community, or his Igbo “nation.” The brutal treatment Equiano witnessed of slaves and slave families perhaps pre­ vented him from marrying prior to gaining freedom (Equiano, 259–226; 272–273). While (p. 287)

he lamented that he could not do more to help abused slaves on the ships where he worked, he did take the opportunity to earn money at the ports they visited through petty trade. It was at these ports as well that Equiano began to create a broad-based communi­ ty, or at least friendships, that traced through Charleston, Savannah, Philadelphia, and the Caribbean islands of Montserrat, St. Eustatius, Barbados, St. Kitts, Martinique, and Bermuda (Equiano 302–303). These “New World” communities that Equiano observed and shared no doubt contained families, including enslaved African couples. Evidence from the narratives document the presence of some native Africans forming long-term relationships with each other, while sometimes choosing to socially ignore or dismiss creole blacks. These Africans who formed couples were not necessarily from the same ethnic group, but seemed to have shared a common language and perhaps important cultural traits that must have provid­ ed some semblance of normality in the shocking world into which they had been bound. Charley Barber, for example, recalled that both his grandparents had been born in Africa, could speak to one another and had other similar cultural traits, but found it difficult to communicate with or culturally connect with others (SC WPA I, 498–503). They, no doubt, did not have the opportunity to stretch their cultural and social perspectives, as did Equiano, who was able to create an expansive community of multiple races and ethnici­ ties. Once Olaudah paid for his freedom, he set sail for London, where he successfully married, had a family, and became a member of a biracial community held together, in part, by a shared opposition to the slave trade and institution. At the same time that Equiano was claiming his freedom and a new family and community life in England, thousands of enslaved blacks in British North America were fleeing to mil­ itary lines. The American Revolution provided an opportunity for blacks to fight either for Page 11 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives the British or the patriots and, perhaps, gain their freedom. Approximately 10,000 es­ caped behind British lines after Lord John Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia issued his Proclamation of November 1775 that promised freedom to all servants and slaves of pa­ triots who fought for the King. Five thousand also eventually fought for the Continental Army after George Washington withdrew an earlier prohibition in response to Dunmore’s actions. Patriot blacks received their freedom and joined a growing number of free black communities—most of whom were located in the upper South and Northeast. The black loyalists who actually were able to leave with the British went to reside in Canada, Lon­ don, and later Sierra Leone, where they struggled to reunite families and create function­ al communities in face of often racially hostile and materially deprived conditions. Some wrote of their lives before leaving. David George, for one, recalled that prior to joining the British, he lived with his parents and siblings in Essex County, Virginia. His memories were filled with painful scars of the physical torture of his female kin, suggesting his de­ sire as a male to protect them. “The greatest grief I then had,” George recalled, “was to see them whip my mother, and to hear her, on her knees, begging for mercy” (George, 1792, n.p.). (p. 288)

David George escaped but eventually was reenslaved in South Carolina, where he

married. He wrote lovingly of his wife and children and his desire, as a father and hus­ band, to safeguard and provide for them. He also spoke of his community—a diverse so­ cial network that at times included Creeks and Nautchees, as well as loyalist comrades and Charleston’s free black and slave communities. According to his narrative, they all provided him some material relief, emotional comfort, and advice in times of crisis. Al­ though fellow black loyalist Boston King’s family of birth differed from that of George’s, because of their relative privilege, King also attested to the close nature of his kin and the patriarchal endeavors of his father: “To the utmost of his power he endeavoured to make his family happy” (King 1798, 106). Most of these early narratives clearly helped to establish for their readership the reality of recognizable family and community ties among enslaved peoples, but document equal­ ly well how destructive the slave trade and the institution of slavery was for black family and communal life. For those persons who worked as public abolitionists, emphasis in narratives on the importance of family had tremendous affect. Still, it would be decades before southern blacks gained their “freedom” and the right to construct or reconstruct family and community in ways that resonated more with their articulated ideals. In the years between the legal end of the African slave trade (1808) and the institution of slavery (1865), the enslaved black population in the United States more than tripled in size. Most were born in family units of some sort and had connections to communal groups. These families and communities, unlike those of the colonial era, resided in the South since the era of the American Revolution ended with an institution that was decid­ edly regionalized. It would become even more so as a result of four major developments: the patent of a relatively efficient cotton gin in 1793; the Louisiana Purchase of 1803; the development of a thriving textile industry in the U.S. Northeast and in Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century; and the removal of the majority of Native peoples who Page 12 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives lived in the South, east of the Mississippi River. These four conditions led to an explosion in the production of short staple cotton in the lower South and Southwest with enslaved blacks as the major source of labor. A thriving domestic slave trade ripped apart genera­ tions-old families and communities as traders shipped enslaved men and, increasingly, women and older children from the upper South to the deep South frontiers that became Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Family, therefore, did not necessar­ ily mean a nuclear structure or stability, and community did not always maintain the promise of loyalty and support. Still, the thousands of those in the antebellum genera­ tions who composed narratives often spoke about family members, kinship, marriage, and communal life and ideals. Given the violent oppression imposed by owners, overseers, dri­ vers, slave traders, and southern law—which allowed no slave couple to legally marry, de­ nied slaves parental rights, and did not recognize slave men as patriarchal heads of their families or slave women as feminine dependents worthy of physical and sexual protection —those ideals largely were impossible to realize and certainly, if ever realized fully, diffi­ cult to sustain. Unlike those authored in the eighteenth century, antebellum narratives usually do not reference family and community within a West African context. The rare exception, of (p. 289)

course, would be the descriptions offered by Africans who were captured after the end of the legal slave trade, such as the men and women of the Amistad who were captured and freed after a trial in New Haven, Connecticut in 1841 (Barber [1840] 2012). For those southern black creoles who grew up near and had relationships with “outlandish” African kin, there also was a special recognition of their ancestral pasts. Charles Ball remem­ bered, for example, that his grandfather had contempt for “African Americans” because of the elevated “rank” he had held “in his native land” (Ball, 1837, 7). He did, however, wel­ come relations with his son and grandson, often taking the young Charles to stay with him in his cabin. The boy loved the time he spent with his grandparent, just as most oth­ ers who spoke about relations with their elderly kin (AK WPA II, 996, 1651–1662). Charles Ball’s African grandfather might have looked down on his African American slave peers in Calvert County, Maryland, but some creole blacks especially respected and revered Africans in their communities who retained traditional cultural beliefs, practices and knowledge (GA WPA I, 877–878). There remained, as well, the hope, or fantasy, that African kin would arrive from the ancestral home to carry their loved ones back. Shadrack Richard in Georgia, for example, remembered the story of his African grandfa­ ther who purportedly traveled to Georgia to buy his son and take him back to West Africa. Both died before they could return (GA WPA III, 1971–1974). Africa, for many, remained within the slave’s imagination a site of pride as well as familial and communal reference where blacks were powerful and had a “place” and caring kin. Narrative accounts of family and community life of those enslaved blacks born in the United States also could point to personal strengths and group accomplishments that, within the violent, unpredictable world of southern slaves, were nothing short of miracu­ lous. Nat Turner’s account of how he came to organize and lead the slave revolt of August 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, for example, is full of references to his socializa­ Page 13 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives tion by parents, his grandmother, and his black community who, collectively, convinced him that he was intellectually and psychically gifted (Turner 1831). “Having soon discov­ ered to be great,” Turner noted of his local acclaim, he believed that he “must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devot­ ing my time to fasting and prayer” (Turner 44–45). Harriet Jacobs, like Nat Turner, also lived in an extended slave family that gave her a sense of exceptionalism, not only be­ cause of her own personal traits, but also because her family held all its members to high standards of character and diligence (Jacobs 87–89). For others, family and community, or the lack of it, shaped their lives in equally profound ways. Frederick Douglass, raised in Maryland, for example, repeatedly spoke to the ab­ sence of familial and communal support in his famed Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass 1845). His mother was, Douglass confessed, for all intents and pur­ pose, absent, as was a filial bond between him and his siblings. “My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant,” he noted (Douglass 16). Although raised (p. 290) by his grandmother with his siblings, Douglass also asserted that “the early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories”(Douglass 20). Still close blood relationships typically mattered, and mattered a great deal. Despite the increased experience of familial separation, dispersal, and loss as a result of a growing domestic slave trade from the 1820s onward, marriage, children, and extended kin re­ mained central and essential to the identities, psyches, and imaginations of the enslaved, perhaps even more than in earlier periods. Why? The actual demographic possibility for some type of family relations was never greater for slaves than in the decades leading up to the Civil War, when childbearing age men and women were present in equal propor­ tions on large holdings and within walking distance for those in small quarters. Moreover, most southern slaves had families that were generations old by the height of the antebel­ lum era. Memories of families and communities flung across the Atlantic diaspora re­ mained important for some, but most focused their attention on regionally based family near at hand or at least near in memory. Ironically, the slaves’ narratives indicate that the hope of having a family was never more physically realistic, yet the possibility of losing creole family or community was never greater. Whenever the loss occurred, devastation prevailed. “When a child was sold it nearly grieved the mothers and brothers and sisters to death. It was bad as deaths in the families,” Mattie Fannen from Arkansas explained (AK WPA II, 2687–2688). This scene was played out repeatedly, particularly in the upper South and increasingly in the lower. Families often were torn apart, leaving significant, generations-deep trauma. Although most had some experience with familial loss, parts of functional slave families and com­ munities still persisted for many. What were the ideals of family and community life with which nineteenth-century en­ slaved men and women identified? Within families, distinct gender roles often held sway, as they had in earlier generations. Husbands expected wives to be supportive and obedi­ Page 14 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives ent. Female obedience, for some men, was an especially desirable female trait. “A man wid a good wife, one dat pulls wid him,” Ezra Adams explained, “can see and feel some pleasure and experience some independence.? But, bless your soul, if he gits a woman what wants to be both husband and wife, fare-you-well and goodbye, too, to all love, pleasure, and independence; “cause you sho” is gwine to ketch hell here and no when-ever you goes ‘way (SC WPA, II, 6–7). Women cooked, cleaned, sewed, washed, nurtured, nursed, and healed when time, re­ sources, knowledge, and their own health permitted. One mother, an ex-slave remem­ bered, fed her children, even if she went to bed hungry and “treated us with all the ten­ derness which her own miserable condition would permit” (Ball 9). Elizabeth Sparks of Matthews County, Virginia explained that her mother “wuz a house woman,” who had to wash her owners’ clothes before she could clean those of her family. “Sometimes she’d be washin’ clothes way up ‘round midnight. No sir, couldn’t wash any nigguh’s clothes in daytime” (VA WPA I, 713–718). Prime women, like Sparks’ mother, obviously could not offer constant care for their young. This bundle of childcare tasks often went to the elderly, very young, or in­ (p. 291)

firm, within the slave community. Josephine Briston of South Carolina recalled that “De old lady dat looked after us, her name was Mary Novlin…[and] she looked after every blessed thing for us all day long en cooked for us right along wid de mindin” (SC WPA II, 60). Charlie Van Dyke, permanently disabled because of a leg injury, “work around the yard and look after his sisters and brothers and also the other slave children” while his mother and other parents worked. (Alabama WPA I, 4601–4603). Men and women who had medicinal knowledge helped treat their kin and others of numerous illnesses, includ­ ing dropsy, asthma, rheumatism, colds, and consumption. Elderly women who had experi­ ence as midwives routinely assisted pregnant women (Yetman 2000, 47–48). Familial expectations were that men and boys provide physical protection. One former slave recounted stories of the men who kept terrorizing panthers away from the quarters (GA WPA I, 3003–3005). As a young boy, Booker T. Washington could rely on his brother John to “break in” his new, rough flax shirt that pierced his skin like “a hundred small pinpoints” (Washington 1901, 246–253). Mingo, who lost his parents as a small child to sale, honored his father’s friend John with the recollection that “My pappy tol’ him to take care of me for him, and John’s attention on that Alabama plantation was ‘the only caren’” he remembered (AL WPA I, 4782–4787). Jacob Branch tried to shield his mother from her mistress’s cowhide (Yetman 2000, 40). Some husbands and fathers, faced with familial separation, escaped only to return and take their kin with them. Celeste Avery, for one, told of an uncle who built a cave in the woods of Georgia and then “carried his wife and two children back” to live with him until freedom (GA WPA I, 221–223).

Page 15 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives Fathers, brothers, grandfathers, and uncles, when present in families and communities, not only helped protect and rescue, but were obligated to provide their families with food, clothing, entertainment, and patriarchal leadership. Before he ran away, for example, Charles Ball’s father would bring food, presents, and entertain his family when he visited (Ball 9–10). One former bondsman from late antebellum Alabama suggested the impor­ tance of food supplements that males provided by noting: “The slaves got plenty of coons, rabbits and bear meat, and could go fishing on Sundays, as well as turtle hunting” (AL WPA I, 3948–3949). Enslaved men, like women, often were prevented from carrying out their familial respon­ sibilities because of unrelenting work routines, sale, escape, or harsh masters and mis­ tresses who purposefully undermined any slave authority that challenged that of slave­ holders. Owners took it as their right to shape the lives of their slave property any way they saw fit, despite the outcry of mothers, fathers, wives, and husbands. Families provid­ ed masters with some security of slave obedience, since the threat to a family member was a potent deterrent to resistance (Yetman 58). Still, the enslaved assert in their narratives that even owners of the most compliant slaves sometimes could treat them savagely. They humiliated, raped, beat, and sold women away from their kin and communities. Indeed, the sexual abuse of female slaves was one of the most disruptive traumas in slave families that the narratives consistently (p. 292) exposed (Picquet 1861; Jacobs 1861). Children, on the other hand, were put to work when ill, harshly punished when unable to perform labor with an adult level of skill or stamina, and sold if thought disobedient or it fiscally benefitted their owners. Masters repeatedly sold boys and men, restricted them from visiting kin, whipped, mutilated, and killed those be­ lieved to be rebellious. All were worked for the most minimal, and sometimes wholly inad­ equate, quotas of food, clothing, and shelter. These were realities of slave life that they repeatedly attested to in their memoirs—realities that shaped familial and communal ex­ periences and expectations. Slave resistance to individual and kin abuse was palpable. Some, like Charles Ball’s fa­ ther in Maryland, ran away after his beloved wife was sold to Georgia and he learned of his own impending sale (Ball 9–11). A former North Carolina bondswoman recalled that her mother turned to prayer: “My mammy she trouble in her heart bout de way they treated. Ever night she pray for de Lawd to git her an’ her chillun out ob de place” (NC WPA II 1028–1040). Minnie Folkes’ mother repeatedly took the whipping that left her bloody, rather than succumb to her overseers’s sexual demands. Sukie Abbott in the southside of Virginia fought back and was sold (VA WPA 162–171). Lulu Wilson’s mother “would knock him [her master] down and bloody him up,” but he still continued to sell her children when he wanted to do so (Yetman 2000, 323). Famed seamstress Elizabeth Keckley refused to let the man who rented her beat her, declaring: “No, Mr. Bigham, I shall not take down my dress before you. Moreover, you shall not whip me unless you prove the stronger. Nobody has the right to whip me but my own master, and nobody shall do so if I can prevent it” (Keckley 33). Lucretia Alexander of Arkansas recalled that her father was sold five times rather than submit to physical abuse, while a slave man Page 16 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives who worked with W.L. Boost was whipped to death because he refused to do as much as his owner demanded (Yetman 11, 37). Slaves routinely stole food, especially meat, when they were hungry. Temporary escape to nearby caves and forests provided some relief from those beaten and washed down in brine, while many escaped singularly or in kin and communal groups to the North and Mexico (VA WPA, 679–83; Yetman 41; Still 1872, 683). Others left their masters just long enough to find others with whom they felt con­ nected. Charlotte Brooks, for example, waited four years to meet another enslaved woman from Virginia who, like her, had been sold to Louisiana and was Methodist, not Catholic. When she finally did meet Aunt Jane, her owner’s instructions to return quickly held little weight. “Aunt Jane was no kin to me,” Charlotte confessed, “but I felt that she was because she came from my old home” (Albert 1988, 9). No family or community was perfect, and certainly enslaved men and women instigated and endured their share of internal abuses. Slave narratives hinted at, and sometimes outright detailed, problems within their families and communities. Some spoke of inci­ dences of fighting, stealing, desertion, and “hitting, fussing, fighting, and rukkussing in the quarters” (Yetman 13, 134; GA WPA I, 134–135). Anderson Furr of Georgia, for exam­ ple, remembered that on his farm, slave men sometimes would “get rowdy-lak, drinkin’ liquor and fightin” (WPA GA I, 3353). Others would inform on their fellow bondmen or women or assist overseers or owners to beat them (Yetman 13). Rose Williams in Texas complained bitterly of forced sexual relations with husband (p. 293) Rufus—forced by her master and Rufus (Minges 2006, 14). Others teased or abandoned women forced into con­ cubinage (Blassingame 1977, 156; Jacobs [1861] 1988, 87–88; Picquet 2012, n.p.). Some, like Fannie Long from North Carolina, remembered divisions and jealousies among the slaves based on color, noting, for example, “dem yaller wimen wus highfalutin’ too, dey thought dey wus better dan de black ones” (WPA NC, 2081–2083). Some had disputes over religious beliefs or felt victimized by those with supernatural powers (Albert 1988, 7–11). The narratives document that the gamut of injustices, misunderstandings, jealousies, dis­ honesties, and downright meanness found in families and communities were no less prevalent among the enslaved than the free. Still, most in the narratives seemed to have concluded, as Jane Pyatt of Portsmouth, Virginia that The respect that the slaves had for their owners might have been from fear, but the real character of a slave was brought out by the respect that they had for each other. Most of the time there was no force back of the respect the slaves had for each other, and yet, they were for the most part truthful, loving and respectful to one another. (Perdue and Barden 1991, 235) Enslaved men and women took the opportunity to express their respect for, and enjoy­ ment of, family and community not only through marriage, childbirth, and rearing but al­ so through ritualized and regularized work, play, and worship. Slave narratives under­ score the ability of enslaved people to express their individuality, as well as familial and Page 17 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives communal values, in everyday activities. Music, word play, and movement, for example, were as much a part of work routines and religious services as they were part of the communities’s numerous cornhuskings, dances, courtships, weddings, funerals, children’s games, storytelling, and quiltings. One former slave from Arkansas explained that in his community “there used to be plenty of colored folk fiddlers. Dancing, candy pulling, quilt­ ing,—that was about the only fun they would have. Corn shucking, too” (Arkansas WPA III, 3010–3016). Another Virginia native recalled that “We could sing in dar, an’ dance ol’ squar’ dance all us choosed, ha! ha! ha! Lord! Lord! I can see dem gals now on dat flo’; jes skippin’ an’ a trottin’” (VA WPA I 56–57). Wade Owens, of Alabama, offered rich detail of the extracurricular activities he and his family enjoyed. Adults, Owens noted, would have “dem Saddy night frolics an’ dance all night long an’ nearly day”; “At de cornshuck­ ings dey’d sing ‘All ‘Roun’ de Corn Pile Sally,’ an’ dey had whiskey an’ gin”; storytellers told children “all kinds of ghos’ stories ‘bout witches gittin’ outter dey skins”; at bap­ tismal, “dey’d give de water invitation an’ den go in water. An’ didn’t dey come out happy, shouting and praying?”; and at the sitting up rituals before funerals, they would “sing, shout an’ holler an’ try to preach” (WPA Alabama I 3607–3613). Family and community as described in slave narratives just did not connote loss, pain, hardship, resistance, and spiritual struggle. Kin and friend relations also meant survival, respect, joy, and love—the full range of human emotions and social experiences that con­ nected enslaved people across origin, time, location, and circumstances. The institution of slavery had a long and diverse history. So too did the social and blood ties of (p. 294) the enslaved. By the time of the American Revolution, the numbers of male and female slaves in the population were equal—allowing many adults to marry. Indeed, even while the eighteenth century witnessed the largest importation of Africans, creole slaves and some Africans as well, found the opportunity to marry, live in extended family units, and be part of vibrant, although always challenged, communities. Major ruptures in social lives occurred as a result of external controls. The birth, mar­ riage, increase in debt, migration, and especially death of an owner, for example, typically meant the division and dispersal of slave families and communities. Larger outer forces such as revolt or war (Bacon’s Rebellion, the Seven Years War, and particularly the Ameri­ can Revolution) also affected slave family life in profound ways. The American Revolution, for example, rendered opportunities for black patriots and loyalists to claim freedom. The era itself ushered in a decidedly southern institution, creating a “freedom” for black fami­ lies and communities in the North, along with a lingering, and explosive, question of black status in the West. Changes in southern and national economies that made cotton “king” and the physical ex­ pansion of the nation via the Louisiana Purchase had the most devastating effect on slave family and community life. Hundreds of thousands, if not more, enslaved black laborers said goodbye to generations-old kin groups and communities as they were forced into the domestic slave trade, often multiple times, in this general shift in the slave population from the upper South and southern seaboard to the “land of cotton” in the lower South and Southwest. The antebellum era ended as the colonial began, with many blacks sepa­ Page 18 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives rated from the families and communities of their birth, struggling to adapt, adopt, and create new kinship lines and communities in frontier societies. Most were able to move forward, at least in establishing other social and cultural groups where they could find support and affection, as well as express the human range of emotions. The kinds of fami­ ly units that they were able to create in their new places of residence too could be nu­ clear or matrifocal, but members of extended families diminished in the antebellum era, particularly on the southern and southwestern frontier as a result of repeated long-dis­ tance sales or forced migration. Some, like Ben Simpson, who was moved from Georgia to Texas, was not able to create a family unit until years after general emancipation in 1865 (B. Simpson, 1941 n.p.). Most survived somewhat better. Even those husband and wives who were separated by sale, but determined not to forget, set out in astonishing numbers at the end of the Civil War to reclaim their spouses reconnect with their children. Narra­ tives of their struggles, successes and failures in their quest to do so are endearing and enduring testaments to the profound importance of the enslaved black family and commu­ nity across time and space in U.S. history.

References Abolition Project “Phyllis Wheatley (1753–1784): The First Published African-American Poet.” 2009. Electronic Version. http://abolition.e2bn.org/people_34.html. Albert Octavia V. Rogers. The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. [orig. 1890]. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. (p. 295) Ball, Charles. Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave. Public Domain Books. [1837]. Kindle Edition. Barber, John W. A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, By the Africans on Board. New Haven: E. L. and J. W. Barber, 1840. Reprint. Charleston: Nabu Press, 2012. Blassingame, John W. ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Inter­ views, And Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Bluett, Thomas. Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, The Son of Solomon the High Priest of Boonda in Africa; Who was a Slave about two Years in Maryland; and afterwards being brought to England, was set free, and sent to his native Land in the Year 1734. [1734] Electronic Edition. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bluett/menu.html. Brown, Henry. Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown Written by Himself. [orig. 1851].Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self Made Man. Athens: Universi­ ty of Georgia Press, 2005.

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives Cugoano, Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slav­ ery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, A Native of Africa. Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Andrews, eds. Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772– 1815. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998. Douglass Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Public Domain Books. [1845] Kindle Edition. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Andrews, eds. Pio­ neers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772–1815. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and William Andrews, eds. Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772–1815. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998. George, David. An Account of the Life of Mr. David George from S. L. A. given by himself. 1792. Electronic Version. Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People. http:// blackloyalist.com/canadiandigitalcollection/documents/diaries/george_a_life.htm. Gronniosaw, James. A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, As Related by Himself. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and William Andrews. Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772–1815. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998. Henry, George. Life of George Henry, Together with a Brief History of the Colored People in America. Providence: H.I. Gould, 1894. Electronic Version. http://docsouth.unc.edu/ neh/henryg/henryg.html. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861]. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Keckley, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. King, Boston. Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, A Black Preacher. Written by Himself, during his Residence at Kingswood School. From The Methodist Magazine, March–June 1798. Electronic Version. http://antislavery.eserver.org/narratives/boston_king/mem­ oirs-of-boston-king-a-black-preacher-xhtml.html. Mason, Isaac. The Life of Isaac Mason As a Slave. [orig. 1893]. 19th Edition, 1996. Elec­ tronic Version. http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/mason/mason.html. (p. 296) Minges, Patrick, ed. Far More Terrible For Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slav­ ery. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, Publisher, 2006. Page 20 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives Picquet, Louisa. The Octoroon: Or Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life, H. Mattison, ed. [orig. 1861]. Seattle: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2012. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself. With a Supplement by the Editor. To Which Is Added, the Narrative of Asa-Asa, a Captured African. [1831] Electronic Edition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/prince/prince.html. Perdue, Charles, and Barden, Charles. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia ExSlaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. Sancho, Ignatius. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. In Two Volumes. To Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life. Vol. I., Electronic Version, http:// www.docsouth.unc.edu/neh/sancho1/menu.html. Simpson, Ben. “Narrative.” Texas Slave Narratives. 1941. Electronic Version. http:// freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ewyatt/_borders/ Texas%20Slave%20Narratives/Texas%20S/Simpson,%20Ben.html. Simpson, Emma. “Narrative.” Texas Slave Narratives. 1941. Electronic Version. http:// freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ewyatt/_borders/ Texas%20Slave%20Narratives/Texas%20S/Simpson,%20Emma.html. Stampp, Kenneth. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. [1956] New York: Vintage Press, 1989. Still, William. Underground Railroad. A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of…& Others or Witnessed by the Author. Philadelphia: William Still, 1872. Kindle Edition. Turner, Nat. “The confessions of Nat Turner; leader of the late insurrection in Southamp­ ton, Va. As fully and voluntarily made to Thos. R. Gray, in the prison where he was con­ fined, and acknowledged by him to be such, when read before the court of Southampton, convened at Jerusalem, November 5, 1831, for his trial.” Ed. Thomas R. Gray. Kenneth S. Greenberg. The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2006. Tyler, Ron, and Lawrence Murphy, eds. The Slave Narratives of Texas. Austin, TX: State House Press, 1997. United States. Work Projects Administration Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Alabama Narratives. Parts 1–3. 1941. Kindle Edition. United States. Work Projects Administration. Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Arkansas Narratives. 1941. Parts 1–7. Kindle Edition. Page 21 of 22

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Family and Community in Slave Narratives United States. Work Projects Administration. Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Florida Narratives. Parts 1. 1941. Kindle Edition. United States. Work Projects Administration. Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Georgia Narratives. Part 1. 1941. Kindle Edition. United States. Work Projects Administration. Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves North Carolina Narratives. Parts 1–2. 1941. Kindle Edition. (p. 297) United States. Work Projects Administration. Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves South Carolina Narratives. Parts 1–2. 1941. Kindle Edition. United States. Work Projects Administration. Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Texas Narratives. Part 1. 1941. Kindle Edition. United States. Work Projects Administration. Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Virginia Narratives. 1941. Part 1. Kindle Edition. Walvin, James. African’s Life, 1745–1797: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano. New York: Continuum Press, 1998. Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1901. Project Gutenberg EBook. Kindle Edition. Yetman, Norman R. Voices From Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000.

Brenda E. Stevenson

Brenda E. Stevenson is Professor of History at UCLA. She is the author of Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South and The Contested Mur­ der of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots.

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives

Collaborative American Slave Narratives   Barbara McCaskill The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.012

Abstract and Keywords This article discusses various ways to understand the collaborative composition of Ameri­ can slave narratives. Some of these texts have been cowritten; others derive meanings from the relationships of paratextual voices with those of the narrator’s. Citing represen­ tative memoirs published both before and after the Civil War by Frederick Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, Mattie Jackson, and Annie Louise Burton, this essay also argues for thinking about the intertextuality of such works, or their dialogic interplay with previ­ ous published and oral literary productions, as instances of collaboration. Memoirs and biographies of African Americans that rely on a combination of oral history and written document are the literary legacy of early collaborative American slave narratives. Keywords: collaboration, coauthorship, partnership, slave narrative, intertextual, paratextual, literacy, community, citizenship

THE American anti-slavery movement drew an unwavering momentum and an uncompro­ mising strength from collaborations. As they browsed the sales tables and sampled re­ freshments at abolitionist bazaars and fundraisers, former slaves and free Americans met and mingled. They sat at each other’s sides in churches and lecture halls. They vetted and critiqued each other’s speeches, editorials, and verses. The members of their Vigilance Committees, shoulder to shoulder, pushed back bounty hunters intent on reclaiming es­ caped slaves, or they stared down mobs determined to foreclose their antislavery assem­ blies. Though sometimes disagreeable, awkward, haughty, or short-lived, their partner­ ships shaped the brotherly and sisterly bonds that galvanized abolition. In this touchpad, texting, and Twittering world of the second millennium, to build an in­ stant media buzz and swiftly attract deep-pocketed donors, celebrities and entertainers loan their names and faces to humanitarian or philanthropic causes. During the American antislavery movement, so too did celebrated writers, trusted clerics, and respected intel­ lectuals snatch up their pens and dedicate their creativity to the memoirs of their former­ ly enslaved colleagues. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845) and William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) demonstrate how fugitive slaves shaped their exceptional stories through exchanges and identifications with a variety of Page 1 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives audiences and writers, and how they navigated the challenges of creating egalitarian writing partnerships. After the Civil War, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866) and Annie Louise Burton’s Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days (1909) exemplify how such coali­ tions also worked in tandem with freedmen’s literacy and race uplift projects in order to advance goals of citizenship. Some collaboratively composed narratives were ghostwritten by or dictated to white and black amanuenses or impresarios. Some authors benefited from more selective or spo­ radic interventions by writing and editorial partners, such as advice toward chapter de­ velopment, the inclusion or omission of characters and scenes, the selection of scriptural verses and literary quotations, as well as other revision suggestions. Even many (p. 299) firsthand, single-authored slave narratives can be understood as collaborations when the meanings of their (often white authored) prefaces, introductions, or appendices shape and are shaped by intertextual relationships with the African American’s voice. The vari­ ous kinds of collaborative narratives that emerged from the genre, with their lessons of love, resiliency, and courage, of exploitation and defeat, helped define African Americans to white American readers as literate, imaginative human beings. After the Civil War, by inscribing American identities, values, and aspirations upon the newly emancipated, col­ laborative American slave narratives shifted the focus of the formerly enslaved and their reunited families from a turbulent past as property and chattel to a brighter future as productive citizens. None of these partnerships were without peril. A well-intended antislavery friend risked misrepresenting an ex-slave deficient in literacy skills, or silencing her to prevent alienat­ ing a sympathetic readership. An exploitative interviewer could cherry pick questions or shuffle information to romanticize slavery or to prioritize self-serving motives over the former slave’s own interests. Nevertheless, particularly in the decades surrounding the Civil War, it was politic for runaways to align themselves with white or African American amanuenses who could assist them in penning and publicizing their stories. In what usu­ ally added up to a contingent and unstable freedom in the northern states, the leisure time, money, tutorial assistance, and energy necessary to learn to read and write often proved luxuries reserved for the luckiest and most persistent among the fugitive slaves. Compounding their need for support rather than reducing it, security often proved elu­ sive in the nominally free North, where fugitives’ social connections and community net­ works were tenuous. Introduced by William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), the editor of the antislavery movement’s largest circulating newspaper, with a prefatory letter by the lawyer Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) reflects its author’s success in using the antislavery lecture platform to leverage the public’s interest in his story and his carefully crafted persona as a humble, yet unbowed, “self-emancipated young man at the North” (p. 24). As Douglass’s Narrative opens, there is avowed unanimity between the white abolitionists on the one hand and the African American fugitive on the other. Garrison’s and Phillips’s endorse­ ments are often cited as classic examples of what the scholar John Sekora imagined as Page 2 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives the indisputable “white envelope” of authenticity that framed and legitimized a fugitive slave’s “black message.” When white (and usually male) writers endorsed the accounts of fugitives like Douglass (1818–1895) as true, accurate, unembellished reminiscences, com­ posed by men and women of character and Christian commitment, such endorsements reached out to incredulous transatlantic British and American audiences who were reluc­ tant to buy in to criticisms of slavery, who doubted black Americans’ capacities to read and write and to articulate truthfully slavery’s horrific histories. Sekora’s image also sug­ gests the tensions that could erupt when white collaborators or editors such as Garrison and Phillips represented and repurposed fugitives’ stories and the results, however wellintentioned, limited and conflicted with the presentational goals of African American writ­ ers. Yet, as Beth A. McCoy states, it is important to recognize (p. 300) such collaborations as accomplishing more than the point that the African American authors are “to be be­ lieved as tellers of fact or even as fact themselves” (2006, 157). Expanding upon the work of Gérard Genette, she finds that such collaborators’ “epigraphs, dedications, prefaces, and other bookish elements,” such seemingly “marginal” paratextual matter, demarcates complex intersections of “race, power, and culture” in African American texts (156, 157). Garrison and Phillips collapse Douglass’s complexities into the identities of a human be­ ing and a Christian, notwithstanding other personae he develops. They offer disbelieving readers a taste of Douglass’s own disorientation by redirecting them to “the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery” (p. 25), to the “cruel scourging,…mutilations and brandings,…[and] scenes of pollution and blood” (p. 27) that are the “occasional results,” rather than “essential ingredients” (p. 30), of slavery. A dramatic series of negations char­ acterizes Douglass’s opening memories of home and childhood. He does not recall his age or birthday. He does not know his father. He does not remember much about his mother (only occasionally did he see her before her death). By challenging what many readers think they understand about slavery (it is not bestial) and what they think they know about slaveholders (with rare exception, they are benign), Garrison’s and Phillips’s enco­ mia rhyme with Douglass’s opening anecdotes of how slavery’s brutalities contradict the beneficial, paternalistic system it styles itself to be. As of the Narrative’s 1845 publication, a standard convention among American anti-slav­ ery writers was to fire up opposition to the system of bondage by unfavorably comparing the rationale for slavery to the country’s principled founding themes of liberty, law, jus­ tice, and defense against tyranny. Similarly, ahead of Douglass’s own words, Garrison’s “Preface” invokes readers’ memories of Patrick Henry (1736–1799) and the Pilgrim Fa­ thers, just as Phillips’s prefatory “Letter” invites comparisons of Douglass to “the fathers, [who] in 1776, signed the Declaration of Independence with the halter about their necks” (p. 30), and insists that readers join him “in consecrating anew the soil of the Pil­ grims as an asylum for the oppressed” (p. 31). By synching together the former slave with the architects of the American republic, Garrison and Phillips introduce Douglass as no less a patriot and an American than the general readers who thumb his Narrative’s pages.

Page 3 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives Garrison and Phillips also gesture to Patrick Henry, the Pilgrims, and the men who penned the nation’s Declaration not merely as precursors to a self-emancipated Douglass, but, more important, as his intellectual partners in spirit. For example, affirming Henry’s rallying cry, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” Douglass’s “resolve to fight” the sadistic Mr. Covey marks “a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of death, to the heaven of freedom” (pp. 68, 69). To the Pilgrims’ new beginning on the Bay State’s Plymouth Rock, Douglass puts up New Bedford, Massachusetts, an Edenic community where he finally be­ comes “Frederick Douglass” and joins a community of hardworking, close-knit, prosper­ ous free black residents. Finally, Garrison’s and Phillips’ introductions imbricate Douglass within international struggles against oppression; namely, the Irish campaigns led by Daniel O’Connell to shake off English rule. When Douglass later writes of meeting two Ir­ ishmen in a shipyard, they advise to him to escape, as if (p. 301) to second O’Connell’s de­ fiant spirit. The genre of collaborative American slave narratives thus expands the mean­ ing of coauthorship to include the liberatory philosophies of long-ago writers who strut across time and space, are reflected and reshaped by living activists, and gain new trac­ tion. In British and American antislavery literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen­ turies, intertextual references to patriots and patriotic orations are effective and conven­ tional rhetorical techniques to expose the hypocrisy of a nation that has shrugged off English tyranny only to embrace southern oppression. In collaborative American slave narratives, mapping a revolutionary past onto characters and landscapes encountered during the fugitives’ journeys to freedom aligns the oppressed with an extensive lineage of free visionaries. As rumblings of sectionalism and secession intensified in the 1850s, William and Ellen Craft (1824–1900; 1826–1891) conceived their Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860). Like Douglass’s and many other accounts of American slaves, this book exempli­ fies how fugitives and their anti-slavery friends collaborated to shape a story of flight and freedom well before the manuscript’s first pages were written. Also, like most narratives of American slaves, their memoir, as William confides, “is not intended as a full histo­ ry” (1) of his and his wife Ellen’s lives. Instead, giving “merely an account of our escape; together with other matter” (1), it features their flight in 1848 over “a thousand miles of slave territory” (28), an extraordinary journey facilitated by the light-complexioned Ellen’s disguise as a rheumatic white male planter. A recursive, disruptive, and circular journey that, as John Ernest has discussed, underscores “the contradictions and instabili­ ties inherent in white supremacist thought” (185), would bring the Crafts through alter­ nately despairing and hopeful times, through “the horrible trammels” (3) of bondage to, if somewhat tentative, “the free air of good old England” (22), there to publish their narra­ tive that would assist in raising funds to emancipate relatives left languishing back in servitude in their former southern homes. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom largely restores scenes the couple experienced some twelve years earlier, from 1849 to 1851. In these years Boston’s vocal, biracial abolitionist community rallied to assist the two fugi­ tives in setting up a home, earning a living, learning to read and write, polishing their do­ mestic and entrepreneurial skills, speaking before public audiences about the “unjust thraldom [sic]” (25) of the peculiar institution, and raising crucial funds for its demolition. Page 4 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives Original editions and reviews of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom usually, but not always, acknowledge William as solo author. “I shall commence at once,” as he states in the Preface, “to pursue my simple story” (1). His first-person singular point of view bol­ sters nineteenth-century notions about focus, intelligence, and creativity that constructed serious literature as masculine territory and that frowned on the spectacle of a re­ spectable woman like Ellen stepping out from behind her husband to speak and write in front of promiscuous or mixed-gender audiences. Because of such conventions, some scholars such as Teresa Zackodnik argue for taking William at his word for being the sin­ gle author of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. My analysis of the Crafts’ narrative, along with the criticism of such researchers as Daneen Wardrop and Ellen Samuels, would attribute some degree of agency to Ellen in making decisions about the content of (p. 302) their book, though not necessarily writing it, because of colleagues’ reminis­ cences of her activism, as well as the letters and articles about her in the anti-slavery press. Geoffrey Sanborn’s research, however, points us to a similarly speculative but per­ suasive understanding of the book’s coauthorship that is supported by his close reading of its form. During the 1850s, as they acclimated to leading fairly autonomous lives, William and Ellen benefited from a fond relationship with the seasoned, popular anti-slav­ ery leader and speaker William Wells Brown (1816–1884). Sanborn’s meticulous investi­ gations of the “borrowed language” (8) in the memoir have led him to the very plausible conclusion that Brown and William Craft actually may have passed the manuscript back and forth across the Atlantic, with Brown inserting quotations, interpolations, and other stylistic elements. The way the Crafts’ saga is narrated as a result of these additions, San­ ford argues, revises conventional notions of how such stories of American fugitives estab­ lish their autonomy and subjectivity. Visual descriptions, scriptural references, humorous asides, and other oratorical ele­ ments that Brown, as Sanborn writes, may have appropriated from anti-slavery lectures and literatures to add to Craft’s drafts of Running a Thousand Mile for Freedom increase its dramatic intensity. For example, masquerading as her husband William’s white “mas­ ter,” Ellen endures one leg of their travels at breakfast with “a rough slave-dealer.” De­ scribed with a catalog of Homeric epithets, punctuated by Biblical allusion, the slave own­ er is a “hard-featured, bristly bearded, wire-headed, red-eyed monster, staring at my mas­ ter as the serpent did at Eve” (31, 32). Similarly, after a close call in one port of Charleston, where Ellen and William’s deception is almost recognized, their narrative re­ lieves the tension with a scene where two Virginia ladies form a crush on the “gentle­ man.” William ironically concludes, “To use an American expression, ‘they fell in love with the wrong chap’” (39). One imagines this remark descending sotto voce as he shares this punch line with a paying audience, or punctuating the talk around the supper table as he gently slaps a guest on the back. While Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is full of the anti-slavery conceits and goth­ ic elements redolent of the popular fictions of Brown and other antislavery writers, it pushes back against the derivativeness that contemporary readers all too often find in slaves’ narratives. As the scholars Frances Smith Foster and Charles J. Heglar have elabo­ rated, the narrative exposes the emotional and intimate dimensions of African American Page 5 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives relationships. For instance, when Ellen sinks her head into William’s chest in a moment of terror and fear, he does not respond with a reflexive Christian platitude or a meandering emancipationist poem. Rather, with simplicity yet intensity, he states, “This appeared to touch my heart, it caused me to enter into her feelings more fully than ever” (27). Similar­ ly, when the Crafts run into trouble trying to cross the border from Baltimore into Penn­ sylvania, their journey arrested by “a full blooded Yankee of the lower order,” William gently breaks the news to his “master”: …I stepped into my master’s [Ellen’s] carriage, to inform him of the difficulty. I found him [Ellen] sitting at the farther end, quite alone. As soon as he looked up and saw (p. 303) me, he smiled. I also tried to wear a cheerful countenance, in or­ der to break the shock of the sad news. I knew what made him smile (44. Emphasis mine). Even though it strategically conforms to nineteenth-century models of gender and sexual­ ity which frown upon the uninhibited, open expressions of desire and passion between two married partners, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom attempts to disclose the ro­ mance, joy, and spiritual depth of African American marital life. During slavery, from the revolts down South led by the scripture-quoting Nat Turner (1800–1831) and Denmark Vesey (1767?–1822), white plantation elites had learned bloody lessons about the subversive powers of literate African servants. Their determina­ tion to stamp out literacy among the slaves before it could be harnessed as a weapon of resistance meant controlling access to the Good Book, from regulating who could lead readings during Sunday worship and study to removing it altogether from slave communi­ ties and driving the slaves’ professions of Christianity underground. Particularly in re­ gions where the numbers of those in bondage eclipsed or equaled those of whites, and where fears of slave revolts and other violence exacerbated already tense race relations, masters and overseers policed slave communities for signs of access to literacy and litera­ cy lessons. They threatened slaves caught possessing books (including Bibles), slates, primers, spellers, and writing instruments with beatings, the auction block, and perma­ nent separations from family members and friends–even with death. They passed laws that summarily humiliated, isolated, fined, imprisoned, banished, harassed, and/or meted corporal punishments to those intrepid whites and free blacks who dared teach letters to their “property.” Nineteenth-century American authors would honor the risks enslaved men and women took to become readers and writers, and the connections they made be­ tween literacy, humanity, and liberation, by creating characters such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Uncle” Caldwell who, as she writes in her “Learning to Read” (1872), “took pot liquor fat/And greased the pages of his book,/And hid it in his hat.” After the Civil War and Emancipation, collaborative American slave narratives continued to connect African Americans’ historic freedom struggle to the quest for education and literacy and the project of citizenship. Producing what William L. Andrews has called a “pragmatic revision of slavery” (p. 86), they helped to vocalize a national agenda to re­ store the Union, rebuild the South, and reinforce what southerners’ contributions would Page 6 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives be as the country mourned the carnage of battlegrounds like Shiloh and Vicksburg and regrouped for what it hoped would be a happier new century. These thematic shifts with­ in the genre, however, did not sap collaborative narratives of qualities that writers and readers found appealing or immediately render them irrelevant and passé. Furthermore, in the uncertainty and instability that swirled during the postwar decades, collaborative slave narratives could bestow economic, educational, and social benefits upon both au­ thor and editor. The “little book” (p. 3) of Mattie Jane Jackson (1843–?) is one such postbellum narrative. The dictated story of this Missouri-born ex-slave, it was “written and arranged” (3) for the public in 1866 by Jackson’s stepmother, Dr. L. S. Thompson, an African American physi­ cian practicing in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Under Thompson’s (p. 304) guidance, her sto­ ry broaches subjects also handled in slave narratives where African American fugitives have collaborated with more literate white writers. She begins, for instance, in the genre’s classic way, with the rhetoric of omission. “I cannot give dates,” she writes, “as my progenitors, being slaves, had no means of keeping them” (5). Some of her memories of births, deaths, people, and places are blank, and such recollections are compromised or incomplete because of the usual “cruel hands” (7) of sclerotic or spendthrift owners who decide to sell away her family members. In Thompson’s kinder hands, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson also asserts a postbellum sen­ sibility. Jackson’s and her family’s story includes the attempt to escape and/or otherwise push back against the violence and abuse of slaveholders–nothing new for such narra­ tives. Yet these episodes of slaves’ intransigence invest an old theme with new meanings. Celebrating “the glory of freedom” (28), Jackson confides: I would advise all, young, middle aged, or old, in a free country to learn to read and write. If this little book should fall into the hands of one deficient in the impor­ tant knowledge of writing, I hope they will remember the old maxim:–“Never too old to learn.” Manage your own secrets, and divulge them by the silent language of your own pen. Had our blessed President [Lincoln] considered it too humiliating to learn in advanced years, our race would yet have remained under the galling yoke of oppression. (29) Dr. Thompson organizes Jackson’s story to substantiate the claim here that education is as “great” a “convenience” (29) as freedom. Her biological father, who escapes to Chica­ go to become “a free man…preaching the Gospel,” is nevertheless able to post letters to her enslaved mother, although they “could not reach her” (9). Hungry for knowledge, Jackson herself “could read a little, but was not allowed to learn in slavery. I was obliged to pay twenty-five cents for every letter written for me” (28). These transactions pay off, as Union soldiers who encamp around St. Louis take “much delight in tossing a paper over the fence” to Jackson and her mother, who soon have “learned to read enough to make out the news in the papers” (13). When her mistress collects a switch for the mas­ ter of the house to cane her, Jackson retaliates by “ben[ding] the switch in the shape of W, which was the first letter of his name” (15). As Doveanna S. Fulton writes (Heather An­ Page 7 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives drea Williams gives a similar interpretation), by inverting the first letter of her name, Mattie’s bent switch also is a “power reversal” (57) and “assertion of agency.” Jackson fi­ nally succeeds in escaping from slavery after several failed attempts, but not before steal­ ing twenty-five dollars from her master to survive in freedom. Now that she has learned to write, she commands the last word, and mails him “a nice letter, thanking him for the kindness his pocket bestowed to me in time of need” (38). These examples of Jackson’s unrelenting pursuit of knowledge seem intended to make it difficult for recently manumitted African Americans to excuse or accept for their own illit­ eracy. As one might expect, then, Thompson’s and Jackson’s production, like the primers of the freedmen’s education project, presents inspiring episodes and characters intended to encourage education, morality, hard work, delayed gratification, fortitude, and Christ­ ian faith. “As the first dawn of life has passed, and the meridian of (p. 305) life is approach­ ing,” if Mattie J. Jackson possesses the energy and pluck to write a memoir to “obtain the aid towards completing my studies” (3, 36), then what can others accomplish in the wake of Emancipation? Dr. Thompson reinforces this point with her editorial note that Jackson “only craves the means to clothe and qualify the intellect” (4) with sales of her book. Re­ siding in New England, where she was “continually crowded with friends and customers without distinction” (35), some of Dr. Thompson’s friends and customers may have an­ swered the call to go down South and teach the former slaves. They may have been eager and able to take Jackson’s book with them to introduce to their pupils. It is a text for African Americans learning to read and write and be free as much as it chronicles Jackson’s own stages in this progress. The mother-daughter collaborators whose names share the title page vocalize a national project of writing the recently manumitted slaves into a narrative of American identity. Even if America remains ideologically divided over whether or not African Americans are prepared to tow their weight as partners in the Reconstruction enterprise, the collabora­ tively written Story of Mattie J. Jackson connects African Americans to the moral values of a national citizenry. As told by Dr. Thompson, Mattie Jackson’s story ranks religion above literature, music, science, and other imaginative and intellectual pursuits because it influ­ ences “the moral aspect of nations” (39). It places families and communities at the center of America’s productive postwar rebirth, presenting reestablished relationships as the core of a country resurrected, the fabric of solid homes, the solid foundation for a thriv­ ing Protestant faith. Describing Jackson as a “much respected” new arrival to her town of Lawrence, Massa­ chusetts, who “sustains a high moral character” (3), Dr. Thompson represents her par­ ents as poster children for these themes of propriety and family. Jackson’s mother Ellen Turner was married three times, but not because of a frivolous attitude toward matrimo­ ny. Turner’s first husband, Westly Jackson, escaped slavery and died up north before Emancipation. Four years into their marriage, Turner’s second husband George Brown escaped to Canada, where he lost touch with his wife and her growing brood of children. During the Union occupation of St. Louis, Turner received permission from her owner Captain Tirrell to marry for a third time to a childhood friend, Mr. Adams, who had Page 8 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives bought his own freedom. Tirrell’s magnanimity, however, was merely a smokescreen for treachery. He arranged to have Turner and her children kidnapped to Kentucky and sold to another master. After the Civil War, Turner and Adams were reunited and “married in a week,” some “two years and four months” (33) following the date they originally were to wed. Meanwhile, after nine years’ separation from his former family, Brown finally tracked down Turner and her children. Though he also had remarried, he arranged for Turner’s daughter Mattie and a younger brother to travel to Massachusetts to live with him and his new wife Dr. Thompson. This complicated odyssey of losses, recoveries, sepa­ rations, and reunions brings readers to the discovery that Jackson’s “little book” is both a compact personal archive and a larger political symbol. It would not be the pen of a relative but, like the accounts of Douglass and the Crafts, the intertextual voices of national leaders that would lend authority to Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days (1909). Its author, Annie Louise Burton (c. 1850–c.1910), led (p. 306) a “young life in the great Sunny South” in 1865 when the news of the Emancipa­ tion Proclamation reached the Alabama plantation where she lived. In less than 50 pages, her “true life story of one born in slavery” (45) takes readers from the arduousness of a plantation childhood spent “picking great baskets full” of cotton, “too heavy…to car­ ry” (38) in the sun-baked Alabama fields, to her employments as a domestic and cook back and forth across the Mason-Dixon line, to her marriage in New England and failed attempts there to launch respectable businesses such as restaurants and boarding hous­ es. Burton’s direct, spare, reportorial prose style reflects how she learned to read imme­ diately after the war, attended high school, and, as a mature wife and mother on the shady side of 40, has taken up night school in Boston. Her book of Memories was inspired by “a letter of my life” (45) Burton submitted to the white principal of her evening school, who then, in a tone reminiscent of antebellum collaborators, urged her to “Write the book and I will help you” (46). It concludes with an appendix including favorite hymns and po­ ems she may have recited and compositions she may have written there. Like the Story of Mattie J. Jackson, Burton’s Memories possibly accomplished the double duties of serving as a primer for uneducated African Americans, as well as drumming up themes of educa­ tion within its pages. Several of these items in Burton’s appendix invoke prominent international leaders–the American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), the martyred American president Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), and the African American minister, historian, and educator Peter Thomas Stanford (1860–1909), a pastor to congregations in both England and the United States. Their words affirm the philosophy of “honesty, up­ rightness, and truthfulness” (15), along with working industriously, worshipping faithfully, and building wealth steadily, that upwardly mobile African Americans envisioned as an ef­ fective path to racial advancement and to economic and political parity with whites. In the Alger-style “rags to riches” mold that many American readers favored, Burton’s story chisels this ethos of scrappy social mobility. The trinity of Carnegie the capitalist, Lincoln the litigator, and Stanford the scholar and pastor lend authority to her project. They sym­ bolize a new era when blacks and whites need not threaten each other, instead uniting in partnership for the nation to attain its greatest destiny. They legitimize her theme of in­ Page 9 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives terracial mutuality and collaboration in the post–Civil War nation. As Stanford writes, “Now, you cannot do without the negro, because if you send him away, you will run after him. He is here to stay” (64). They also help pitch her narrative to an adult audience, a clever balance to the childlike, superficial perspective of past events that occasionally in­ forms some of her reminiscences. For example, in Burton’s appended article “A Question of Ethics,” Andrew Carnegie de­ scribes “9,000,000 colored men anxious and willing to work” as “a blessing” (74) to the country. His pronouncement establishes labor to be the means for African Americans to define themselves as productive citizens, not problems. Burton inserts herself in this par­ adigm by describing a plethora of jobs she has occupied doing farm work and cooking and cleaning in service to white households. Likewise, her frequent references to the val­ ue she places on an education rhyme with her final composition on President Lincoln, which emphasizes his “love of learning” (55). Where the young (p. 307) Lincoln “obtained whatever books he could, studying by the firelight, and once walking six miles for an Eng­ lish Grammar” (56), a newly emancipated young Burton “soon got so I could read” (13) and passes on this desire to her adopted son Lawrence, who becomes a proud, patriotic graduate of Hampton Institute. Writing with the academic’s precise, empirical prose, Stanford calls upon numerical evidence in his appended essay entitled “The Race Ques­ tion in America” in order to establish southern African Americans as worthy of inclusion within a civilized American populace. “14,000 lawyers and doctors,” “over 150,000 farms and houses,” “$11,000,000 for educational purposes,” and “over $12,000,000 worth of school property, 3000 teachers, 50 high schools, 17 academies, 125 colleges, 10 law and medical schools, 25 theological seminaries, all” do “a mighty work for God and humani­ ty” (63). Similar topics of delayed gratification, thrift, labor, property ownership, piety, and education among Burton and her family members in Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days anticipate and reinforce Stanford’s statistics. Burton creates an intertextual dialogue with the work of Reverend Stanford, who had published his memoir From Bondage to Liberty 20 years earlier, in order to represent her­ self as the happy result of the aforementioned postbellum qualities. “I myself have suf­ fered as a child whose parents were born in slavery,” Stanford writes, “deprived of all in­ fluences of the ennobling life, made obedient to the will of the white man by the lash and the chain, and sold to the highest bidder when there was no more use for them” (61). He is fascinated with and takes obvious pride in the distance his fellow African Americans have traveled from slavery to civilization due to “the higher education of the…race” (62). Where he praises God for inspiring “his white sons and daughters both in the North and South to teach their brothers in black” (62), Burton has brought this vision of a “new edu­ cated negro” (65) to fruition with her school certificates in “attendance,” “deportment,” and “general proficiency in studies” (51, 52). Her own patience and persistence about learning to read and write wherever she could find the time, whenever she could follow it through, exemplifies the “rapid strides” in literacy Stanford has documented among the race since the “close of the war” (66). Then “it was a rare thing, indeed, to find a man of the race [women did not merit such statistics] who even knew his letters” (66). By the time Stanford gets around in his essay to recommending his textbook entitled A School Page 10 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1890 (1890), a production featuring patriotic and dignified representations of slavery’s descendants, it is clear that Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days intends the same transformative function of using literacy to define African American identity and character with “renewed terms” (70). Burton’s little book of Memories establishes another intertextual relationship with the life and speeches of Booker T. Washington (1856–1919). Few African Americans in Burton’s lifetime symbolized reconciliation and cooperation as did Booker T., and few were as ef­ fective brokering political and financial concessions among both white and black leaders. His presence in her memoir helps to sanction her ideas among readers, similar to the framing matter and intertextual references of earlier narratives. Like Burton and so many other postbellum African American memoirists, Washington had (p. 308) compared himself to the Great Emancipator, with a similar childhood “in a typical log cabin” (1), a similar understanding that “hard and unusual struggle” (23) build character and strength, and a similarly “intense longing” (16) for knowledge and education. Like Burton’s own son, Washington had attended Hampton. Partly out of necessity, partly out of an intuitive grasp of readers’ expectations, Burton’s tone echoes Washington’s by leaving no room for “bit­ ter feeling toward the white people on the part of my race because of the fact that most of the white population was away fighting in a war which would result in keeping the Ne­ gro in slavery if the South was successful” (7). Burton represents African Americans as refusing to play a blame game with white southerners in “these changing times” (39), as understanding whites’ nostalgia for “the beautiful proud Sunny South, with its proud masters and mistresses” (39). Washington likewise declared, “I have long since ceased to cherish any spirit of bitterness against the Southern white people on account of the en­ slavement of my race. No one section of the country was wholly responsible for its intro­ duction….” (9). Like Douglass with Garrison and Phillips, the Crafts with each other and their friend Brown, and Jackson with Thompson, intertextual presences like Washington and Stanford in Burton’s narrative point to how American slave narratives collaboratively establish meaning through a polyvocal technique of using the struggles and achievements of other American writers and speakers to reinforce, intensify, and nuance the stories they tell. Unfortunately, the more evidence of such dual authorship in a slave’s narrative, whether presented as an outright coproduction or subtler intertextual linkages, the more suspect and unconvincing, and the less truthful and persuasive, the African American’s story might seem to black and non-black audiences. From the beginnings of African American print culture, for former slaves and their antislavery friends, published, single-authored, first-person memoirs generated maximum political and intellectual capital. They provided the opponents of southern bondage with one of the most powerful arguments of all–the wisdom of firsthand experience–enabling readers quickly to recognize how much more awful bondage was next to anything they could imagine it to be. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written in his influential books on African American literature and African American vernacular traditions, by demonstrating the individual black subject’s ability to imagine, to reason, and to compose original forms of written and spoken expression, slave narra­ tives inserted their authors into categories of humanity and being. It was sufficient for a Page 11 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives fugitive’s sponsors and supporters, like Douglass’s friends Garrison and Phillips, to con­ tribute their letters, poems, and speeches as framing devices or appended endorsements. Not always appealing, profitable, and politic in the anti-slavery and uplift eras were nar­ ratives that gave clear evidence of having been dictated or “told to” second-hand by for­ mer slaves to writers who had never experienced bondage themselves. Well into the pro­ gressive era and beyond, the suspicion persisted that written collaborations risked revi­ sionism, suppressing the former slave’s authentic voice and distinctive aspects of slave culture, and even sugarcoating the facts behind slavery’s awful vices. For example, from 1936 to 1938, the Depression-era federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) commis­ sioned unemployed artists and professionals to canvass the country collecting folklore, among them the novelist and Floridian Zora (p. 309) Neale Hurston (1891–1960), who in­ terviewed black laborers in turpentine camps and the proud residents of all-black towns. In many cases, WPA workers were charged with documenting the oral histories of surviv­ ing American slaves before their generation died and their memories faded. Yet too many of these stories, slanted with the racist or regional biases of their predominately white transcribers, were characterized by condescension, silences, misinterpretation, and sub­ tle or overt ridicule. Just as scholars have learned to read between the lines of the WPA narratives in order to recover the authentic experiences of the ex-slaves who told these accounts, a new turn in American literary and cultural studies recognizes the value and legitimacy of African Americans’ oral histories. This has been announced by memoirs and biographies that draw without apology from both published matter and oral recollections, passed down like inherited wealth among American families and communities. For example, Annette Gordon-Reed’s hunt for evidence to substantiate claims of a sexual relationship between the enslaved Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, her Virginia master and America’s third sitting president, in part reflects a receptive attitude to the authoritative weight and plausibility of African Americans’ spoken stories as well as whites’ written facts. GordonReed’s award-winning work inspired a national conversation about the acceptability of dismissing the oral histories of “black” relations in “white” bloodlines out of hand, of writ­ ing them off as merely pretty fictions or mere products of the addled memories and aspi­ rational, but empty, fantasies of former slaves. Her research called attention to how it is important to realize that the written or printed matter of official regimes, such as books, inventories, and testimonies from courts of law, can be just as subjective as any oral nar­ ratives, camouflaging racially biased motives and perceptions behind a cloak of institu­ tional authority. I have argued in this essay for a wider definition of collaborative American slave narra­ tives that extends beyond the idea of two or more writers sitting down together to com­ pose a text. For example, the textual and paratextual interventions of editors and friends in many ostensible single-authored texts, from submitting a testimonial to revising a chapter or two to advising about content, style, and organization throughout the manu­ script, invite contemporary readers to reconsider how such books also may have regis­ tered and had impact in their day as communally constructed projects. The intertextual dialogues between narratives and historical voices, or between narratives and the stories Page 12 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives of family members, friends, and other living associates, offer a third way of thinking about the communal aspects of such compositions. All of these collaborations demon­ strate what Saidiya V. Hartman has called the “networks of affiliation and identifica­ tion” (52) that pervade so many African Americans’ narratives of slavery and freedom. Borne of blood and fictive kin, of formal institutions and casual neighbors, communities of African Americans, Hartman writes, have cohered not so much around a shared identity rooted in the history of enslavement as they have around the desire to eliminate it. They have emerged around the common goal of liberation from oppression that itself reflects an understanding that any one individual’s life gains meaning and fulfillment only insofar as he or she has been guided and inspired by those who have gone before. While contemporary histories and memoirs usually have been single authored and obviously not produced by former slaves, they are successors in many ways to such col­ laborative American slave narratives of earlier centuries. Like the earlier books, they knit together first-hand perspectives on bondage with second-hand ones, and they elevate equally the oral/vernacular stories from the slaves’ communities and kin with the written/ formal documents of scholarly and/or primarily white sources. Lucille Clifton’s Good Woman (1987), Kent Anderson Leslie’s Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege (1996), Ed­ (p. 310)

ward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (1998), Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond (2006), and other post–Vietnam era histories and memoirs nod to what the ex-slave Harriet Jacobs in her memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) called the “tangled skeins” that “the genealogies of slavery” engendered (78) and that ex­ tended well into the decades of Jim Crow, as southerners winked salaciously yet hushed them up. These works are the descendants of the collaborative American slave narratives of earlier centuries. One purpose they have served has been to unbury the secret histories of consensual or coerced sexual relations between whites, blacks, and Native Americans from under the roots of southerners’ venerable family trees, and thus to exorcise generations’ worth of si­ lence, shame, anger, and hypocrisy. Their goals of reconciliation and honesty across the color line, and the collective fights and coalitional forces of people of different racial backgrounds that literally have gone into making them, call to mind the thematic struc­ ture and compositional unity of the collaborative slave narratives of old. They underscore that a diverse and multicultural America, where the birthrate of minorities has in many regions outpaced that of the majority white population, cannot thrive when anxieties about mixed race identity and histories of passing continue to divide and silence its citi­ zenry. Finally, they mark the latest moment in a literary history that reaches back to the collaborative narratives–to authors white and free, and black and hunted, who inter­ twined their visions of integrity and peace regardless of how imperfectly their relation­ ships would follow.

References Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiogra­ phy, 1760–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Page 13 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives ——. “The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-American Literary Realism, 1865–1920.” In African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. An­ drews. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993. 77–89. ——, ed. Slave Narratives after Slavery. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ball, Edward. Slaves in the Family. New York: Ballantine, 1998. Brown, William Wells. Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. Ed. Robert S. Levine. Rpt. 1909; Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Burton, Annie Louise. Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days. In Six Women’s Slave Nar­ ratives. Rpt. 1909; New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1988. (p. 311) Clifton, Lucille. Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980. Rochester, NY: BOA Edi­ tions, 1987. Craft, William and Ellen. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. Rpt. 1860; Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1999. Douglass, Frederick. The Narrative of an American Slave. Written by Himself. In The Ox­ ford Frederick Douglass Reader. Ed. William L. Andrews. Rpt. 1845; New York and Lon­ don: Oxford University Press, 1996. 21–97. Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Fabian, Ann. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. ——. ‘Til Death and Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in Early African America. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2010. Fulton, DoVeanna S. Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1987. ——. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives Greenspan, Esra, ed. William Wells Brown: A Reader. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Heglar, Charles J. Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage in the Narratives of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Jackson, Mattie J. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson; Her Parentage–Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery–Incidents During the War–Her Escape from Slavery. A True Story in Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Rpt. 1866; New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1988. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Enlarged ed. 1861; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Leslie, Kent Anderson. Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849–1893. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996. McCaskill, Barbara. “‘Yours Very Truly’: Ellen Craft–The Fugitive as Text and Artifact.” African American Review 2. 4 (1994): 509–529. ——, ed. “Introduction: William and Ellen Craft in Transatlantic Literature and Life.” In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slav­ ery, by William and Ellen Craft. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. vii–xxv. ——. “Ellen Craft: The Fugitive Who Fled as a Planter, c. 1826–1891.” In Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 1. Edited by Ann Short Chirhart and Betty Wood. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2009. 82–105. McCoy, Beth A. “Race and the (Para)textual Condition.” PMLA 121.1 (January 2006): 156– 169. Samuels, Ellen. “‘A Complication of Complaints’: Untangling Disability, Race, and Gender in William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.” MELUS 31.3 (2006): 15–47. (p. 312) Sanborn, Geoffrey. “Kilroy was Here: William Wells Brown and the Rewriting of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.” Forthcoming publication. Sekora, John. “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative.” Callaloo 10.3 (Summer 1987): 482–515. Wardrop, Daneen. “Collaboration in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: William’s Key and Ellen’s Renaming.” Arizona Quarterly 61.3 (Autumn 2005): 57–73. Washington-Williams, Essie Mae, and William Stadiem. Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Page 15 of 16

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Collaborative American Slave Narratives Williams, Heather Andrea. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Free­ dom. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Zackodnik, Teresa. Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Politics in the Era of Reform. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011.

Barbara McCaskill

Barbara McCaskill, University Of Georgia

Page 16 of 16

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives

Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives   Kimberly K. Smith The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.014

Abstract and Keywords Although not obvious candidates for ecocritical analysis, the classic American slave narra­ tives offer rich opportunities for exploring African Americans’ complex relationship with the land. Promising lines of inquiry include folk beliefs about nature, how plantation slav­ ery organized human and nature relations in the American South, and how the narratives invested the American landscape with political, moral, and spiritual meaning. Drawing on the early nineteenth-century ideology of democratic agrarianism, the narratives explore in depth the effect of oppression on the land and how oppression distorts one’s relation­ ship to the natural world. Although slave agriculture often forced slaves into an intimacy with and affection for the natural world, slavery also tended to alienate slaves from the land and the natural world by associating farming with brutality and coercion. This theme continues to influence black political thought, informing the contemporary environmental justice movement’s analysis of how racial discrimination creates polluted, highly degrad­ ed landscapes. Keywords: slavery, slave narrative, ecocriticism, agrarianism, agriculture, nature, place, landscape, environmental justice

THE African American slave narratives are not an obvious subject for ecocritical investi­ gation. They were not written, nor are they normally read, as vehicles for exploring the meaning of the natural world or for advocating its protection. But as Lawrence Buell points out, environmental criticism is not confined to the genre of nature writing; it is concerned also with the “environmental(ist) subtexts of works whose interests are osten­ sibly directed elsewhere (e.g., toward social, political, and economic relations)” (Buell 2005, p. 29). Thus environmental criticism may focus on elucidating the environmental values underlying or implicit in works of literature, on analyzing how “nature” is con­ structed in such works, or on the use of “place” as an analytic category. These are all rich themes in the slave narratives. Indeed, as Christine Gerhardt has suggested, the slave narratives are good examples of the “racial and ethnic specificity of America’s environ­ mental literatures.” Applying both ecocritical and postcolonial theoretical frameworks to the narratives, Gerhardt finds that they illuminate “the many incoherences and contradic­ Page 1 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives tions involved in the relation between African Americans and nature,” and more generally “how different kinds of land conquest are linked to the colonization of people” (Gerhardt 2002, p. 515). The genre of slave narrative includes many different kinds of texts, from book-length, published works to oral histories. This essay focuses on the most well-known subgenre: book-length narratives, published before the Civil War, authored by (or in some cases coauthored by or based on the lives of) ex-slaves. Sometimes referred to as the “classic” narratives, these works represent the full development of many of the trends begun in the narratives of the late eighteenth century, and their conventions have become generic standards (Heglar 2001, 6). They also share a common political context, namely the ante­ bellum debate over slavery, which made them an important foundation for the subsequent development of African American thought. In particular, the classic narratives offer an ac­ count of the effect of oppression on the land and an account of how oppression distorts one’s relationship to the natural world—both accounts continue to influence (p. 316) black political thought. We can in fact find the roots of the contemporary environmental justice movement in the environmental ethic developed in the classic slave narratives. This essay offers an overview of emerging lines of ecocritical investigation and some of the intellectual contexts relevant to such investigation—most notably, the early nine­ teenth-century ideology of democratic agrarianism and its associated environmental cri­ tique of slavery. Ecocritical scholarship on the narratives is a relatively recent develop­ ment, so this discussion will necessarily be exploratory, with the aim of opening up av­ enues for further research.

Slave Narratives and Slave Culture Although it is tempting to do so, we must be cautious about looking to the classic slave narratives for insight into how the American slave community made sense of the natural world. The antebellum slave narratives were, among other things, sophisticated works of political advocacy, written to further the cause of abolition, and were directed to northern white audiences. As many commentators have noted, they draw heavily on the conven­ tions of such well-established Euroamerican genres as the picaresque, spiritual autobiog­ raphy, and Indian captivity narratives. Thus rather than simple reflections of a slave’s worldview, they were complex rhetorical acts reflecting both the narrators’ unique experi­ ences and the broader northern political culture. Of course, the cultural background of the slave narrators (and some of their audiences) included the folk culture to which most of the narrators were exposed during their captivity. That culture offered a rich tapestry of Native American, European, and African ideas about nature, some of which find their way into the narratives. But such references must be interpreted with careful attention to the rhetorical context. The early narratives, such as the 1789 work, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olau­ dah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (Caretta 2007), may give us some insight into specifically West African ideas about nature. To be sure, Equiano’s narrative is a contro­ Page 2 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives versial source; Vincent Carretta has questioned whether Equiano was really born in Africa, citing evidence that he may have been born in South Carolina in 1747 (Carretta 2007, pp. 46–47). Nevertheless, he may have been exposed to African beliefs there, and he might also have drawn on western literature on Africa. Whatever the source of his knowledge, Equiano draws on traditional West African animistic beliefs in describing his (alleged) enslavement in Benin and transportation to the Barbadoes. For example, when the sea grew rough, he “thought the Ruler of the seas was angry,” and expected to be thrown into the waters as an offering to appease the spirits. His captors also seemed to have magical powers, which allowed them to master unfamiliar creatures such as horses (Taylor 1999, I: 64, 60). Although Equiano’s magical worldview eventually gives way to Protestant spirituality, with Providence replacing animistic spirits, the idea that both the social and natural worlds are governed by a spiritual power persists throughout the nar­ rative. This connection between spiritual and physical domination of humans and (p. 317) of nature deserves further exploration, particularly in light of substantial evidence that animistic beliefs persisted in New World slave communities for several decades. The theme of spiritual power, however, is not quite as prominent in the other narratives, most of which focus less centrally on the conversion experience and contain fewer refer­ ences to African ideas about the natural world. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa (1798), for example, written by amanuensis Elisha Niles and published only a few years after Equiano’s, says little about animism. Smith, who was born and enslaved in Africa, does offer detailed descriptions of the African landscape. It is a rich land, he tells us, where fruits grow “spontaneously,” and it is generous to the trav­ eler, in spite of the many “noxious animals” one might hear howling in the forests at night. Smith describes a gentle, pastoral landscape, watered with dew and a large river that enriches the fertile soil (Smith 1798, 6–7). This description, as Yolanda Pierce has noted, serves to “challenge ideas about Africa in the minds of his eighteenth-century audi­ ence, for whom the continent of Africa is even more terrifying than the unclaimed Ameri­ can wilderness” (Pierce 2007, 87). Thus Smith’s detailed descriptions aim at dispelling Western misconceptions about Africa rather than exploring African beliefs themselves. Nor do the later, classic narratives contain much information about African or African American folk beliefs about nature. Postbellum slave testimony, much of which is in the form of oral histories collected by government workers and scholars, is a better resource for such an investigation. For example, Elizabeth Blum’s study of this literature finds that slaves held complex views of the wilderness. The forests surrounding plantations could be places of refuge but also of danger, both natural and supernatural. She notes that older slave women were often able to exploit the spiritual power found in the forest by develop­ ing extensive knowledge of herb medicine. Both men and women hunted and fished in the forest as well (Blum 2002, 251, 256–257, 260–261). This postbellum slave testimony of­ fers considerable evidence that slaves developed a distinctive body of knowledge about the natural world, which allowed them to harness its physical and spiritual power in resis­ tance to their oppression. But we find only occasional evidence of that cultural heritage in the classic slave narratives. To cite a familiar example, Frederick Douglass, in his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, suggests that his ability Page 3 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives to resist his brutal overseer may have had something to do with a special root given to him by a friend (a reference to the magical use of roots and herbs common in slave com­ munities) (Taylor 1999, I: 569). Such references are rare, but they point to a rich body of folklore lying just beyond (and perhaps deliberately obscured by?) the formal texts. Folk beliefs about nature are only one promising line of ecocritical investigation, however. The classic slave narratives invite a broader inquiry into how plantation slavery organized human and nature relations in the American South during the first half of the nineteenth century. Slave agriculture involved controlling nature as well as humans, and the systems of control developed by the planters, as well as the slaves’ responses to them, shaped what the slave narrators had to say about the natural world. For example, the institutions of slavery deprived slaves of formal property rights and the right to travel, and (p. 318) they restricted their ability to engage in independent food production. These rights are, accordingly, featured prominently in the classic slave narratives as critical to maintaining a positive, productive relationship with the natural world. Most of the narrators sought their own home, their own land, and the right to profit from their labor, as well as the freedom to move across the landscape without fear of capture (principally so they could visit the families from which they had been separated). William Wells Brown, for example, realized that because of his fugitive status, escaping from slavery meant he might never again see his “dear sister and two beloved brothers” in the South. But he is driven to en­ dure this loss and other profound hardships by his desire to purchase “a little farm,” so that he may have a “Free Home” (Taylor 1999, I: 703). His conception of happiness in fact consists almost entirely in owning some land of his own—a theme echoed by many other narrators. Josiah Henson’s liberation is complete only when he acquires a house, along with some livestock, and he goes on to preach the importance of land ownership for free blacks: They should aim “to raise [their] own crops, eat [their] own bread, and be, in short, [their] own masters” (Taylor 1999, I: 749, 752). This emphasis on property is one of the insights that ecocritics can take from the narratives: While many contemporary envi­ ronmentalists are critical of the American tradition of strong property rights, the fugitive slaves remind us that in a society plagued by racial injustice, property rights offer a de­ gree of independence that helps the oppressed flourish in relationship to the natural world. The absence of rights, conversely, put slaves in a conflicted relationship to the land. To be sure, slave agriculture often forced slaves into an intimacy with and affection for the nat­ ural world. Many of the narrators expressed a deep connection to the southern land­ scape, despite their trials. Lewis Clarke, for example, insisted, “I would have given any­ thing in the world for the prospect of spending my life among my old acquaintances, where I first saw the sky, and the sun rise and go down,” if he could have been assured of his freedom there. Having escaped to Canada, he had difficulty adjusting to its landscape: “A strange sky was over me, a new earth under me, strange voices all around; even the animals were such as I had never seen…. It was a long time before I could make the sun work right at all. It would rise in the wrong place, and go down wrong; and, finally, it be­ haved so bad, I thought it could not be the same sun” (Taylor 1999, I: 623). Despite their oft-stated love for the South, however, it’s clear that slavery also tended to alienate slaves Page 4 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives from the land and the natural world by associating farming with brutality and coercion. As suggested earlier, knowledge of farming and herb lore could be a basis of power and self-respect in the slave community and even with respect to their masters, but those competencies also marked one’s status as a slave. As a result, many slaves were ambiva­ lent about working the land, expressing both pride in their agricultural labor and a desire to escape the violence, drudgery, and low status associated with field work. We see some of this ambivalence in the 1853 narrative of Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, written by amanuensis David Wilson. Northup takes pains to explain that his fa­ ther, although a slave, was “respected for his industry and integrity,” in large part be­ cause he “passed his life in peaceful pursuits of agriculture,” avoiding more “menial” work. This paragon of agrarian virtue eventually manages to buy his way out of slavery, but Solomon neglects his father’s example. He seeks excitement (p. 319) in the city, is kid­ napped and enslaved, and only with great effort finds his way back to freedom. Through­ out the story Northup maintains that his ultimate goal is the pastoral ideal, “the posses­ sion of some humble habitation, with a few surrounding acres.” But Northup does not in fact like farming. As a free man, he always chooses industrial trades; as a slave, he natu­ rally finds field work brutally oppressive but also notes that he isn’t very good at it (Tay­ lor 1999, II: 173, 174, 210, 242–243). Such an admission apparently was not a source of embarrassment to him. As John Brown explains in Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1854), written with the help of Louis Alex Chamerovzow, in the slave states it is farm labor, not incompetence, that “is made shameful.” Indeed, even white farmers are ashamed: “A man does not like to go to work in his own fields for fear folks should look down upon him.” Slaves also resented having to work for others without remuneration, although Brown insists they would work hard enough for themselves. Nevertheless, Brown (unlike Northup) boasts of his own skill and industriousness: At farming and any other sort of labor, he proudly asserts, he “was a match for any two hands” (Taylor 1999, II: 341, 347, 392). This ambivalence toward agricultural labor illustrates some of the “incoherences and con­ tradictions involved in the relation between African Americans and nature” to which Christine Gerhardt refers. Farming, in nineteenth-century America, was the primary way humans related to the natural world. Attitudes toward farming therefore say a great deal about how people perceived and valued nature. The combination of knowledge, skill, and resentment expressed in the slave narratives captures some of the complexity of African Americans’ relationship to the American landscape. Moreover, the narratives suggest that the slave system also alienated the slave owners from the land by associating agricultural labor with slave status. As Charles Ball puts it, “exemption from labour is their badge of gentility…It is disgraceful to plough, or to dig” (Taylor 1999, I: 384). This pervasive am­ bivalence toward farming, and toward the natural world itself, appears to be one of the environmental legacies of race slavery. But there is even more at stake in the narrators’ discussions of farming. Conversations about slave agriculture in nineteenth-century America inevitably engaged a set of ideas, or a discourse, that we may term “democratic agrarianism,” an ideology that accorded Page 5 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives agricultural labor profound political meaning. This agrarian tradition forms a critical background for understanding what the narratives teach us about the relationship be­ tween social justice and environmental stewardship.

Democratic Agrarianism and the Environmen­ tal Critique of Slavery Abolitionism was in many respects an agricultural reform movement, aimed at replacing slave agriculture with the system of agriculture promoted by Thomas Jefferson and (p. 320) his fellow agrarians: a community of free, independent farmers owning and work­ ing their own land from a position of political and social equality. This vision of free farm­ ing informs most of the classic narratives and constitutes the basis of their environmental critique of slavery. The slave narrators, drawing on their experiences of slavery as well as arguments developed by eighteenth-century European and American agriculturalists, ar­ gued that only free, independent farmers could develop the interest in and affection for the land that would lead to good stewardship and a healthy, morally beneficial relation­ ship between humans and the natural world. The narratives’ environmental critique of slavery drew on a well-developed eighteenthcentury conversation about agricultural stewardship whose general contours are worth exploring in some detail here. Euroamericans inherited a rich tradition of agrarianism, which teaches that man’s natural, God-given calling is to cultivate the earth. Christian agrarians based that claim on the Biblical injunction to “replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion” over the animals and plants (Genesis 1:28) and on Genesis 2:15, in which God puts Adam in the garden of Eden “to dress it and keep it.” Agrarians like Thomas Jefferson contended that agricultural labor cultivated several moral virtues criti­ cal to republican citizens: industriousness, self-reliance, frugality, humility, piety, and pru­ dence. Owning and working one’s own farm also gave citizens the economic indepen­ dence and social status that would allow them to enter into politics on a footing of equali­ ty with other citizens. This concern with political equality made most democratic agrarians wary of slave agri­ culture. Although not always opposed to slavery on a small scale, many of them sharply attacked the inequality and moral corruption they saw in southern slave society. Slave agriculture, under this view, introduced into American society a class of degraded, unfree human beings who could not (under conditions of slavery) achieve the status of citizens, and who must be kept in bondage through morally corrupting violence and brutality. Ac­ cording to this critique, slavery was bad for the slave, bad for the citizen, and, important­ ly, bad for the land (Smith 2007,. 43–45; Kerber 1970, 23–66). The agrarian critique of slavery was articulated long before the era of radical abolition­ ism; it is on display already in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecouer’s 1781 work, Letters from an American Farmer. Crèvecouer’s narrator, a farmer in Pennsylvania who owns a few slaves himself, is harshly critical of the form of slavery he witnesses in the South. The Page 6 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives slave-trading city of Charleston, South Carolina, he notes, enjoys all the luxuries and re­ finements its great wealth can provide, but it is surrounded by “scenes of misery” to which the master class is blind and deaf. “Here the horrors of slavery, the hardship of in­ cessant toils, are unseen; and no one thinks with compassion of those showers of sweat and of tears which from the bodies of Africans daily drop and moisten the ground they till” (Crèvecouer 1963, p. 168). He contrasts (somewhat disingenuously, of course) the corrupt, degraded South with the middle colonies, filled with honest, independent farm­ ers, pious but tolerant, respectful of the rights of others and ruling their small families gently, through kindness and reason. Letters thus creates a moral geography, moving from the virtuous North to the corrupt South—a geography that will resurface in aboli­ tionist literature and be developed in considerably more detail in the slave narratives. But Letters does more; it explains why this moral geography emerged in the onceinnocent New World. What the South lacked from the beginning, according to Crèvecouer’s account, was a strong tradition of free labor. Americans (at least the white Americans living in the northern colonies) enjoyed a freedom of thought and action miss­ ing from the South and from many European regimes. Free workers, according to the narrator, make better citizens. Northern citizens love their government because it “re­ (p. 321)

quires but little from us,” and they respect the laws because the laws are equitable. They don’t want to dominate others because they are not dominated themselves. Moreover, they are better farmers: “We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfet­ tered and unrestrained because each person works for himself.” He insists that even his slaves enjoy a great deal of liberty, because he understands that they would be poor work­ ers without it (Crèvecouer 1963, 52, 67, 58–59). Liberty is essential to creating good workers, and therefore to achieving good stewardship. The connection between liberty and good stewardship implied by Crèvecouer finds a great deal of support in the works of agriculturalists and economists of the era, such as Adam Smith, Arthur Young, the French Physiocrats, Thomas Jefferson, and John Taylor of Caroline. To distill a rather complex conversation to a few principles, these free labor ad­ vocates argued that agricultural fertility depended on careful, skilled labor; lazy, un­ skilled workers would till the soil carelessly, leading to soil erosion and loss of fertility. Ideally, small farms worked by well-educated owners and a few closely supervised hands would be more productive, for a longer period of time, than large farms worked by gangs of uneducated, depressed, and angry slaves, supervised by masters who cared more for luxuries and status display than the intricacies of good farming. The logic is compelling; even in the eighteenth century it was clear that large plantations offered some economies of scale, but their environmental costs were problematic. English farmers had learned how to make small farms productive over the long term, but plantations were profitable only when devoted to monocultures of cash crops, and only as long as one could move on in a few years to virgin land (see, e.g., Young [1781] 1967; Smith [1776] 1981). The economic and environmental challenges of large plantations were a well-worn theme in the North and the South well before the classic slave narratives took them up. The slave narratives, however, developed and complicated these themes, adding a wealth of Page 7 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives insight and descriptive detail to what had been a set of commonplaces. Nor are these de­ tails merely decorative flourishes. A central aim of the classic slave narratives is to edu­ cate the reader’s moral perception—to sensitize them to the morally relevant features of what they are seeing. This is achieved in part by describing features of slavery that are usually hidden from view. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Harriet Jacobs, for example, took her readers beyond “the beautiful groves and flowering vines, and the comfortable huts of the favored household slaves” to the uglier reality of the field slave. But educating the moral perception also involves interpreting or explain­ ing the significance of what one is seeing. One sympathetic reviewer of Uncle Tom’s Cab­ in sums up this goal admirably, noting that many even in the South “are ignorant of the existence of what they do not see, or indeed of the true meaning and nature of what they do see, until their attention is forcibly called to it” (Taylor 1999, (p. 322) II: 592; “Narra­ tives of Fugitive Slaves” 1849, 471). The wealth of environmental description in the nar­ ratives is part of this project of educating the moral vision. The narratives teach the audi­ ence how to “read” the southern landscape to perceive the “true meaning and nature” of the physical world created by slave agriculture. Consider, for example, the narrative of Charles Ball—Slavery in the United States, written with the help of Isaac Fischer and published in 1836. Ball dwells at some length on the degeneration of agriculture observed by the narrator as he proceeds South from Mary­ land in a slave gang. “[U]nder the bad culture which is practiced in the south,” he tells us, “the land is constantly becoming poorer, and the means of getting food, more and more difficult.” He describes “immense thickets” of cedars, a decaying churchyard the only break in a monotonously desolate landscape. The land “had originally been highly fertile and productive, and had it been properly treated, would doubtlessly have contin­ ued to yield abundant and prolific crops.” But the slave owners “valued their land less than their slaves, exhausted the kindly soil by unremitting crops of tobacco, declined in their circumstances, and finally grew poor.” Ball notes that farmers in Virginia did not ro­ tate their crops and often abandoned worn-out fields to be overtaken by sedge grass, and then cedars and chinquapin bushes. As the slave gang progressed farther South the situa­ tion only grew worse: In Georgia, “the fields were destitute of every thing that deserved the name of grass, and not a spear of clover was anywhere visible. The few cattle that ex­ isted, were browsing on the boughs of trees, in the woods.” The rice fields were a vivid green, but were full of “stagnant and sickly water,” swarming with frogs and snakes. In sum, throughout the South the soil, “tortured into barrenness by the double curse of slav­ ery and tobacco,” stood as “a monument of the poverty and punishment which Providence had decreed as the reward of idleness and tyranny” (Taylor 1999, I: 266, 279–280, 283– 284, 195–196). Such detailed descriptions of the natural environment put the reader in a critical relation­ ship to the landscape of slavery, making vivid how the land is scarred by the slaveholders’ indolence and moral decay. That perspective is implicit, also, in Frederick Douglass’ com­ parison of the poverty of Maryland with the wealth of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where everything looked “clean, new and beautiful.” It is echoed again by James Penning­ ton, who refers to soil exhausted by “the bad cultivation peculiar to the slave states” and Page 8 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives the “once fine smooth gravel walks, overgrown with grass—the redundances of the shrub­ bery neglected…a fine garden in splendid ruins.” In contrast, according to John Thomp­ son, on plantations where slaves are well-treated, the land is “less cursed by cruelty” and therefore “rich and fertile; producing in abundance corn, wheat, and tobacco.” Lewis and Milton Clarke sum up this theme succinctly: Slavery “curses the soil,…the flocks and herds; it curses man and beast” (Taylor 1999, I: 589, 634; II: 114, 147–148, 431). Not all southern landscapes were physically degraded, of course. Much of the South was still heavily forested in the nineteenth century, and wild places (although always fraught with dangers) could represent to the slave a refuge, or evidence of a natural, God-given order in contrast to the corrupt order of the plantation (Dixon 1987, 23–24). Solomon Northup’s striking description of a swamp captures some of the strangeness (p. 323) and spiritual power—the fear and wonder—that a fugitive might experience in wild places: Imagination cannot picture the dreariness of the scene. The swamp was resonant with the quacking of innumerable ducks! Since the foundation of the earth, in all probability, a human footstep had never before so far penetrated the recesses of the swamp. It was not silent now—silent to a degree that rendered it oppressive,— as it was when the sun was shining in the heavens. My midnight intrusion had awakened the feathered tribes, which seemed to throng the morass in hundreds of thousands, and their garrulous throats poured forth such multitudinous sounds— there was such a fluttering of wings—such sullen plunges in the water all around me—that I was affrighted and appalled. All the fowls of the air, and all the creep­ ing things of the earth appeared to have assembled together in that particular place, for the purpose of filling it with clamor and confusion. Not by human dwellings—not in crowded cities alone, are the sights and sounds of life. The wildest places of the earth are full of them. Even in the heart of that dismal swamp, God had provided a refuge and a dwelling place for millions of living things. (Taylor 1999, II: 227) Its literary qualities alone—the close description, the biblical language and evocation of prelapsarian earth, the startling contrast between the oppressive silence of the day and the raucous midnight symphony, the deft comparison of the swamp with a busy urban scene—make this passage deserving of careful attention by ecocritics. We might infer from such passages that the spiritual resources needed to redeem the landscape of slav­ ery lie just beyond the borders of the plantation. Certainly there is something ominous (for slave owners) in this reminder of God’s endless compassion and awesome power. But for the slave narrators, these occasional evidences of God’s presence did little to miti­ gate slavery’s impact on the natural world. In fact, the curse of slavery affected even beautiful and apparently healthy agricultural landscapes, as evidenced by Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849). Bibb, having been cap­ tured and taken South, pauses during his journey to reflect on the beauty of the free soil of Ohio: “Things looked to me uncommonly pleasant: The green trees and wild flowers of Page 9 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives the forest; the ripening harvest fields waving with the gently breezes of Heaven; and the honest farmers tilling their soil and living by their own toil.” But his pleasure dims as he contemplated his fate: “to be sold like an ox, into hopeless bondage, and to be worked un­ der the flesh devouring lash.” Later, returning north to his home state of Kentucky, his ap­ preciation of its natural beauty is again spoiled by the specter of slavery: “My very soul,” he tells us, “was pained to look upon the slaves in the field.” Harriet Jacobs, as well, could see in the “bright, calm light” of the stars only cruel mockery of her sorrow (Taylor 1999, II: 36, 83, 580). Such passages underscore the psychological alienation between humans and nature that slavery creates: The meaning of the landscape is affected by its juxtaposi­ tion with human oppression. It is difficult if not impossible—for the slave and even for the more sensitive free citizens—to take pleasure in fields watered with the blood of human chattel. If slavery curses the soil, redemption lies in free farming. Most of the narrators embraced as their aim the agrarian ideal. Josiah Henson famously called on free blacks to “undertake the task…of settling upon wild lands which we could call our own; and where every tree which we felled, and every bushel of corn we raised, would be for ourselves; in other words, where we could secure all the profits of our own labor.” Lewis Clarke con­ (p. 324)

cluded that the prosperity and comfort they found in the free states was due quite simply to the fact that “every man in the free states works; and as they work for themselves, they do twice as much as they would do for another” (Taylor 1999, I: 751, 633). Only a free la­ bor system, the narrators insist, could produce diligent and careful land stewards, and only that system would create the pastoral landscapes so highly valued by Americans. Un­ der this view, freedom and everything that word implies—free labor, secure property rights, social and political equality—is essential to establishing a healthy, productive, and positive relationship with the land. The general outlines of this environmental critique of slavery have persisted in AfricanAmerican political thought. The claim that racial oppression leads to environmental degradation is prominent in later critiques of the southern peonage system, as articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk and Booker T. Washington in Working with the Hands. Du Bois also applies this reasoning to urban landscapes in his seminal analy­ sis of ghettoization in Philadelphia Negro, which explains how racial segregation leads to urban decay landscapes (Du Bois [1903] 1989; Washington 1904; Du Bois [1899] 1967). The same theme informs the contemporary environmental justice movement’s analysis of how racial discrimination creates polluted, highly degraded landscapes. The dynamics of these processes can be quite complicated, but central to them is one of the fundamental insights of the slave narrators: Good environmental stewardship requires good stewards, men and women who cherish the land and the labor of working it. Exploited and abused workers will have few incentives to exercise such stewardship, and may also have difficul­ ty developing the attitude of generosity and affection toward the world that leads to good care. Thus the consequences of oppressive labor systems will be written, indelibly, on the landscape itself.

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives

Place and Race If the slave narratives illustrate the perverse environmental consequences of racial op­ pression, they also add considerable depth and richness to the meaning of place in Ameri­ can literature. Place is, as Lawrence Buell insists, “an indispensable concept for environ­ mental humanists,” because it connects being and habitation in a number of ways, gestur­ ing simultaneously toward environmental materiality, the social construction of nature, and affective bonds with the land (Buell 2005, 62–63). “Place” we understand to be a space to which meaning has been ascribed, and the slave narrators’ descriptive and imag­ inative gifts invested the American landscape with profound political, moral, and spiritual meaning. Indeed, the North-South moral axis of the (p. 325) fugitive slave narratives con­ tinues to permeate American literature and American culture generally. As suggested earlier, the environmental critique of slavery and the agrarian ideal behind it drew on the moral geography laid out in Crèvecouer’s Letters from an American Farmer, showing how, as one moved from North to South, the moral degeneration of the American character was written on the landscape. But the slave narrators added new lay­ ers of meaning to that geography, drawing on a common feature of slave culture: the use of Old Testament types and tropes to invest geographic places with spiritual significance. Political culture in the North and South was, of course, deeply pervaded with Biblical themes, and this was true as well of slave culture. But slave culture was distinctive—and, according to most commentators, distinctively African—in the degree to which it fused material and spiritual reality, investing the landscape with spiritual significance. As Eu­ gene Genovese put it, “African ideas place man himself and therefore his Soul within na­ ture,” merging the spiritual and material world, so that places often held spiritual signifi­ cance. This tendency is quite prominent in the slave spirituals, and it was a common fea­ ture of political rhetoric in the Black community before and after the Civil War (Genovese 1972, 247–248). So, as Frederick Douglass explained, when slaves referred to “Canaan,” they meant both an otherworldly Heaven and the North: “the north was our Canaan.” The South was often referred to as “Egypt,” the land of captivity, and wild spaces were the desert in which the Israelites wandered. Henry Bibb, for example, tells us that the first time he tried to escape, he was halted by the Ohio River, which became for him the Red Sea: “To me it was an impassable gulf. I had no rod wherewith to smite the stream, and thereby divide the waters. I had no Moses to go before me and lead the way from bondage to the promised land” (Taylor 1999, II: 19). William Wells Brown called Canada “the promised land”; Josiah Henson referred to the South as “that Egypt” and likened himself to Moses, “a stranger, in a strange land,” when he arrived in Canada (Taylor 1999, I: 715, 753, 748). Moreover, Melvin Dixon points out that in addition to these ex­ plicitly Biblical references, slaves’ oral culture often used features of the vernacular land­ scape as metaphors for their religious feelings: Valleys represented depression and de­ spair, mountains were figures for personal triumph and witness, and the wilderness rep­ resented a state of spiritual seeking (Dixon 1987, 18–19, 23–24). These rhetorical prac­ tices resulted in a typological map, a sacred geography that layered the American land­ scape with spiritual meaning. Page 11 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives Complicating this spiritual landscape, however, was the racial landscape created by slav­ ery. The southern landscape was, to the fugitive slave, inscribed with racial barriers that a free, white observer might not see and that could profoundly affect the slaves’ relation­ ship to their physical environment. The most striking example of this theme is Harriet Ja­ cobs’ narrative, which draws for us a stark picture of racial confinement: Jacobs, once she leaves her master, must hide in town so as to be near her children. Thus even after her “escape” she still suffers a variety of prisons: a small “cell” in a friend’s house, a hole be­ neath the kitchen floor, and most distressingly, a small garret in her grandmother’s house (only nine by seven feet) where she spends nearly seven years (Taylor 1999, II: 609–640). The persistence of racial confinement even after one (p. 326) escapes—the experience of being trapped in place by fear of white violence—is a common theme in the narratives. Charles Ball, for example, when escaping from slavery, sought “refuge in the deepest soli­ tudes of the forest, from the glance of every human eye.” He makes it clear that the forests were not safe; he was at one point pursued by an alligator. But the towns were guarded by patrols, making the settled, cultivated regions more dangerous to him than “the gloom of wilderness…broken only by solitary plantations or lonely huts” (Taylor 1999, I: 431, 443). Henry Bibb, on the other hand, “dared not go into the forest, knowing that I might be tracked by bloodhounds, and overtaken.” He hid instead in town, under a pile of boards between two workshops, a neglected space that a free man probably would not even notice. When he emerged at night into a city filled with slaveholders, “it was like a person entering wilderness among wolves and vipers.” His way was blocked not by walls but by “the gaze of patrols, or slave catchers.” He finally made his way out of the city through a tunnel intended for livestock, and he worked his way across country by staying on the borders of plantations (Taylor 1999, II: 41–42). Because the highways, plantations, and forests all posed serious dangers, Bibb learned to see a whole different landscape composed of marginal, hidden, and overlooked places. Thus in addition to ex­ ploring the spiritual and moral geography of slavery, the narratives reveal to us a hidden landscape, a strange and unexpected world visible only from the perspective of the op­ pressed. Learning to see this hidden landscape, and to understand how alien the land can appear even to someone who has lived there all his life, may be one of the chief contributions of the classic slave narratives to the body of American environmental literature. In contrast to the dominant interpretation of the American landscape found in the canonical works of American naturalists—the romantic, mythic landscapes of John Muir or Henry David Thoreau—the narrators offer subaltern visions suppressed or marginalized by racial op­ pression. The land celebrated by American nature writers is also a land cursed by injus­ tice. Its fields have been watered with the blood of slaves; its forests have borne strange fruit. This history, they remind us, cannot easily be forgotten, since its effects are still written and being written on the land itself. Ecocritical analysis of the narratives thus teaches that to the extent racial oppression shapes and troubles our affective bonds to the land—the connection between being and habitation, self and place—it renders us all, still, strangers in a strange land. Page 12 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives

References Blum, Elizabeth. “Power, Danger, and Control: Slave Women’s Perceptions of Wilderness in the Nineteenth Century.” Women’s Studies 31 (March–April 2002): 247–266. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publish­ ing, 2005. Caretta, Vincent. “Olaudah Equiano: African British Abolitionist and Founder of the African American Slave Narrative.” In The Cambridge Companion to the African Ameri­ can Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 44–60.

(p. 327)

de Crèvecouer, J. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. New York: Penguin Classic, 1963. Dixon, Melvin. Ride Out the Wilderness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Philadelphia Negro [1899]. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk [1903]. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Gerhardt, Christine. “The Greening of African-American Landscapes.” Mississippi Quar­ terly 55 (Fall 2002): 515–533. Heglar, Charles. Rethinking the Slave Narrative. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Kerber, Linda. Federalists in Dissent. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970. “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves.” Christian Examiner 48 (July 1849): 471. Pierce, Yolanda. “Redeeming Bondage: The Captivity Narrative and the Spiritual Autobi­ ography in the African American Slave Narrative Tradition.” In Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch. Cambridge: Cambridge Universi­ ty Press, 2007, pp. 83–98. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. [1776]. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981. Smith, Kimberly. African American Environmental Thought. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Smith, Venture. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa. New London: C. Holt, 1798. Taylor, Yuval, ed. I Was Born a Slave. 2 vols. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999. Washington, Booker T. Working with the Hands. New York: Doubleday, 1904. Page 13 of 14

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Environmental Criticism and the Slave Narratives Young, Arthur. A Six Months Tour through the North of England [1781]. New York: Augus­ tus M. Kelly, 1967.

Kimberly K. Smith

Kimberly Smith, Carleton College

Page 14 of 14

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Locating Slave Narratives

Locating Slave Narratives   Rhondda Robinson Thomas The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.024

Abstract and Keywords This article examines the challenges associated with locating African American slave nar­ ratives in geographic regions, such as by points of arrival or points of departure, and in ideological frameworks, such as Southern studies, transnationalism, transatlantic studies, and old Northeastern studies. Although authors of slave narratives located themselves in families and communities and often cited multiple locales they inhabited due to forced and voluntary migration, scholars often situate their stories within specific geographical regions or theoretical paradigms. The varied migration experiences of authors of slave narratives complicates efforts to locate these narratives, however, encouraging a multi­ faceted approach that considers multiple locales and diverse theoretical paradigms that acknowledge the complexities of a genre that is only beginning to be understood. Keywords: locating slave narratives, geographic regions, ideological frameworks, points of departure, points of ar­ rival, forced migration, voluntary migration, locales, theoretical paradigms, transnationalism, old Northeastern studies, Southern studies, transatlant

AFRICAN American authors of slave narratives claimed their own place within the United States despite their status as property during the antebellum era and as second-class citi­ zens after the Civil War. They located themselves within families, homes, communities, and organizations in life stories that contested their status as slave and destabilized the dehumanizing institution that demanded compliance and containment. In their first-hand accounts of slavery and freedom that detailed experiences many of their readers had nev­ er witnessed, they provided both a historical record of the atrocities perpetuated by the “peculiar institution” and a counternarrative that challenged the nation’s characteriza­ tion of itself as a democracy founded on the principles of freedom and equality. When scholars examine slave narratives, they consider how the laws, practices, tradi­ tions, politics, and activism of specific communities where African Americans experienced slavery and freedom in America and abroad affect our understanding of these texts. Such considerations lead to debates regarding how to locate African American slave narra­ tives. Some scholars situate the texts geographically, such as by points of departure or ar­ rival, which draws attention to both the familiar and unfamiliar places where fugitive and Page 1 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives former slaves lived, settled, and published their stories. Others choose an ideological ap­ proach, such as examining slave narratives through the lens of Southern studies or transnationalism, or even suggest that the “African American” label erases the variety of national origins that are represented in the narratives. The politics of publication also in­ fluences considerations regarding the location of slave narratives because scholars and publishers seek innovative means to complicate our understanding of the slave-narrative tradition as well as to increase the profitability of these texts in an increasingly competi­ tive publishing market. These varied approaches to the study of the African American slave narrative can both enhance and limit our understanding of this genre. Locating them within a specific geo­ graphic space draws attention to the distinct experiences associated with a particular (p. 329) place but may diminish the importance of multiple spaces within the narratives in which authors locate themselves. Furthermore, scholars have increasingly drawn atten­ tion to relatively unknown sites such as St. Louis and Milwaukee that are associated with African American history and culture, which challenge the traditional geographical ap­ proaches for studying African American slave narratives. Similarly, focusing studies with­ in a particular ideological paradigm can lead to the privileging of certain scholarly inter­ pretations, even as new critical methods continually complicate our understanding of the slave narrative. Thus, an awareness of multiple and varied locales in which former slaves labored and lived, as well as a reliance on diverse ideological frameworks to interpret their stories, are essential for exploring the complexities of the African American slave narrative, the foundational text of the American African literary tradition that is only be­ ginning to be understood. Authors of African American slave narratives often located their stories within specific re­ gions to convey the pervasiveness of slavery within the United States and their resource­ fulness in building a life in an unwelcoming land. Some focused on the state where they were born and experienced slavery to emphasize the continued presence and commodifi­ cation of enslaved African Americans throughout the land of liberty. John Andrew Jackson recounted his story of bondage in his 1862 The Experiences of a Slave in South Carolina, for example, whereas James Mars entitled his 1868 narrative as the Life of James Mars, a Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut. Written by Himself. Others embraced a more region­ al approach, such as the 1846 Narrative of William Hayden, Containing a Faithful Ac­ count of His Travels for a Number of Years, Whilst Enslaved, in the South. Written by Himself in which Hayden presents his I-witness account of Southern slavery that includes extensive forced movement within and between Virginia and Kentucky. In so doing, he and other writers drew attention to the complex legal, social, and economic interstate and intrastate nexus that was essential for slavery’s economic success but destructive for enslaved African Americans and their families. Others characterized the states where they experienced slavery as points of departure, such as James Watkins who informs read­ ers that he was “formerly a ‘Chattel’ in Maryland, U.S.” in the title of the 1852 edition of his Narrative and “formerly a slave in Maryland, U.S.” in his 1860 Struggles for Freedom, both published in England. Still others relied on geography to map the trajectory of their slavery to freedom transformation as both physical migration and personal progress. Page 2 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives James W. Pennington identifies himself as the “Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York” but “formerly a slave in the State of Maryland” in the title of his 1849 The Fugitive Blacksmith, and Austin Steward characterizes himself as “Twenty-two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman” who also serves as “President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West” in the title of his 1857 narrative. The professional titles and geographical descriptors delineate acts of defiance by authors who broke free from slavery and em­ braced the role of citizens entrusted with responsibilities for nurturing the growth and development of the free communities in which they settled. The recent proliferation of African American slave-narrative anthologies that focus on specific locales might lead us to conclude that scholars have solved the vexing (p. 330) questions about how to locate these texts geographically. Collections of narratives have be published under titles such as James Seay Brown’s Up Before Daylight: Life Histories from the Alabama Writers Project, 1938-1939; William L. Andrews’s North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones; the Applewood Books series of slave narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that feature interviews with former slaves from 15 states; B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton’s From Bondage to Belonging: the Worcester Slave Narratives; and Susanna Ashton’s I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives. These anthologies examine the varied experiences of enslaved African Americans in states, regions, or cities, drawing attention to both known and re­ covered sites of slavery and freedom. However, the volumes also obscure the fact that African Americans who labored in slave states such as North or South Carolina, or who wrote or dictated their narratives after resettling in free northern communities like Worcester, often spent time in many other geographical regions through forced and vol­ untary migration. Thus, limiting slave narratives to specific geographical regions can di­ vert attention away from the necessity of considering many different locales in piecing to­ gether the history of African Americans’ long struggle for freedom. Indeed, scholars’ efforts to carve out a larger place for authors of slave narratives within the historical record of the region from which they escaped or the community in which they found a home or a publisher often complicate rather than resolve the issue of locat­ ing slave narratives. For example, the 1862 edition of Thomas H. Jones’ narrative pub­ lished in Boston appears in the Worcester collection, and the 1885 edition published in New Bedford is included in the North Carolina collection. Similarly, different editions of Jacob Stroyer’s life story, published in Salem, Massachusetts, are included in two collec­ tions, the 1879 edition in the Worcester collection and the 1885 edition in the South Car­ olina collection. Jones and Stroyer’s stories could also be featured in collections of Massa­ chusetts or New England slave narratives. Slave-narrative authors’ representations of their travels within their texts compellingly il­ lustrate the challenges that scholars face in classifying the texts regionally. In An Autobi­ ography. Bond and Free: or, Yearnings for Freedom, from my Green Brier House. Being the Story of My Life in Bondage, and My Life in Freedom (1861), Israel Campbell re­ counts being sold, hired out, and relocated. Campbell’s multifaceted story of his experi­ Page 3 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives ences as a slave in several different Southern states, a fugitive during a 40-day journey from Mississippi to Canada, an expatriate when he established a new life with his brother and sister-in-law in Canada, and an abolitionist when he traveled throughout the North as an agent for the Fugitive Convention of Canada, raise difficulties in locating his narrative. His migration experiences expose the fissures in an institution that he exploited while transforming himself from American slave to Canadian citizen. Efforts to compartmental­ ize his story within a specific region could emphasize one locale as the most important site in his narrative and thereby diminish the importance of migration in his life story. William and Ellen Craft’s Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) poses a different type of challenge in locating slave narratives, for they focus on recounting their (p. 331) escape from slavery rather than their years in bondage. The Crafts detailed their perilous four-day journey from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, and ultimately England where they published their story. Their narrative is written primarily for an English audience, which further complicates the determination of its locale. Thus, their story could be locat­ ed in various ways, by point of departure in Georgia or multiple arrivals—in Philadelphia, Boston, or England. Each locale provides a slightly different perspective, preserving the complexity of their experiences that breached the boundaries that slavery was designed to establish between whites and blacks. Despite these complications, the appeal of locating slave narratives within specific points of departure or arrival persists. Creating collections of slave narratives with the authors’ birthplace as the organizing strategy helps to ensure that perspectives from individuals whose views were not often valued are acknowledged as vital components of a region’s public historical narrative. In her introduction to I Belong to South Carolina, Susana Ash­ ton asserts that some of the authors of slave narratives featured in the collection re­ mained South Carolina “property” after they escaped because of their legal status as fugi­ tive slaves. I Belong to South Carolina seeks to reinsert their narratives into South Carolina’s official history, thereby encouraging recognition of the authors as residents of a state that denied them citizenship. Ashton’s intent to supplement South Carolina’s public historical narrative is more compli­ cated than it appears, however, for ironically, I Belong to South Carolina rebinds African Americans authors within the slave state they risked their lives to escape. Indeed, the ma­ jority of the seven authors of narratives featured in I Belong to South Carolina never re­ turned to their home state. They escaped to Nova Scotia and New England, published their life stories in English and American cities, lived in foreign countries and resettled within various free states. Although all the narratives illuminate the slave experience in South Carolina, most reveal equally compelling stories of slavery in other states, as well as freedom in the North, Nova Scotia, West Africa, and England. Furthermore, most of the authors wrote or dictated their narratives after leaving South Carolina, and they ad­ dressed varied audiences in England and the United States, factors that influenced their stories in several compelling ways. For example, Sam Aleckson, who was born in 1852 in Charleston, gained freedom through the Emancipation Proclamation, and eventually set­ tled in Connecticut, publishing Before the War and after the Union. An Autobiography Page 4 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives (1929) after experiencing freedom for more than 60 years. He adopted a thematic ap­ proach, presenting recollections of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and northern life, and offering social commentary on issues such as divorce and lynching. In the final sentence of his narrative, Aleckson declares, “I feel as an American” (170). Having traced his journey from slavery in South Carolina to freedom in Connecticut, he offers his life as irrefutable evidence of the achievements African Americans had attained after emancipa­ tion. Aleckson locates himself as a resident of both South Carolina and Connecticut but also within a nation that had once sanctioned a system that categorized him as chattel. Although he had once belonged to South Carolina, he ultimately located himself as a citi­ zen in a democracy. (p. 332) Other scholars who have published slave narrative anthologies have acknowledged con­ cerns about how to characterize mobility when attempting to locate slave narratives geo­ graphically. In North Carolina Slave Narratives, William L. Andrews describes the authors whose stories he selected as “expatriates” (9). The writers provide accounts of their expe­ riences in slavery and freedom from multiple perspectives for different types of readers. For example, Lunsford Lane conveys a bitterness about his “banishment” from North Car­ olina in the title of his text, The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. Embracing an Account of His Early Life, the Redemption by Purchase of Himself and Family from Slavery, And his Banishment from the Place of His Birth for the Crime of Wearing a Colored Skin (1842). After gaining his freedom, establishing a prosperous busi­ ness, and marrying and starting a family, he was forced to leave North Carolina by the state legislature. Lane moved to Boston and eventually raised enough money to purchase and relocate his family to his “recently acquired home” (Andrews 126). Andrews’ North Carolina collection of slave narratives reaffirms the expatriate Lane’s residency in North Carolina, effectively restoring him to his rightful place as a native son of Raleigh, which Lane describes as “the home of my boyhood, my youth, and my manhood” (Andrews 119). Conversely, Moses Roper contrasts his escape from the American system of bondage with his newfound freedom to travel extensively in Europe. In the Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery. With an Appendix, Containing a List of Places Visited by the Author in Great Britain and Ireland and the British Isles; and Oth­ er Matter (1848), Roper references North Carolina in several places throughout his narra­ tive and speaks warmly of a brief visit to his family home, but he locates himself within an interstate system of slavery characterized by forced migration. He recounts being sold re­ peatedly in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida before escaping and living as a fugitive in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont. To avoid being remanded to slavery, Roper traveled to England in 1835 where he was welcomed as a “Freeman of Great Britain,” joined the antislavery lecture circuit, and published his narrative (57). The term “expatri­ ate” seems particularly appropriate for Roper, who was sold and forced to permanently leave his home and family in North Carolina, and later to temporarily leave America be­ cause of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.

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Locating Slave Narratives Slave narratives written by freeborn authors who were forced into bondage further com­ plicate efforts to locate slave narratives by point of origin, for the locale of the slave expe­ rience often receives more attention than the author’s homeland. After escaping from 12 years of forced enslavement, free black New Yorker Solomon Northup published his nar­ rative titled Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana (1853). Northup clearly identifies himself as a freeborn New Yorker who became a victim of the illegal slave trade while visiting the nation’s capi­ tal. His narrative is featured on the Documenting the American South website, which ac­ knowledges the uniqueness of his experience by cross-listing the text in several different geographical categories, including “African Americans—New York (State)—Biography,” “Kidnapping—Washington, D.C.—History—19th Century,” and (p. 333) “Slaves—Louisiana —Biography,” thereby encouraging readers to consider several different ideological ap­ proaches and geographical locations when analyzing Northup’s narrative. Efforts to locate African American slave narratives written by African authors pose a dif­ ferent set of challenges for scholars, particularly in determining how to acknowledge a writer’s African heritage. In the Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina (1831), for example, Said recalls, “My birthplace was Fut Tûr” (the Fulani Empire of West Africa now known as Senegal), which suggests that his story could be identified as a West African narrative if point of departure was considered. Such collections are nonexistent. In the Documenting the American South digital archive, however, Said’s narrative is in­ dexed in several different categories, including “Muslims, Black—North Carolina—Biogra­ phy” and “Slaves—North Carolina—biography,” but no categories for West African narra­ tives are listed. Instead, Said is identified as an “African American Muslim,” “Muslim, Black,” and “Slave” in North Carolina, which effectively gives him a new identity dictated by the racial, geographical, and religious markers associated with American slavery. Although many scholars have located African American slave narratives within the United States, some have acknowledged the diasporic nature of slave narratives when situating the texts within specific geographical regions. In Five Black Lives: the Autobiographies of Venture Smith, James Mars, William Grimes, The Rev. G. W. Offley, and James L. Smith, one of the earliest slave narrative anthologies to focus on the fugitive slave’s point of ar­ rival, Arna Bontemps locates the narratives he selected in Connecticut. However, the pro­ motional copy printed on the book jacket situates the collection within the African Diaspo­ ra, promising a spectrum of stories that are “…the basic stuff of Black History—spanning 150 years in time, from Africa to Connecticut in geography…several quite different expe­ riences of slavery, escape, and freedom.” Bontemps confirms this description in his Intro­ duction, noting that the narratives cover a “range of black experience in the South and North…. If there was any one lifestyle resulting from the transition from bondage to free­ dom, these personal histories do not seem to show it” (x). Those different lifestyles are re­ flected in narratives by writers who were born in Connecticut; Virginia; Guinea, West Africa; and Maryland; and labored in several states, including Connecticut, Virginia, Georgia, and Maryland. They obtained freedom in a variety of ways: Grimes by running away and eventually purchasing himself; Venture Smith by earning enough money to pur­ Page 6 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives chase himself; Offley by obtaining freedom when his father purchased him only to be forced into an indentured servitude contract; Mars by resisting his master’s efforts to re­ locate his family to Virginia; and James L. Smith by running away. All the writers discov­ ered Connecticut to be a haven where former and fugitive slaves “found places of refuge and/or homes in the land of promise, so to speak” (ix). More recently, scholars who have edited anthologies that focus on locales in New Eng­ land have adopted a more regional approach in examining lesser-known points of arrival. For From Bondage to Belonging: the Worcester Slave Narratives, B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton selected eight slave narratives published by authors (p. 334) who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts: Narrative of Lunsford Lane (1842), The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave (1856), The Experience of Rev. Thomas H. Jones (1857), A Narrative of the Life and Labors of the Rev. G. W. Offley (1859), Jacob Stroyer’s Sketch­ es of My Life in the South (1879), The Narrative of Bethany Veney (1889), Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (1893), and Allen Parker’s Recollections of Slave Times (1895). They ex­ amine Worcester in the context of other New England black communities and describe the town’s evolution from a society with slaves in the colonial era to a hub for free blacks in the antebellum period (xi). Despite these challenges regarding locating these stories as Worcester narratives, the selection of a significant point of arrival enables us to gain im­ portant insights into fugitive slaves’ transition into a life of qualified freedom in black northern urban communities. McCarthy and Doughton characterize this experience a “transition from bondage to belonging” in Worcester, a vibrant, activist, fraternal African American community with a strong religious base and steady employment opportunities. This perception undermines the sense of “belonging” that some writers had experienced in Southern slave communities. For example, Mars lost his sense of belonging when his first wife was sold and taken away by a new master, but his turmoil diminished after he remarried. His desire for a more secure sense of belonging compelled him to purchase his second wife’s freedom, send her and their children to the North, and escape from slavery to reunite with his family. Writers who published their narratives after the Civil War expe­ rienced a more hopeful sense of belonging as they directed their narratives toward a gen­ eration of Americans who were coming of age in a nation where slavery had been abol­ ished. A careful examination of the texts in the Worcester collection quickly reveals the chal­ lenges of locating slave narratives in Worcester. Although the narratives lack the dias­ poric quality of Five Black Lives, they represent significant geographical movement with­ in North America. Only three of the writers—Bethany Veney, Isaac Mason, and Allen Park­ er—settled in Worcester permanently. Additionally, some lived in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, whereas another traveled abroad to Haiti and Canada. The different publication options that the writers chose for their narratives reflects further migration throughout New England. Although five selected printers in Worcester, three found pub­ lishers elsewhere in Massachusetts and in Connecticut.

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Locating Slave Narratives Although McCarthy and Doughton provide convincing historical evidence to support their decision to identify Worcester as a significant point of arrival for locating slave narra­ tives, they could not substantiate their claims with evidence from the narratives. None of the authors provides extensive recollections of their experiences in Worcester and most do not cite the locale in their life stories. In the foreword to the collection, John Stauffer accounts for this omission by asserting that slave narratives generally followed a chrono­ logical pattern with the climax being the escape from slavery, and that audiences were more interested in the authors’ recollections of their experiences in slavery rather than in freedom. Yet some of the writers provide insightful accounts of their lives after their es­ capes. For example, Isaac Mason includes the chapters titled “In the Land of Freedom” and “A Flying Visit to Hayti” in his narrative, and John Thompson describes (p. 335) his ad­ ventures as a seaman on whaling voyages, both offering sites to consider when locating slave narratives beyond American borders. Although the Worcester and Connecticut narratives focus on points of arrival that were attractive and accessible to fugitive and former slaves, other slave narratives feature sig­ nificant sites that few Americans of any race could easily gain admission to in the nine­ teenth century. In Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), Elizabeth Keckley offers a brief but compelling overview of her expe­ riences as a slave and more detailed insights into her roles as modiste and confidante to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Keckley includes some information that readers would have expected to see in the first three chapters of her memoir about her life as a slave, such as the circumstances of her birth, the physical and sexual abuse she suffered, and the method of her escape. Yet she devotes most of her narrative to recollections of her thriving business as dressmaker for the wives of prominent politicians in the nation’s cap­ ital, and insights about the Lincoln’s presidency and family life, rare commentary by an African American about this critical period in American history. Although locating Keckley’s narrative in the White House is noteworthy, acknowledging other important locales where she labored as a slave remains critical to understanding her journey from slavery to freedom. Keckley was born into slavery in Virginia but also la­ bored in North Carolina and Missouri, where she acquired dressmaking skills. In St. Louis, she worked as an enslaved seamstress to wealthy white clients who eventually helped her to purchase freedom for herself and her son. When Keckley moved to Wash­ ington, she quickly discovered that the dressmaking skills she had acquired as a slave would enable her to be gainfully employed as a modiste, eventually for the First Lady. This inextricable link between locales enables us to trace Keckley’s transformation from a bondswoman to businesswoman and White House confidant. Keckly purchased her freedom in St. Louis, Missouri, a site that has become increasingly important in discussions regarding the practices for locating slave narratives. St. Louis interests scholars as a significant site because of its strategic location within a nine­ teenth-century slave state and its well-established free black community. Until the Civil War, African Americans, both free and enslaved, comprised about five percent of its popu­ lation. Proslavery and antislavery factions clashed in the city throughout the antebellum Page 8 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives period. St. Louis functioned as a critical commerce center for the interstate slave trade in the Delta region. Additionally, St. Louis figures prominently in several slave narratives, particularly in the Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave (1849). Brown re­ counts his experiences with varied masters, his family members being sold to different slaveholders, and the brutalities against slaves and free blacks that he witnessed. Dred and Harriet Scott also filed suit in Missouri’s Circuit Court in St. Louis to gain their free­ dom. Other African Americans found the city to be a gateway to liberty because of its proximity to the free state of Illinois. After the Civil War, black Exodusters flocked to St. Louis, which they perceived to be the entrance to the promised land of the West. By that time, members of the city’s thriving free black community had established churches, busi­ nesses, fraternal associations, benevolent (p. 336) organizations, and women’s clubs that gave middle-class blacks a measure of comfort and former slaves a means of upward mo­ bility. Lucy Delaney’s narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom (1891) illuminates the necessity for the continued and varied investigations of recently re­ covered site for African American literary history. She recounts how her free-born mother was kidnapped in Illinois and transported to St. Louis where she was sold into slavery, eventually married, and had two daughters, Nancy and Lucy. Although the Delaney family had been promised freedom, they were eventually separated through a series of deaths and marriages in their owners’ family. After her father was sold “down the river” and her sister Nancy escaped while traveling with her newly married owners, Delaney’s mother gained their freedom through a protracted legal battle. Delaney not only illuminates the African American experience in St. Louis, she draws attention to Illinois, a free state that served as a haven for free blacks but was transformed into a hunting ground after Con­ gress enacted the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. In “‘Face to Face’: Localizing Lucy Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light,” Eric Gardner’s meticulous archival research pro­ vides details about the “personal and local motivations and contexts behind Delaney’s narrative” that are critical for understanding the purpose of the text (51). His approach for examining publication history of Delaney’s narrative as well as the communities in which she lived and worked provides models a multifaceted approach for locating slave narratives. Gardner’s approach could be particularly helpful for examinations of slave narratives that include multiple, significant locales. For example, in Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, and England (1855), Samuel Ring­ gold Ward informs readers that he was born a slave in Maryland in 1817 but escaped with his parents when he was nearly 3 years old. He did not learn of his status as a slave until he was 24. Until that time, Ward lived as a free black in New Jersey and New York where he attended school, completed several law clerkships, married Emily E. Reynolds and started a family, and became a licensed minister for the New York Congregational Associ­ ation and a traveling agent for the American and New York Antislavery Societies. Within a few years of the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Ward and his family settled in Canada, where he became an agent for the Canadian Antislavery Society. Unlike Dou­ glass, Brown, and other prominent fugitives who purchased their freedom while abroad, Page 9 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives Ward never purchased his freedom to ensure a safe return to America. Instead, he trav­ eled to England in 1853 to raise funds for his antislavery work in Canada and later pub­ lished his Autobiography in London three years later. Although Ward locates himself in “Toronto,” his point of arrival on the title page of his text, he includes accounts of signifi­ cant geographical movement in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, all of which must be considered when analyzing his life story. Ward’s experi­ ence as a “fugitive Negro” and his antislavery work in at least seven different nations gives him a unique view of the transatlantic arch of the antislavery movement. Yet Ward’s narrative raises other concerns regarding how to locate slave narratives ideo­ logically as his life story can be characterized as African American, Afro-Canadian, (p. 337) or even transnational. The earliest studies of slave narratives identified the texts as the foundation of the Afro-American literary tradition. In his introduction to The Clas­ sic Slave Narratives, Henry Louis Gates Jr. asserts, “In the long history of human bondage, it was only the black slave in the United States who—once secure and free in the North, and with the generous encouragement and support of abolitionists—created a genre of literature that at once testified against their captors and bore witness to the urge of every black slave to be free and literate” (1). Scholars have increasingly chal­ lenged this characterization, however. In “‘This is no hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives,” George Elliott Clarke argues that Canadian literary critics also persist in classifying “…the slave narrative as American and alien,” rarely acknowledging its con­ tributions to the Canadian literary tradition, despite the publication of books by people of African descent who were enslaved or lived as fugitives in Canada, and collections of in­ terviews with fugitive slaves who sought refuge in Canada (11). He identifies several key narratives by fugitive slaves as Afro-Canadian, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849), The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life (1859), as well as two col­ lections of interviews, William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872) and Benjamin Drew Jr.’s A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee; or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves (1856). Questions immediately arise when one locates slave narratives within an Afro-Canadian tradition, however, for this strategy negates the experiences of writers who were en­ slaved in America or settled in places other than Canada. Josiah Henson’s experience ex­ emplifies this dilemma, for he arrived in Canada in 1830, published his 1849 narrative in Boston, and recounts other travels in his narrative, including trips to New York, Connecti­ cut, Massachusetts, and Maine. Furthermore, African American abolitionist William Still and white abolitionist Benjamin Drew Jr. interviewed fugitives and published collections of their narratives in American cities. Although Still’s text includes testimony by fugitive slaves who were en route to or settled in Canada, it also features stories of others who re­ mained in the United States. Conversely, Drew’s North-Side View of Slavery, written in re­ sponse to Rev. Nehemiah Adams’ 1854 A South-Side View of Slavery, focused exclusively on fugitive slaves who were living in Canada.

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Locating Slave Narratives Clarke’s claim for a distinct Afro-Canadian tradition becomes more problematic through his choices of slave narratives by authors who lived in Canada temporarily but resettled and published their narratives in America. He characterizes The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life (1859), Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons of a Soldier of the Revolution, During a Captivity of More than Twenty Years Among the Slaveholders of Kentucky, One of the So-Called Christian States of North America (1856), and Austin Steward’s Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman; Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West (1857) as Afro-Canadian literature, for exam­ ple. However, Loguen escaped from slavery in Tennessee and migrated to Canada when he was 24, but he moved back to the United States around (p. 338) 1837 and published his narrative in Syracuse, New York. Similarly, Virginia-born Smith and Lewis and Milton Clarke settled in Canada but published their narrative in Boston and New York, respec­ tively. George Clarke also suggests that narratives by Henry Bibb, who published Narra­ tive of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave (1849) in New York be­ fore moving to Canada, and Moses Roper, who published his Narrative (1838) in London before relocating to Canada in 1844, should be located in the Afro-Canadian tradition. One could argue that the narratives should be located within several different ideological frameworks, including African-American, Afro-Canadian, and, in some cases, Afro-British literary traditions to reflect the authors’ significant geographical movements. Although Clarke stakes a claim for a distinct Afro-Canadian tradition for slave narratives, he also acknowledges the need for an international approach that considers multiple geographic regions and cultural influences. Similar challenges arise in debates regarding locating slave narratives as American or African American. Presentations of excerpts from Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in different editions of the Norton Anthology reflect some of the chal­ lenges of classifying slave narratives by national origin or racial group. Jacobs, who was born in Edenton, North Carolina, devotes more than half of her narrative to recollections of her life as a slave in her hometown. She locates herself within a loving family, disrupt­ ed by the untimely deaths of her parents, then nurtured by a devoted grandmother, exten­ sive kin network, and community of enslaved and free blacks neighbors who engineered her escape. Jacobs also includes details of her first experience in the free state of Penn­ sylvania, reunion with her daughter and employment by a white family in Boston, danger­ ous escapes from the city to elude slave catchers, a visit to England, and the purchase of her freedom by her employer. Excerpts from Jacobs’ narrative appear in the Norton An­ thology of American Literature, Volume B and the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed. In presenting Jacobs’ narrative as an “American” story, Norton editors chose the chapters on Jacobs’ childhood, lover, children, hideaway in her grandmother’s garret, sexual abuse inflicted by Dr. Flint, and the purchase of her freedom. When Norton presents Jacobs’ story as an “African-American” experience, however, editors add the chapters on her new master and mistress, first escape from slavery, preparations for es­ cape from North Carolina, confession of her life story to her daughter, and the Fugitive Slave Act. Although space concerns certainly influenced the amount of text editors could Page 11 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives include in each anthology, the greater number of chapters from Incidents in the African American anthology gives readers a fuller understanding of the adverse effects of slavery on women, and Jacobs’ relationship with family and friends who engineered her escape. Scholars’ struggles with selecting national identities for slave narratives reflects the var­ ied approaches the writers themselves have taken when choosing racially marked lan­ guage that signaled their affiliation with a group or nation. In Equiano the African: Biog­ raphy of a Self-Made Man, Vincent Carretta writes that Equiano described himself as “a son of Africa,” “the Ethiopian,” and an “African” prior to publishing his Interesting Narra­ tive in 1789. By characterizing himself as “the African” in the title of his Narrative, how­ ever, Equiano gives “…millions of enslaved Africans and (p. 339) their descendants…a face, a name, and most important, a voice,” according to Caretta (1). Although Parliament debated whether the British Empire should end the transatlantic slave trade, Equiano provided a compelling means for the English to understand the impact of slavery on indi­ vidual Africans and the strides they could make if given opportunities to excel. Other writers selected specific racial markers and coupled them with gendered and pro­ fessional descriptors to affirm their humanity and challenge their status as property, thereby resisting marginalization. Consider, for example, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (1760) and Slav­ ery in the United States. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (1837). The descriptor in Hammon’s narrative provides the only clue to his racial identity without designating his social state. Ball places his race and gender in a separate sentence, signaling his defiance of the dehumanizing effect of slavery. Authors also linked their race to respected professions, such as the 1902 The Life of Charles T. Walker, D.D., (“The Black Spurgeon”), a pastor in the mode of Charles H. Spurgeon, influential and popular British Baptist preacher and author. Still others adopted identifiers that de­ nounced the criminalization of race, including Samuel Ringgold Ward’s Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-slavery Labors in England, the United States, and Canada (1855). Conversely, in The Blind African Slave, or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace (1810), Brinch identified himself as a victim of international slave trafficking. Like Equiano the African, Brinch and other writers exhibited a keen under­ standing of African origins, national identity, Christian beliefs, and social mobility that complicate efforts to locate their narratives within a singular theoretical framework and justify the need for multiple modes of analytical strategies to examine slave narratives. As scholars have continued to search for new means to resolve the complications that arise in the study of slave narratives, some have endorsed new Southern studies as an ef­ fective means of disrupting the racial and cultural binaries that are traditionally associat­ ed with this genre. Houston A. Baker and Dana D. Nelson introduced new Southern stud­ ies in the preface to a special edition of American Literature, asserting that this approach would enable scholars to “reconfigure our familiar notions of Good (or desperately bad) Old Southern White Men telling stories on the porch, protecting white women, and being friends to the Negro” (231). New Southern studies encourages interdisciplinary investiga­ tions of slave narratives that shift the focus from master-slave, north-south, and free-slave Page 12 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives binaries to complex representations of the South as culturally, geographically, and politi­ cally diverse. This theoretical approach might be useful for a text like Aunt Sally: or, The Cross the Way of Freedom. A Narrative of the Slave-life and Purchase of the Mother of Rev. Isaac Williams of Detroit, Michigan (1858), which examines slavery in North Carolina and Alabama, slave entrepreneurs and their white customers, and varied relationships be­ tween enslaved and free African American families and slaveholders as they negotiated the terms of labor, leisure, and liberty. Other scholars have argued that Southern studies would provide a more useful methodol­ ogy for dispelling myths regarding relationships between blacks and whites and (p. 340) recognizing black writers’ depictions of Southern experiences as critical components of the region’s history. In Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990, Patricia Yaeger argues that “the insistence that southern literature, at its best, is not about community but about moments of crisis and acts of contestation, about the intersection of black and white cultures as they influence one another and col­ lide” (38). Andrews addresses such concerns directly in North Carolina Slave Narratives, particularly through the Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy. He explains, “In a south­ ern court of law, Grandy had no voice, of course, but his narrative shows how effectively he appealed to the court of public opinion, even in the South. Because he skillfully mobi­ lized white male peer pressure on his master, the slave ultimately won the verdict he sought—freedom” (11). New Southern studies positions authors of slave narratives not simply as storytellers but as cultural critics and historians whose insights and experi­ ences illuminate intersections between individuals, families, and communities in the South and the nation. This new interest in the Old South has compelled other critics to recommend shifting the geographical focus for the study of slave narratives to old Northeastern studies. The Worcester Narratives (Massachusetts; McCarthy and Doughton) and Five Black Lives (Connecticut; Bontemps) emphasize the importance of this region to the study of African American slave narratives. Early antislavery sentiments in the United States emerged in the Northeast prior to the publication of slave narratives in antislavery tracts such as Sa­ muel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (1700) and Quaker Anthony Benezet’s A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies, in a short representation of the calamitous state of the enslaved negroes in the British Dominions. Collected from various authors, etc. (1766). Different types of texts about American slavery, including confes­ sions, testimonies, and court documents serve as reminders of the pervasiveness of slav­ ery in this region before the northeast became an abolition stronghold after the American Revolution. Old Northeastern studies also underscores the centrality of New England as a site from the colonial era onward for the publication of slave narratives, particularly Boston, a ma­ jor port city with a rapidly developing print culture, highly literate residents, and active antislavery communities. In 1760, Green and Russell, the official government printer, published Briton Hammon’s Narrative, which some scholars believe to be the first African American slave narrative written by a person of African descent. In the early nineteenth Page 13 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives century, white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, director of the American Antislavery Office, collaborated with white printer Isaac Knapp to publish and distribute slave narra­ tives, including the Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (1838) and the Narra­ tive of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and Garrison advertised the publications in his weekly antislavery newspaper The Liberator. Additionally, authors could tap into an extensive network of printers, publishers, and booksellers that included larger operations like the press owned by John P. Jewett, who published an array of anti­ slavery texts, including William Wells Brown’s The American Fugitive in Europe (1855), Benjamin Drew’s North-Side View of Slavery (1856), and Josiah Henson’s Truth Stranger than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His (p. 341) Own Life (1858). Other printers—for example, Cupples, Upham, and Company, which published William Eliot’s The Story of Archer Alexander, from Slavery to Freedom, March 30, 1863 (1885)—also operated the Old Corner Bookstore where Archer’s narrative and other slave narratives may be have been sold. Locating slave narratives in Boston as a site of publishing opportunities opens up a different means to examine the texts from a geographic perspective and to consider the impact of an antebellum publishing hub’s marketing strategies on the distribution of these texts. Old Northeastern studies also focuses attention on neglected geographical sites that re­ veal how slavery was integral to the success of the colonial experiment and the founda­ tion of the United States of America. Authors of African American slave narratives have helped to preserve the history of slavery in Upstate New York Dutch communities in Nar­ rative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828 (1850); Connecticut in The Life of James Mars, a Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut (1868); and Vermont in A Lost Family Found; An Authentic Narra­ tive of Cyrus Branch and His Family, Alias John White (1869). These mid-nineteenth-cen­ tury slave narratives ensured the preservation of stories about the early American slave experience, revealing the region’s history that could easily be erased through its charac­ terizations of the North as Promised Land for African Americans. Rather than locate slave narratives within various geographical approaches, ranging from points of arrival and departure to regional or national studies, other scholars recommend situating the study of African American slave narratives within transatlantic or transna­ tional studies. These interdisciplinary methods are attentive to economic, cultural, social, geographical, and political relationships in the African Diaspora influenced the develop­ ment of African American slave narratives. Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness offers a useful paradigm for examining slave narra­ tives, particularly his concept of the Black Atlantic, a “a system of historical, cultural, lin­ guistic, and political interaction and communication that originated in the process of en­ slaving Africans” (v). He argues that Africans developed a “complex cultural formation” as they learned the slaveholders’ languages and adapted to their new communities, par­ ticularly in obtaining the literacy skills they needed to challenge or escape the oppression they experienced. The acknowledgment of hybridity comes into play in examinations of this “complex cultural formation” in transatlantic studies, which seems particularly useful in examining slave narratives by authors such as Oladuah Equiano, Omar Ibn Said, and Page 14 of 17

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Locating Slave Narratives Boyrereau Brinch/Jeffrey Brace who identified themselves as Africans thrust into an American system in texts that exhibit hybridized cultural forms that grew out of the en­ slaved communities throughout the Americas. Transnational studies might offer the most comprehensive option for locating slave narra­ tives geographically and ideologically, because it requires a placement of the texts in a global context. One might argue that slave narratives by authors such as William Wells Brown, the Crafts, and Henry Box Brown are transnational simply because the texts were published in England rather than America. Yet this discipline is not only concerned with border crossings. It also requires careful examinations of historical, economic, political, religious, and sociological factors in determining the impact of slavery (p. 342) on individ­ uals, families, and communities in different cultures, regions, nations, and continents. Transnational studies provide tools to uncover rich textures of the slave narrative tradi­ tion regarding differences in race, culture, and nationality that are central to understand­ ing the varied experiences of people of African descent and how they experienced slavery throughout the Americas. Locating African American slave narratives requires movement beyond geographical con­ cerns to approaches that reflect diverse ideological frameworks and acknowledge nation­ al and diasporic identities and experiences. The authors of these texts presented multifac­ eted stories that examine life in a system of bondage that did not destroy their ties to fa­ milial communities, despite forced migration and voluntary flight, or their ability to reestablish themselves in safe havens in America and abroad. Their narratives provide a critical lens for examining the story of slavery in the Americas and the development of a literary tradition by people of African descent. A multifaceted approach that considers the complexities of their stories provides a paradigm for extensive analysis that is essential for locating African American slave narratives.

References Adams, Nehemiah. A South-Side View of Slavery. Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1854. Andrews, William L., ed. North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones. Chapel Hill: University of North Car­ olina Press, 2005. Ashton, Susanna, ed. I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives. Colum­ bia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Baker, Houston and Dana D. Nelson. “Violence, the Body, and ‘The South.’” American Lit­ erature, Special Issue 73.2 (2001): 1–248. Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man. New York: John S. Taylor, 1837.

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Locating Slave Narratives Benezet, Anthony. A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies, in a short representation of the calamitous state of the enslaved negroes in the British Dominions. Collected from various authors, etc. Philadelphia: D. Hall & W. Sellers, 1767. Bontemps, Arna, ed. Five Black Lives: he Autobiographies of Venture Smith, James Mars, William Grimes, The Rev. G. W. Offley, and James L. Smith. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan Uni­ versity Press, 1971. Brinch, Boyrereau. The Blind African Slave, or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nick-named Jeffrey Brace. Ed. Benjamin F. Prentiss. St. Albans, VT: Harry Whitney, 1810. Campbell, Israel. Autobiography. Bond and Free: or, Yearnings for Freedom, from my Green Brier House. Being the Story of My Life in Bondage, and My Life in Freedom. Philadelphia, The Author, 1861. Carretta, Vincent. Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Clark, George Elliott. “‘This is no hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives.” Pa­ pers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 43. 1 (Spring 2005). (p. 343) Craft, William and Ellen. Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. London: William Tweedie, 1860. Delaney, Lucy. From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom. St. Louis, MO, J. T. Smith, 1891. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. Drew, Benjamin. A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada. Boston: J. P. Jewett and Company, 1856. Floyd, Silas Xavier. The Life of Charles T. Walker, D.D., (“The Black Spurgeon”). Nashville: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1902. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Penguin, 1987. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis and Nellie Y. McKay eds. Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd edition. New York: Norton, 2003. Gardner, Eric. “‘Face to Face’: Localizing Lucy Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light.” Legacy 24. 1 (20070: 50–71).

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Locating Slave Narratives Hammon, Briton. A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man. Boston: Green and Russell, 1760. ibn Said, Omar. Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina, 1831. Ed. John Franklin Jameson. Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1925. Documenting the American South. “North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920.” Accessed September 17, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/omarsaid/menu.html. McCarthy, B. Eugene and Thomas L. Doughton, eds. From Bondage to Belonging: the Worcester Slave Narratives. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana. Auburn, NY: Derby and Miller, 1853. Docu­ menting the American South. “North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920.” Accessed September 17, 2013. http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html. Sewall, Samuel. The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial. Boston: Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1700. Still, William. The Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872. Ward, Samuel Ringgold. Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, and England. London: John Snow, 1855. Williams, James. Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Rhondda Robinson Thomas

Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University, has published Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1774–1903 and the scholarly edition of Jane Hunter’s autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer. She also co-edited the forthcoming The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought, a Reader.

Page 17 of 17

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies

Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies   Winfried Siemerling The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.019

Abstract and Keywords This essay uses hemispheric perspectives to discuss slave narratives from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Canada. Although the abolitionist movement and later the Federal Writers’ Project facilitated slave narratives in the United States, only a few full-length ac­ counts document slavery or the apprenticeship system in the British Caribbean, Cuba, or Brazil. The narratives by Mary Prince, Ashton Warner, James Williams, Archibald Monteath, Juan Francisco Manzano, Esteban Montejo, and Mahommah Baquaqua are supplemented, however, by black testimony in reports, petitions, letters, and Inquisition or trial transcripts. Little black testimony is available concerning slavery in Canada, but a substantive corpus is produced by self-emancipated slaves who arrived as black loyalists in eighteenth-century Nova Scotia and then via the Underground Railroad in Canada West, among them Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, Austin Steward, Jermain Wesley Loguen, and Samuel Ringgold Ward. Over one hundred further short narratives were collected by Benjamin Drew and published in 1856. Keywords: slave narratives, testimony, hemispheric, Canada, Caribbean, Latin America, black loyalists, under­ ground railroad

THE transatlantic slave trade is one of the foundational factors of the Americas or what is called the New World. Although differences between imperial spheres and later national boundaries mattered and the economic importance of black slavery varied, the transat­ lantic slave trade “extended from Rio de la Plata to the St. Lawrence, and was the basic system of labor in the colonies most valued by Europe” (Davis 1966, 9). Although writings and documents related to slavery are extensive, testimony by slaves or former slaves themselves is often very scarce. Given slavery’s geographical reach throughout the Amer­ icas, it seems curious at first glance that the majority of the known texts we call “slave narratives” relates to the United States. After all, “between 60 and 70% of all the Africans who survived the voyages to the New World were destined for Europe’s sugar colonies” in Brazil and the Caribbean (Davis 1975, 51). The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, di­ rected by David Eltis, shows over 12.5 million slaves sent to the New World from 1514 to 1866; only 10.7 million survived (http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/ Page 1 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies estimates.faces; see also Gates 2010). Based on earlier numbers by Eltis (2001), Laird Bergad (2007, 62) gives comparative slave trade numbers from 1519 to 1800 with Brazil at 34.1% of the destinations, followed by the British Caribbean (31.3%), the French Caribbean (15.7%), the Spanish Colonies (7.3%), the Guineas (5.8%), British North Ameri­ ca (4.4%), and the other Americas (1.4%). For around 1790, he gives slave population es­ timates—in descending order—for Brazil (1.5 million), the United States (694,000), the French Caribbean (675,000), the British Caribbean (480,000), Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, arriving at total of 3,662,000 (Bergad 2007, 63). Although we have only a few known slave narratives concerning slavery outside the Unit­ ed States, Marion Wilson Starling reports “more than six thousand narratives of Ameri­ can Negro slaves” (1988, 1). Henry Louis Gates thus states that “No group of slaves any­ where…has left such a large repository of testimony about the horror of becoming (p. 345) the legal property of another human being” (1987, ix). A number of factors of course favored the creation and later recovery specifically of narratives by blacks who had escaped slavery in the United States. These include the political culture of free states and Canada in the nineteenth century, areas in which an active abolitionist presence meant material support, editorial help, and audiences for slave narratives, the subse­ quent collection of narratives through F.D. Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, and later the institutionalization of African American studies in Unites States uni­ versities, especially from the late 1960s onward (see Gates 1992). Yet despite the undeniable weight of the United States in this respect, the fact that slav­ ery was fundamental to the development of a good number of New World economies and practiced to some degree by most of them necessitates also a hemispheric approach to slave testimony—and perhaps to the absence or extreme paucity, in many places and peri­ ods, of texts that respond to the expectation patterns created by the genre of the “clas­ sic” slave narrative. Writers and theorists remind us that slave narratives necessarily har­ bor silences at their very core (e.g., Morrison 1995, McBride 2001); they may also draw our attention away from other available forms of slave testimony, such as those contained in trial documents, committee reports, letters, newspapers, and other documents. Re­ search may thus have to pay increased attention to these other forms and consider re­ defining the slave narrative. This is not to say that the Americas have not produced fully articulated slave narratives outside the United States. In Cuba, the narrative by Juan Francisco Manzano was com­ pleted in 1839, with a partial English translation appearing in 1840. The only known Spanish-language slave autobiography written in the nineteenth century, it is comple­ mented by Miguel Barnet’s 1968 Biografía de un cimarrón, the story of his informant, the former slave Esteban Montejo. The Caribbean accounts by Mary Prince from Bermuda and Ashton Warner from St. Vincent, both published in London in 1831, have been among the more widely read slave narratives, with Prince’s narrative especially seeing a number of editions since the 1980s. From Jamaica we have the apprentice narrative of James Williams, published in London and Glasgow in 1837; more recently the 1853 Jamaican slave narrative of Archibald Monteath, first published in German in 1864 and translated Page 2 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies into English the following year, has received intensive attention (Maureen Warner-Lewis 2007). Slavery in Brazil finally is among the experiences described in Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua’s autobiography, published in 1854 in Detroit while Baquaqua lived in Chatham, Canada West. His place of residence draws attention to Canada as one of the other main producers of slave narratives in particular in the nineteenth century, the main subject of part 2. While slavery was restricted in Upper Canada and ceased to exist in Lower Canada through the power of the courts earlier, it ended formally only with the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. Slavery in Canada seems the subject of only one known slave narrative, while United States fugitives to Canada contribute to a substantial corpus of Canadian slave narratives, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 increased the volume of the underground railroad.

(p. 346)

The Caribbean and Latin America

While slave narratives are enabled by their relation to other texts and often to previous slave narratives (Stepto 1979, Gates 1988), they are also directly marked by “the context of their presentation”; in Dwight McBride’s words, “It is the theater of abolitionism that enables the moment of articulation, the moment of bearing witness” (McBride 2001, 5). This consideration, evidently pertinent to the anglophone tradition, raises the question of how slave testimony was possible in the absence of a strong abolitionist presence. The on­ ly known hispanic narrative written by a slave illustrates some of the contextual con­ straints of the “discursive terrain” (McBride 2001, 5). Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobio­ gafía de un esclavo was composed between 1835 and 1839. Despite Cuba’s active role in black slavery, it is the only account by a Cuban slave prior to the abolition of slavery there in 1886, joined only in the 1960s by the recorded account of Esteban Montejo (testi­ monies by Chinese indentured laborers, who after the abolition of the slave trade in 1867 worked under circumstances similar to slavery, are available in the 1876 Cuba Commis­ sion Report; see Lopez 2006). The reasons for this silence include, as Ivan A Schulman’s introduction to a 1996 bilingual edition of Manzano’s narrative suggests, official censor­ ship and the wider “colonial period’s master discourse” (Schulman 1996, 7). This context practically eliminates slavery as a theme even for nonslaves. Other black writers of the period, most of whom were free, chose not to emphasize it (Schulman 1996, 19). Another reason is obviously the slaves’ illiteracy. Manzano is exceptional in this respect. He had already published two volumes of poetry in 1821 and 1830 (Schulman 1996, 20) before beginning the Autobiografía in 1835, while still a slave. The acquisition of literacy and his interests in literature are one of the recurrent topics of the narrative. As a house slave identifying with white dominant culture, however, it seems that Manzano writes it reluc­ tantly. He fears that detailing his life as a slave will incur not only punishment by his mis­ tress but also the loss of esteem of his benefactor Domingo Del Monte, who appreciated his poetry and requested his autobiography (Schulman 1996, Molloy 1989). On the other hand, open refusal was all but impossible, since Del Monte could—and eventually did—fa­ cilitate his manumission, which occurred in 1836. As a consequence, the text abounds with ambivalences, joining descriptions of Manzano’s attachment to his mistresses with passages delineating his suffering and punishments as a slave, often averting his—and his Page 3 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies readers’—gaze with phrases like “let us pass over the rest of this painful scene in si­ lence” (Manzano 1996, 73) or “Dear God! Let us draw a curtain over the scene. My blood was shed” (93). Given Manzano’s position, it is not surprising that the text was completed only once he was free; after all, he was still surrounded by his previous owners and by slavery. Even his friend Del Monte favored not immediate abolition but rather reform, his family’s fortune being directly related to sugar slavery (Schulman 1996, 18). Del Monte nonetheless conveyed Manzano’s text with other documents destined for the London 1840 Anti-Slavery Convention to the British magistrate Richard Madden, who partially translated and published it (the second half is (p. 347) missing), together with some of Manzano’s poems, as Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba, recently liberated in 1840 (Molloy 1989, 395). Apart from a more or less clandestine circulation of the text in Cuba, its reception thus occurred mainly abroad (some of Manzano’s poems were also translat­ ed into French by Victor Schoelcher, in his 1840 Abolition de I’esclavage). The first Span­ ish edition appears not before 1937, in Havanna. As Sylvia Molloy has pointed out, Madden’s translation tends to harmonize Manzano’s own language, which in its original, often irregular form is indicative of the author’s predicaments (Molloy 1989, 404–408, 417). Indeed, it took the changed context after the Cuban revolution with its renewed historio­ graphic interests to produce Biografía de un cimarrón in 1968, narrated by the anthropol­ ogist and writer Miguel Barnet on the basis of his interviews with Esteban Montejo, a for­ mer slave. Before his death in 1973, Montejo lived through slavery and the Cuban war of independence, then experienced the United States presence in Cuba and finally the Cuban revolution. The differing translation titles Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1968) and Biography of a Runaway Slave (1994) together suggest the tensions of com­ posite authorship of this account, which includes descriptions of life in the barracoons, the slaves’ religion, games and amusements, their relation to the Chinese, and work in the sugar mills. In opposition to Manzano, Montejo decides early to run away and de­ scribes his solitary life in the woods as Maroon. After the abolition of slavery, life in the sugar mills changes initially little. The account ends, surprisingly, with Montejo’s partici­ pation in the war of independence and his experience of United States involvement in Cu­ ba. It has been pointed out that these episodes concern foreign-related Cuban problems, and that the omission of the fairly outspoken and astute Montejo’s comments on later events such as the race war of 1912 or the Cuban Revolution may be related to Barnet’s own reintegration in the Cuban intelligentsia after the revolution (Luis 1989, 486–488). Such issues highlight again the moment of enunciation and the “discursive terrain” as de­ cisive for the content and form of slave narratives. Later attempts to give reality to slave life in Cuba have been made by other writers, for instance in the plays by Gerardo Fulle­ da León collected in Resistencia y cimarronaje (2006). The British abolitionist movement that provides Manzano with an audience is equally im­ portant for other narratives from the Caribbean. The two 1831 narratives by Mary Prince from Bermuda and Ashton Warner from St. Vincent are both transcribed with the help of Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society of England. In both cases the amanuensis is Susanna Strickland, who two years later emigrated to Canada as Susanna Page 4 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies Moodie and became one of its most important nineteenth-century writers. Mary Prince’s is the first known female slave narrative, and the only one from the Caribbean. Family separation, multiple owners, floggings, sexual abuse, and work in the salt ponds on Turks Island in the Bahamas were part of her slave life. Eventually her owners took her from Antigua to London, where Prince realized that she was technically free, though also threatened by destitution. The Moravian Society, which Prince had already encountered in Bermuda, came to her help. In addition, recognizing the potential impact on similar other cases, the Anti-Slavery Society petitioned Parliament to challenge Prince’s reenslavement in Antigua in case of her return (see Sharpe (p. 348) 1996, 37, Ferguson 1992). This effort failed, however, signaling a severe defeat for the anti-slavery cause. Prince relates her story to Susanna Strickland while she is in the employ of Thomas Pringle. His introductory discussion of the editorial process states that the narrative, “taken down from Mary’s own lips…was written out fully…and afterwards pruned into its present shape; retaining, as far as was practicable, Mary’s exact expressions and peculiar phraseology” (Prince 1997: 55). An increasingly substantive discussion (including Gates 1987, Ferguson 1992, Ferguson 1997, Paquet 1992, Sharpe 1996, Whitlock 2000, McBride 2001, Nwankwo 2005, and Simmons 2009) deals with the extent of Prince’s agency de­ spite the constraints placed on the narrative by the conventions and necessities of aboli­ tionist discourse. Prince’s account, probably originally delivered in a form of Creole, con­ tained information not transferred to paper (Sharpe 1996, 38, 44). The degree of linguis­ tic revision is also suggested by Pringle’s introductory remarks to another text published together with that of Mary Prince, the “Narrative of Louis Asa-Asa.” Pringle here tran­ scribes one the former African slave’s remarks more directly and in agrammatical form, while the concluding paragraph of the narrative itself is qualified as being “entirely his own” (Prince 1997, 132), thus by implication qualifying the rest as the work of the amanuensis or the editor. In addition, alternative accounts of incidents contained in Prince’s narrative are produced by character witnesses, opponents, and by Prince herself in a later court case involving Pringle and Prince’s owner. These variants offer exceptional insights into the choices made in the previously published narrative and into the workings of slave narratives as discourse more generally. Jenny Sharpe contrasts the narrative with this material and other contexts, arguing that slave tactics “are difficult to detect in the slave narrative, not only because they lack a language of their own, but also because they are overwritten by the moral discourse of the antislavery movement” (Sharpe 1996, 46). Yet the narrative’s appeal to the strategically addressed “good people in England”—who presumably would rein in the “bad” planters overseas if they knew the realities of slavery—is clear, making its claim on the base of experiential authority: “and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few people in England know what slavery is. I have been a slave—I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what the slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free” (Prince 1997, 74).

Page 5 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies The kind of response hoped for by Prince is indeed evident when her amanuensis, Susan­ na Strickland, transcribed also the narrative of Ashton Warner in the same year. In her in­ troduction, Strickland confesses that she had “never given the subject much serious thought” until presented with evidence that she associates here with the Romantic guar­ antees of truth, nature, and authenticity: “To their simple and affecting narratives I could not listen unmoved. The voice of truth and nature prevailed over my former prejudices. I beheld slavery unfolded in all its revolting details; and, having been thus irresistibly led to peruse the authentic accounts of the real character and effects of the system, I re­ solved no longer to be an accomplice in its criminality, though it were only by keeping si­ lence regarding it” (Strickland 1831, 11). As Pringle had done in Prince’ (p. 349) narra­ tive, Strickland intervenes repeatedly in notes, especially to assure the reader that the words in particular passages are “his own expressions” (Strickland 1831, 12). Warner, who was still a nursling when his mother was manumitted, believed himself to be free and became a cooper’s apprentice. He was suddenly claimed, however, by the new owner of the estate of his birth. Local customs seemed to conflict with the Colonial Slave Law; while some magistrates seemed to support Warner’s claims to freedom, he was appre­ hended and remained enslaved while in St. Vincent. He avoided the lot of the slaves in the sugar fields, but described their fate and married one of them. When a manager ad­ mitted that he was indeed free and was claimed fraudulently under an old slave’s name, he refused to work and finally ran away. Free in London, he sought to establish his free­ dom also at home, but like Mary Prince faced the choice between destitution in England or reenslavement under the Colonial Law at home. He died in a hospital in London just before his narrative appeared in print. After Emancipation in 1834, slaves in all British colonies except Antigua and Bermuda were forced to serve their masters during an additional apprenticeship period—four years for field slaves and six years for house slaves (Paton 2001, xlvii n6). Despite reduced working hours for field slaves, slave holders thus continued to receive free labor in addi­ tion to monetary compensation for their former slaves (Paton 2001, xvii). Disputes be­ tween masters and slaves and punishments of the latter were now regulated by appointed “stipendiary magistrates” who, with few exceptions, sided with the owners. Due to in­ tense criticism, however, the apprenticeship system ended in 1838. A text that con­ tributed decisively to its demise was A Narrative of Events, since 1 August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Laborer in Jamaica, published 1837 in London and Glas­ gow. The British abolitionist and wealthy merchant Joseph Sturge, while investigating conditions under apprenticeship in Jamaica, decided to free Williams and send him to England, where Archibald Palmer—a dismissed stipendiary magistrate who favored ap­ prentices in his decisions—wrote down William’s account. The narratives by Prince and Warner may have inspired Sturge in this enterprise (Paton 2001, xxi, xxxii–xxxiv). The re­ sulting text, however, is an exception in that it opts for a form of “anglicized Creole” rather than standard English (Paton 2001, xxxiv) to heighten the impression of authentici­ ty. Williams’ narrative also differs from classical slave narratives in that it restricts itself to a short period of under three years, from the beginning of apprenticeship to the mo­ ment of writing. Williams attacks vigorously conditions under apprenticeship as worse Page 6 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies than before, denounces sexual abuse of female apprentices, and describes graphically the system of punishment and in particular Jamaican prisons. The text was a serious blow to the apprenticeship system, leading to an investigation that produced testimony from over 120 apprentices (British Parliamentary Papers 1837–1838 XLIX: 159–263)—in Diana Paton’s words, “the most substantial collection of first-person accounts of their experi­ ences by Caribbean slaves or former slaves” (xiii). Also in 1837, the year Williams’ narrative was published in England and Jamaica, an Igbo whose former name was Aniaso but who in Jamaica took the name Archibald Monteath, bought his manumission. He was a helper in the Moravian church (which did not oppose slavery). Monteath, whose narrative has recently been republished in (p. 350) a detailed study by Warner-Lewis (2007), was abducted as a child and became a house slave and overseer. In his narrative, he judges slavery mostly mildly but blames it as an obstacle to Christianity. He was baptized formally in 1821, though engaging only later more intensely with Christianity and especially the Moravian community, where he often led services and was paid a salary after 1837. His narrative seems to have been taken down by two amanuenses—his own writing was not fluent—around 1853. It was first published, howev­ er, in one version in 1864 in German and then in English translation in 1865, before a sec­ ond version was discovered and published in 1966 (republished 1990 in Callaloo). The text was clearly not created for abolitionist reasons but as a conversion narrative and illu­ minating model for other Moravian church members. Like the earlier narrative of his fel­ low-Igbo Equiano (or that of Asa-Asa), however, it is one of the few texts to describe life in Africa—including the enslavement practiced by Africans themselves—and perhaps the on­ ly fully articulated slave narratives concentrating on Jamaica. Besides this text and the apprentice narrative by Williams, Equiano’s narrative deals partly with Jamaica, as does The Horrors of Slavery by Robert Wedderburn, the son of a Scottish plantation owner and slave dealer and a slave mother, who was freed at birth. As in the case of the Jamaican inquiry apprentice testimonies, at least shorter narratives from other areas are contained in official documents. An example are the Reports of the Fiscals and of the Protectors of Slaves of Berbice and Demerera-Essequebo (later Guyana), preserved by the Public Records Office and as part of the British Parliamentary Papers. Slaves were able to complain to these officials about brutal punishments and lack of food and clothing. These sources reveal over a thousand slave testimonies from the be­ ginning of the nineteenth century, mostly transcribed in the first person (Lean and Burnard 2002, 122). Known slave narratives and testimony from Brazil are relatively rare, the consequence of a late abolitionist movement and severe repression (Krueger 2002, 172). Slavery was not abolished there until 1888. The Brazilian slave population is estimated to have been 1.5 million around 1790—and thus larger than the French and British Caribbean together (Bergad 2007, 63)—and between 3.5 and 6 million in its entirety (Krueger 2002: 170). Robert Edgar Conrad’s Children of God’s Fire (1984) contains a slave testimony obtained by a Select Committee of the British House of Lords, slaves’ petitions, and several texts by the former slave Luís Gama. Robert Krueger identifies roughly 700 pages of text by Page 7 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies over 140 Brazilian slaves or former slaves. While the largest part comes from Inquisition or trial transcripts (Krueger 2002, 172), the corpus contains also the 1982 interview with one of the last living slaves, Mariano Pereira dos Santos, and 26 letters and 350 pages of dictation by Brazil’s first black female writer, the prolific Santa Rosa Egipcíaca. She es­ caped forced prostitution to become a “pious church woman” and successful preacher, fi­ nally being interrogated by the Inquisition (Krueger 2002: 175–177, Mott 1983). The only fully articulated slave narrative we have from Brazil, however, is by Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua (1854). Republished in a critical edition by Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy in 2001, An Interesting Narrative. Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, A Native of Zoogoo, In the Interior of Africa (A Convert to Christianity,) with a Description (p. 351) of That Part of the World; Including the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants begins with ethnographic information about West Africa, including African slavery. Baquaqua de­ scribes multiple captivities in wars, his enslavement through deception, the march to the coast, and first encounter with whites. The traumatic memory of the sufferings and mur­ ders on the slave ship remain a continual presence: “Oh! the loathsomeness and filth of that horrible place will never be effaced from my memory; nay, as long as memory holds her seat in this distracted brain, will I remember that. My heart even at this day, sickens at the thought of it” (Law and Lovejoy 2003, 153). Sold in Pernambuco, Baquaqua experi­ enced further cruelty, learned Portuguese, and finally escaped from a sea trader while in New York. He was baptized during a stay in Haiti and received some schooling in New York, but then racism made him leave for Canada, where he acquired British citizenship (191). Written together with the Unitarian minister Samuel Downing Moore, the first part of the narrative is mostly in the third person with direct quotations from Baquaqua, while the second part is generally narrated in the first person. The collaboratively produced text thus exhibits the generic instabilities of auto/biography and raises again questions of voice and control. In addition, it leaves the place of composition uncertain: is it Michigan, where Moore resides and the book is published, or Chatham, Canada West, where Baquaqua has taken up residence (Law and Lovejoy 2003, 7–11)? In either case, Baquaqua’s trajectory and the Chatham context—to which we will return—makes the text not only an African and Brazilian but also a Canadian slave narrative.

Canada As Eric Williams and others have pointed out, Canada’s early economy was not based on labor-intensive staples for export as in the southern United States and the Caribbean (Williams 1964, 4–5). Slavery was practiced nonetheless on a smaller scale until the early nineteenth century in what is now Canada, including in New France, Nova Scotia (which originally comprised New Brunswick), the Island of St John (now Prince Edward Island), and Upper and Lower Canada (later called Canada West and East, and now Ontario and Quebec respectively). In 1793, the importation of new slaves was prohibited in Upper Canada under Simcoe; slavery in Lower Canada was halted by court decisions between

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies 1798–1800 (Mackey 2004, 25–32). Formally, however, slavery ended only with abolition in the British Empire in 1834. One of the first slaves in New France, Olivier le Jeune, is given briefly a voice in the first person in the Jesuit Relations of 1632 (Thwaites 1897, V, 62, qtd Winks 1997, 1). In the case of the Montreal slave Angélique, tried and hanged in 1734 for allegedly burning down Montreal, only her responses under interrogation survive, recorded in the third per­ son in court documents. We have to rely on sources such as newspapers, letters, trial records, and census and other documents rather than fully articulated narratives con­ cerning slavery in what is now Canada. The only exception is Sophia Pooley, who was brought to Canada as a slave and sold to Mohawk chief Joseph Brant and then to the (p. 352) English immigrant Samuel Hatt, giving her testimony to abolitionist Benjamin Drew (Drew 2000, 192–195). By contrast, a substantial body of narratives exists by au­ thors who experienced slavery elsewhere before settling as free persons in Canada. As documented, for instance, by Walker (1992) and Clarke (1991), early slave and conver­ sion narratives and black captivity narratives are produced by black loyalist ministers who came to Nova Scotia after the Peace of Paris in 1783, although several of them left again with 1200 other disappointed black loyalists for Sierra Leone in 1792. The narra­ tive of captivity among the Cherokees by John Marrant—who was born of free blacks and went on to become a Methodist minister—was published in London in 1785 (see Gates 1988, 142–146). A combined slave and captivity narrative is “An account of the life of Mr. David George, from Sierra Leone in Africa; given by himself in a conversation with Broth­ er Rippon of London, and Brother Pearce of Birmingham,” which appeared first in the Baptist Annual Register I (1790–1793). Witnessing violence against his family as a slave in Virginia, George escaped but was taken captive by Natives and sold to several white masters, cofounding Silver Bluff Baptist Church in Georgia in 1773. During the American Revolution, he joined the British and sailed to Halifax. A successful Baptist preacher in Shelburne and Birchtown in Nova Scotia, he baptized both blacks and whites. His house and meeting place were vandalized, however, and he shared poverty and distress with the other black loyalist settlers. Leaving for Freetown, Sierra Leone, with many of them, he continued preaching there. His account is a slave narrative but also a Baptist text, with the emphasis on David George’s work as a preacher. Similarly the narrative by Boston King, “written by himself” and published first in the Methodist Magazine in 1798, dedi­ cates only the first part to his slave experience and multiple escapes. The other three parts detail conversion experiences undergone in Nova Scotia by his wife, members of the community, and himself, and his own preaching there. After his decision to move to Sierra Leone in order to contribute to missionary work in Africa, his work there led to his further education at Kingswood School in England, established by Methodist founder John Wesley in 1748. In addition to these texts, George Elliott Clarke, in his two volume anthology of black Nova Scotian writing (1991), includes John William Robertson’s The Book of the Bible against Slavery, published in 1854 in Halifax. Robertson comments on the Bible, describes brutality against blacks, and narrates his difficult escape as a sailor and his eventual arrival in Halifax. Page 9 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies With the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, Canada attracted a stream of fugitives arriving by way of the underground railroad that increased again with the Unit­ ed States Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Especially Canada West became the home of many former slaves and free blacks alike, who produced a substantial body of writing that in­ cluded numerous slave narratives. These texts have been subject to inquiry by historians and have in some cases been read from within United States studies, but the disciplinary developments of African Canadian and Canadian critical race studies have resulted in shifting perspectives (see Rhodes 2000, Kang 2005, Clarke 2005). Black Atlantic, hemi­ spheric, and other transnational critiques of national paradigms also suggest renewed at­ tention from different perspectives. Moses Roper, who escaped slavery via Savannah and New York in 1834 and sub­ sequently lectured widely in England and Scotland, published his narrative first in Eng­ land in 1837. In an appendix to a later edition he mentions his settling in Canada West in 1844 to remain closer to his family still enslaved south of the border (Roper 1848, Finseth 2007, 24). Lewis Clarke, a Kentucky slave who escaped in 1841 to Canada despite the horror stories he was told about it by slave holders (Clarke and Clarke 2008, 41), found work in Chatham before returning to the States to rescue his brothers Milton and Cyrus. (p. 353)

His narrative was first published in 1845, and then again together with that of his brother Milton in 1846. In the same year appeared a curious text in Montreal by Israel Lewis. The former slave became involved in the Canadian Wilberforce settlement when Cincinnati enforced the Ohio Black Code in 1829, but was several times dismissed from his functions and charged with embezzling funds (Winks 1997, 155–160; Mackey 2004, 120–126). His pamphlet “Crisis in North America” (reprinted in Mackey 2004, 200–203) unrealistically calls for petitioning the Queen for a meeting of “100,000 Coloured Men…to assemble at Niagara for the purpose of putting an end to Slavery” (Mackey 2004, 200). Austin Ste­ ward, the former president of Wilberforce with whom Lewis jousted over money and ac­ cusations of theft in court in 1833, presented his side of that story in chapters 20, 27, and 33 of his own later narrative, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years of Freeman: Em­ bracing the Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce (1857). An escaped former Virginia slave, Steward ran a successful grocery store in Rochester in the 1820s but was recruited to help run the Wilberforce settlement in 1831. In 1837, because of infighting and the difficulties with Israel Lewis, he returned financially ruined to Rochester. Steward’s narrative also contains the accounts of other fugitives from Virginia, reported in chapter 23. Some of the perhaps best-known slave narratives relating to Canada appear in the years just before and then after the Fugitive Slave Act, namely those by Henry Bibb (1849), Josi­ ah Henson (1849) Thomas Smallwood (1851), Samuel Ringgold Ward (1855), and Jer­ maine Wesley Loguen (1859) These texts are joined by the collection of over one hundred short narratives transcribed by Benjamin Drew and published in 1856. Henry Bibb, born in Kentucky of a white father and a slave mother and “educated in the school of adversity, whips, and chains” (xvii), reached Canada for the first time in 1838 but was re-enslaved when he returned for his family to the United States. Free again and Page 10 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies pursuing abolitionist activities in Detroit, he published his influential Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave in 1849. The Narrative mentions Cana­ da, the “land of liberty” and “sweet land of rest” (Bibb 2005, 11), time and again as goal of his escape (e.g., 16–19, 22–29), and at some point Bibb asserts that he “had been to Canada” (82). It is only after the publication of his narrative and the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, however, that he moved to Sandwich, Canada West, becoming a leading black orga­ nizer and editor. He cofounded the Home Refugee Society to buy and resell land to fugi­ tives, and with his wife Mary cofounded The Voice of the Fugitive (1851–1853), Canada’s first sustained black newspaper (which would serve as platform in his feud with Mary Ann Shadd, who became increasingly critical of Bibb, the Refugee Home Society, and any form of black self-segregation in her in her own paper, The Provincial (p. 354) Freeman). Bibb’s editorials promote abolition, temperance, black education, and immigration to Canada (see Stanton 2001). The Voice of the Fugitive also offers accounts of refugee slave cases in the United States and of arrivals in Canada (Cooper 2000, 314). The narrative of Josiah Henson, who escaped to Canada already in 1830, appeared first in 1849 in Boston as The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself. Increasingly identified—rightly or wrongly (see Winks 1997, 187–195)—as a model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, Henson was pro­ pelled to exceptional prominence; in an 1876 London edition, his narrative finally ap­ peared as Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life. An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom”). Henson’s story is important in its own right, however, rendering his conversion experience and justifying his decisions in the face of moral and spiritual dilemma. Henson thus examines his failure to free a group of fellow slaves when the occasion arises, and his temptation, on a boat to be sold in New Orleans, to kill his master. After his escape to Canada in 1830, Henson took a leading role in the ultimately failed Dawn black settlement and its manual labor school, the British American Institute. Though at various times embroiled in disputes over the running of Dawn and the school, he undertook numerous voyages on behalf of the settlement and its woodcut­ ting operations, including a trip to the 1850–1851 World Fair in London during which he met Queen Victoria. Through various editions, Henson’s narrative exhibited the self-artic­ ulation and self-fashioning of a leading black Canadian in the nineteenth century. At a convention held in Drummondville (today’s Niagara Falls) in 1847, Henson’s role at Dawn was challenged by, among others, Thomas Smallwood, an underground railroad conductor who moved to Canada in 1843 and in 1851 published A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man) in Toronto (Smallwood 2000, 99–105; Almonte 2000, 10). Smallwood spends barely a page of his narrative on his own slave experience in Maryland and manumission in 1831. Instead he offers excerpts by famous authors attacking slavery, critiques the African Colonization Society, and describes his extensive activities and the betrayals he has experienced as an underground railroad conductor. He also exposes the plagiarism of Paola Brown, who in 1851 brought out a slightly altered version of David Walker’s 1829 Appeal under his own name in Hamilton (Brown 1851; see Mackey 2004, 76–84). Smallwood’s text is unequivocal in its praise of Canada as place of settlement and Page 11 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies its complete condemnation of the United States, which is compared with the biblical Egypt. Two other important slave narratives are by the ministers Jermaine Wesley Loguen and Samuel Ringgold Ward. Loguen’s text, perhaps not written by himself, is rendered in the third person, appealing to the reader’s sympathies with narrative devices in the style of sentimental fiction. The text describes Loguen’s experience of slaveholders’ brutality and renders at length his escape to Canada in the mid-1830s. From 1841 on, Loguen became an important underground railroad conductor in Syracuse, advertising his role openly. He was forced to return at least temporarily to Canada after being indicted for participating in the escape of the fugitive slave “Jerry” McHenry from a Syracuse court house, an event recounted at the end of Loguen’s text. Agitating at times (p. 355) together with him against the Fugitive Slave Law is Samuel Ringgold Ward, whose parents escaped slavery when he was still young. Ward became a minister and agent of the American and then New York State Anti-Slavery societies. He published several newspapers—first The True American (1847–1848) and then Impartial Citizen (1849–1851)—before his involvement in the “Jerry” case also forced him to flee to Canada in 1851. Here he served as agent of the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society and collaborated with Mary Ann Shadd, appearing initially as nominal editor of her paper, The Provincial Freeman. His 1855 Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro; His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada, and England, written before his later move to Jamaica, details his identification with Canada upon ar­ rival there, but also the need to counter anti-black prejudice and even pro-slavery senti­ ment in Canada. Ward’s narrative further provides a report on the most important black communities in Canada West. He gives a critical account of the Dawn settlement with its now defunct trade school, lauds the achievements of the black community in Chatham while deploring the degradation of some individuals (as in the case of the bigger cities of London and Hamilton). Only his description of the Buxton settlement is entirely positive. Like Mary Ann Shadd in her A Plea for Emigration (1852), Ward registers his reservations with respect to any segregated black settlements, schools and churches in Canada; while separate institutions may have been justified in the United States, he argues that there is no need for them in Canada. Benjamin Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery; The Refugee: or The Narratives of Fugi­ tive Slaves in Canada, published by J. P. Jewett in Boston the following year (1856), offers an even more systematic portrayal of the black settlements and especially the condition of the fugitive slave population in Canada West. Drew, an abolitionist and former Boston school teacher, visits Canada West even more extensively than William Wells Brown in 1861 (see Ripley 1986, 461–498). He transcribes the statements of over one hundred for­ mer slaves settled here as free subjects, providing in addition introductory descriptions of fourteen black communities including St. Catharines, Toronto, London, Chatham, Buxton, Dresden/Dawn, Windsor, Sandwich, and Amherstburg. Drew in particular seeks to counter the pro-slavery view set forth in Nehemiah Adam’s 1854 A South-Side View of Slavery—itself partially a critique of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The imperative to cri­ tique slavery and demonstrate the benefits of freedom for blacks was all the more urgent after the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the possibility of further slave states being Page 12 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies created in the United States. One of Drew’s specific goals was to demonstrate to Ameri­ cans that former slaves could become valuable and independent citizens once they en­ joyed freedom. While the interviews vary in length, not surprisingly similar themes recur, including the experience of violence or family separation, the fear of being sold south, the desire for education for oneself and one’s children (and its availability in Canada), aver­ sion to the begging system, and frequent remarks about the absence of alcohol in the black Canadian communities. The overall tenor of the narratives is clear: free black citi­ zens in Canada are doing well, implicitly providing a model for possible solutions in the United States. Among the slave narratives assembled here is a very brief account by Har­ riet Tubman, the underground railroad conductor operating (p. 356) out of St. Catharines, in which she states that “slavery is the next thing to hell” (Drew 2000, 30). Other volumes also collect a number of slave narratives and present them in particular contexts. A number of fugitive slave stories are rendered in Rev. William Troy’s HairBreadth Escape from Slavery to Freedom (1861). The son of a slave father and a free black woman and thus free himself, Troy moved to Canada West in 1851, living first in Amherstburg and then in Windsor (where he appears in William Wells Brown’s descrip­ tion of black Canadian settlements [Ripley 1986, 477]). Troy later toured England and eventually returned to his native Virginia. While he offers an account of his life in the first chapter of his text, the rest is dedicated to the stories of about thirty slaves attempting their escape, most of them succeeding, and in many cases moving to Troy’s communities in Amherstburg and then Windsor. A few years later, Samuel Gridley Howe compiled for the United States government The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West: Report to the Freedman’s Inquiry Commission (1864). He drew heavily on Drew’s volume and traveled to many of the same places, adding interviews with about another dozen black settlers. Howe’s report itself—meant to provide insight into the possible condition of blacks after abolition in the United States—is heavily concerned with the health of the settlers in Canada and medical opinion that blacks do not do well in cold climates. The report seems also to have been an attempt to allay fears of amalgamation, reporting that from Canadi­ an evidence, “there need be no anxiety upon the score of amalgamation of races in the United States” (33). The black narratives include discussions of the weather, white preju­ dice, the experience at Buxton, and a longer account of a black tobacco manufacturer in Hamilton. Finally, a more substantive publication than Howe’s which also contains slave narratives is William Still’s The Underground Railroad, which appeared in 1872 in Philadelphia. Still, from 1852 the chairman of the Philadelphia General Vigilance Commit­ tee that “aided almost eight hundred fugitive slaves by the beginning of the Civil War” (Ripley 1986, 205), also visited black Canadian communities in 1855 and reports positively on them. Besides other materials documenting the functioning of the under­ ground railroad, The Underground Railroad includes correspondence and narratives of over six hundred fugitive slaves, many of whom settled in Canada. One of them is William Peel, who in April 1859 had himself boxed up and sent by steamer from Baltimore to Philadelphia, a containment of seventeen hours, after which he proceeded to Canada.

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies While most of the refugees settled in the southern part of Canada West, the presence of fugitives further north near Georgian Bay appeared in a later narrative by former Mary­ land slave Jim Henson. Published in 1889 as Broken Shackles by transcriber John Frost under the pseudonym of Glenelg, Henson’s stories comprise his slave life in Maryland, his escape, and his coming to Owen Sound in Canada via Pennsylvania and New Jersey. An­ other underground destination was Montreal, a place with a small but long-standing black community (see Mackey 2010). Gary Collison suggests that the Montreal black com­ munity comprised perhaps four hundred residents in 1861, despite that year’s census number of only forty-six; with the help of census slips, city directories, newspaper ac­ counts and other sources, he reconstructs in detail the life of one former (p. 357) slave liv­ ing in Montreal in his Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (1997). The Mon­ treal Gazette of January 31, 1861 printed an account of another fugitive slave, that of Lav­ ina Wormeny, who was enslaved as a child of free parents in Washington and arrived after multiple escapes and arrests in Montreal. Two other known slave narratives from Canada come from the west coast, documented in Wayde Compton’s Bluesprint (2001), a ground­ breaking collection of black British Columbian writers. One of them, William H.H. Johnson’s The Horrors of Slavery, published in 1901 in Vancouver, is disparagingly de­ scribed by Winks as “a potpourri of the fieriest of abolitionist tracts” (1997, 291); black historian Dorothy Williams, however, sees it also as a sign of resistance against the racism experienced by those black refugees who remained in Canada after the Civil War (Williams 2005, 42). The other is the story of Sylvia Stark, transcribed in notes by her daughter Marie Stark Wallace, which narrates her family’s journey from Missouri to Salt Spring Island off the coast of Vancouver. Canadian slave texts and reported or transcribed testimony can be found in other sources as well. One example is the Canadian volume of The Black Abolitionist Papers (Ripley 1986). The volume contains, among other items, a former slave’s letter to his erstwhile owner, an unsuccessful petition by a Nelson Hackett to Lord Sydenham to prevent his ex­ tradition to the United States, a black victim’s warning against false friends who are black but paid by slave catchers, or a text by the escaped slave of Senator Henry Clay, Lewis Richardson. We find here also a discussion of the then-famous case of Frederick “Shadrach” Wilkins by Henry Bibb, a former slave writing from St. John, New Brunswick in 1854, and a text sent to Mary Ann Shadd by the Amherstburg True Band—one of the many similarly named black self-help organizations in Canada West and mostly composed of former slaves. Finally, one can mention here also General Carleton’s “Book of Ne­ groes,” the ledger with over 3000 names that was kept by the British to document former slaves, but also those who came with their loyalist masters, shipped mostly to Nova Sco­ tia out of New York in 1783 (Winks 1997, 31–33). The ledger, kept to allay Washington’s protest that United States “property” was carried away, notwithstanding Peace Treaty commitments to the contrary, contains also a number of transcribed statements by former slaves that state where and when they left their masters, made to establish their service to the British as criterium of their shipment into freedom.

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies These examples put emphasis again on a perspective that is also underlined by the case of Latin American and Caribbean slave testimony discussed in the first part of this essay. A hemispheric approach to slave narratives and slave testimony tends to relativize an ex­ clusive concentration on the fully articulated narratives that are the impressive result brought forth by resistance to United States slavery. The instances, discussed above, of the shorter statements made to commissioners in Jamaica, the accounts contained in the Fiscal reports, letters, petitions, and trial statements, or those contained in the Book of Negroes, remind us of the necessity to consider other forms. A hemispheric perspective draws our attention furthermore to the apprenticeship narrative; as Diana (p. 358) Paton suggests, it decenters the slave narrative, putting emphasis on the different time frame of the apprenticeship period and on the now triangular relationship between the apprentice/ slave, the master, and the magistrate or state (Paton 2001, xvii–xviii). Finally, while most slave narratives relating to Canada issue from the experience of United States slavery, these texts have to be read also in light of the specificity of their destination. Their au­ thors frequently render aspects of the myriad slave perceptions circulating about Canada in the United States, and they have usually come to conclusions that differ from those who decide to flee slavery but do not cross the border. These narratives offer in many cas­ es important records of nineteenth-century Canada in general, and more particularly of its race relations and the transformation of the lives of former slaves in freedom—howev­ er difficult—while slavery persists south of the border and continues to claim often close relatives. Canadian slave narratives should thus also be understood in the contexts of Canadian settler and migrant writing, and of Canadian autobiography and memoir. All of these aspects of a hemispheric approach to slave narratives and slave testimony sharpen the contours of any specific form within this wider context and should serve to direct fur­ ther research, independent of linguistic or national limitations, into all areas and forms of resistance to slavery and other forms of oppression.

References For information, materials, and other forms of support, I would like to thank Juanita De Barros, Frank Estelmann, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. I have also been able to draw on the results of a Standard Research Grant from the Social Science and Hu­ manities Council of Canada. (Many of the slave narratives below are also available as digital editions at http:// docsouth.unc.edu) Almonte, Richard. “Introduction.” A Plea for Emigration, Or, Notes of Canada West. By Mary Ann Shadd. Toronto: Mercury P, 1998. 9–41. ——. “Introduction.” A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man). By Thomas Smallwood. Toronto: Mercury P, 2000. Bergad, Laird W. The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. New Approaches to the Americas. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, and American Slave. In­ trod. by Lucius C. Matlack. Mineola, New York: Dover, 2005 (orig 1849). Also available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html accessed August 20, 2013. British Parliamentary Papers 1837–1838 XLIX. “Papers Presented to Parliament, by His Majesty’s Command, in Explanation of the Measures Adopted by His Majesty’s Govern­ ment, for Giving Effect to the Act for the Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Colonies.” Brown, Paola. Address Intended to Be Delivered in the City Hall, Hamilton, February 7, 1851 on the Subject of Slavery. Hamilton, 1851. Clarke, George Elliott, ed. Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing. 2 Vols. Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1991. Clarke, George Elliott. “‘This Is No Hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narrative.” Pa­ pers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 43.1 (2005), 7–32. Proquest. (p. 359) Clarke, Milton, and Lewis Garrard Clarke. Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Mil­ ton Clarke: Sons of a Soldier. BiblioLife, 2008. Collison, Gary. Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen. Cambridge and Lon­ don: Harvard UP, 1997. Compton, Wayde, ed. Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. Van­ couver: Arsenal Pulp P, 2001. Conrad, Robert Edgar. Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. Cooper, Afua. “‘Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause’: Henry Bibb, Abolitionism, Race Uplift, and Black Manhood 1842–1854.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2000. Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1966. Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975. Drew, Benjamin. The Refugee; or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related By Themselves, with An Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada. Toronto: Prospero, 2000. 1856. Eltis, David. “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassess­ ment.” The William and Mary Quarterly 58.1 (2001): 17–46. Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670– 1834. New York: Routledge, 1992. Page 16 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies ——. “Introduction to the Revised Edition.” The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Mary Prince.: U of Michigan P, 1997. Finseth, Ian Frederick. “Introduction.” North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones. Tampathia Evans & William L. Andrews. Chapel Hill and London: North Carolina UP, 2007. 24–34. Fulleda León, Gerardo. Resistencia y Cimarronaje: Teatro de Gerardo Fulleda León. Comp. and ed. Inés María Martiatu. Contemporáneos. La Habana, Cuba: Ediciones UNION, 2006. Gates, Henry Louis. “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game.” Op-ed. The New York Times April 22, 2010. Http://www.nytimes.com, accessed April 22, 2010. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Signet, 1987. ——. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Ox­ ford UP, 1988. —— “African American Criticism.” Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of Eng­ lish and American Literary Studies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992. 303–319. Henson, Josiah. Autobiography of Josiah Henson. An Inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stow’s Uncle Tom. Introd. by Robin Winks. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003. 1881. ——. The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Nar­ rated by Himself. Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849. Kang, Nancy. “‘As If I Had Entered a Paradise’: Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-Bor­ der Literary History.” African American Review 39.3 (2005): 431–458. Proquest. King, Boston. “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, A Black Preacher. Written by Himself, During His Residence at Kingswood School.” Methodist Magazine 21 (1798): 105–110, 157–161, 209–213, 261–265 (commented edition available at http:// antislavery.eserver.org/narratives/boston_king/bostonkingproof.pdf accessed Au­ gust 20, 2013; partially reprinted in Clarke 1991). Krueger, Robert. “Brazilian Slaves Represented in Their Own Words.” Slavery and Aboli­ tion 23.2 (2002): 169–186. (p. 360) Law, Robin and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publisher, 2001. Lean, John, and Trevor Burnard. “Hearing Slave Voices: The Fiscal’s Reports of Berbice and Demerara-Essequebo.” Archives: Journal of the British Records Association XXVII.107 (2002). Page 17 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies Loguen, Jermain Wesley. The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life. Syracuse, NY: J.G.K. Truair & Co., 1859. Lopez, Cathleen. “The Chinese in Cuban History.” Essays on the Chinese Diaspora in the Caribbean. Ed. Walton Look Lai. St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: History Department, University of the West Indies, 2006. 105–129. Luis, William. “The Politics of Memory and Miguel Barnet’s The Autobiography of a Run Away Slave.” MLN 104.2 (1989): 476–491. Mackey, Frank. Black Then: Blacks and Montreal 1780s–1880s. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004. ——. Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840. Studies on the History of Quebec. Montreal; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Manzano, Juan Francisco. The Autobiography of a Slave. Introduction and modernized Spanish version by Ivan A. Schulman, trans. Evelyn Picon Garfield. Latin American Litera­ ture and Culture Series. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996. McBride, Dwight A. Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York UP, 2001. Molloy, Sylvia. “From Serf to Self: The Autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano.” MLN 104.2 (1989): 393–417. Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. William Zinser. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 85–102. Mott, L. Rosa Egipcíaca. Uma Santa Africa no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand, 1983. Nwankwo, Ifeoma C. K. Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: ‘A History of Mary Prince.’” African American Review 26 (1992): 131–145. Paton, Diana. “Introduction.” A Narrative of Events, Since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica. By James Williams. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2001. xiii–lv. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Ed. Moira Fergueson. U of Michigan P, 1997. Rhodes, Jane. “The Contestation Over National Identity: Nineteenth-Century Black Ameri­ cans in Canada.” Canadian Review of American Studies 30.2 (2000): 175–186. Richard Almonte. “Introduction.” A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man). By Thomas Smallwood. Toronto: Mercury P, 2000. 9–19. 1851. Page 18 of 20

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies Ripley, C. Peter, ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. Robertson, John William Robertson. The Book of the Bible Against Slavery. Halifax, 1854. Partially reprinted in Clarke 1991. Roper, Moses. A Narrative of the Ventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery with an Appendix Containing a List of Places Visited by the Author in Great Britain, Ireland and the British Isles, and Other Matter. London: Printed for the author, 1848 (orig. 1837). Http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/roper/roper.html accessed August 20, 2013. Schulman, Ivan A. “Introduction.” The Autobiography of a Slave. Juan Francisco Man­ zano. Latin American Literature and Culture Series. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996. 5–38. (p. 361)

Sharpe, Jenny. “‘Something Akin to Freedom’: The Case of Mary Prince.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8.1 (1996): 31–56. Simmons, Merinda. “Beyond ‘Authenticity’: Migration and the Epistemology of ‘Voice’ in Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba.” College Literature 36.4 (2009): 75–99. Smallwood, Thomas. A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man. Ed. Richard Al­ monte. Toronto: Mercury P, 2000. 1851. Stanton, Susan Marion. “Voice of the Fugitive: Henry Bibb and ‘Racial Uplift’ in Canada West, 1851–1852.” M.A. Thesis, University of Victoria, 2001. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. Steward, Austin. Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Free Man: Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West. Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive. Rochester, NY: William Alling, 1857. Thwaites, Reuben Gold. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Vol 5. Cleveland: Bur­ rows Bros. Co., 1897. Troy, William. Hair-Breadth Escape from Slavery to Freedom. Manchester: Bremner, 1861. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/troy/troy.html accessed August 20, 2013. Walker, James W. St. G. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Sco­ tia and Sierra Leone 1783–1870. Reprints in Canadian History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 1976.

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Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies Ward, Samuel Ringold. Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro. His Anti-Slavery Words and Labors in the United States, Canada, and England. London: J. Snow, 1855. Http:// docsouth.unc.edu/wards/menu.html accessed August 20, 2013. Warner, Ashton. Negro Slavery Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner, a Native of St. Vincent’s. With an Appendix Containing the Testimony of Four Christian Ministers, Recently Returned from the Colonies, on the System of Slavery as It Now Exists. Ed. S. Strickland. London: Samuel Maunder, 1831. http:// docsouth.unc.edu/neh/warner/menu.html accessed August 20, 2013. Warner-Lewis, Maureen. Archibald Monteath: Igbo, Jamaican, Moravian. Kingston: U of the West Indies P, 2007. Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London and New York: Cassell, 2000. Williams, Dorothy L. “Print and Black Canadian Culture.” History of the Book in Canada: Vol II, 1840–1918. Ed. Yvan Lamonde Patricia Fleming, Gilles Gallichan. Toronnto: U of Toronto P, 2005. 40–43. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Introduction by D.W. Brogan. London: A. Deutsch, 1964. Williams, James. A Narrative of Events, Since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica. Introduction by Diana Paton. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2001. Wilson Starling, Marion. The Slave Narrative. Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1988. Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1997. 1971. Wormeny, Lavina. “Narrative of the Excape of a Poor Negro Woman from Slavery.” The Gazette. Montreal, January 31, 1861. Rpt in Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s– 1880s. By Frank Mackey. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004. 162–166.

Winfried Siemerling

Winfried Siemerling, Université de Sherbrooke, Québec

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Caribbean Slave Narratives

Caribbean Slave Narratives   Nicole N. Aljoe The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.017

Abstract and Keywords This essay discusses slave narratives written by and about slaves from the Caribbean. It suggests that while Caribbean narratives have much in common with the more familiar narratives from the United States, they are also quite distinct in form, theme, and con­ tent. Keywords: slave narrative, Caribbean, West Indies, West Indian, testimony, slavery, biography, genre

AS a genre, the slave narrative is often associated primarily with the southern United States. However, just as the institution itself was global, so too, was the genre. Slave nar­ ratives, defined as testimonies and narratives that focus on providing details about the experiences of African Atlantic enslavement, were written in a variety of locations includ­ ing the Caribbean colonial islands. And contrary to popular belief, there are many extant examples of Caribbean slave narratives. Their absence in prevailing understandings of the slave narrative is due to the fact that none of the Caribbean slave narratives discov­ ered thus far resembles the self-written, separately published slave narratives with which we are most familiar, such as texts by iconic United States narrators like William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, or Harriet Jacobs. Instead the Caribbean narratives appear in the archives in more complex manifestations: dictated, unsigned, and undated testi­ monies, portraits embedded in other texts, court depositions, spiritual conversion narra­ tives, letters, interviews, brief narrative and ethnographic portraits, representations of conversations, etc. And though not as numerous as in the United States, by my conservative count there are at least 20 separate and many other embedded narratives from the Caribbean and Latin America that satisfy the general definition of slave narratives. Examples of Caribbean slave narratives begin with the interviews of recently arrived enslaved Africans conduct­ ed in 1624–1627 in Cartagena, Colombia by the Jesuit missionary, Father Arturo San­ doval; and include the 1709 “Speech Made by a Black of Guardaloupe [sic]”; Joanna’s nar­ rative, embedded in John Gabriel Stedman’s travel and military narrative, A Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition Amongst the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796); interviews with Page 1 of 10

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Caribbean Slave Narratives two Fantee Barbadian slaves from 1799 found in the Bodleian library; the circa 1820 “Memoir of Florence Hall”; Mary Prince and Ashton Warner’s 1831 dictated narratives; Salone Cuthbert’s spiritual narrative dictated in 1831; Abu Bakr al-Sadiqa’s narrative, which was originally self-written in Arabic then translated into English by magistrate Robert Madden in his 1835 travel narrative; James Williams’ 1836 (p. 363) narrative of the apprenticeship period in Jamaica; Archibald Monteith/Monteath’s 1864 narrative of his conversion to Moravianism; and concludes with Miguel Barnet’s 1968 testimonio of the 105-year-old former maroon slave, Esteban Montejo. Although these ephemeral, fragmentary, explicitly mediated documents may seem very different from the more familiar slave narratives, in fact they are similar in that they, too, endeavor to describe the experiences of enslavement. And while, to date, no one has found a “Caribbean” Douglass or Jacobs (though he or she may yet exist), it is nonethe­ less still important to consider these texts on their own terms, as they exist, rather than viewing them as too contaminated by other voices or poor imitations of their U.S. counter­ parts. Moreover, in addition to offering a paradigm for exploring the myriad ways in which print culture sought to represent the worlds of enslaved Afro-Caribbean peoples, Caribbean slave narratives also evidence the hybrid foundations of the slave narrative genre. Indeed, as illuminated by Marion Wilson Starling’s scholarly bibliography of slave narratives (researched during the 1940s but not published until 1981), of the over 6,000 documented slave narratives found in U.S. archives, only 3–4%, or 150–250, were selfwritten and separately published. Consequently, the extant Caribbean slave narratives ac­ tually more closely resemble the majority of texts Starling identified as slave narratives, and thus they contribute to a more comprehensive and nuanced portrait of the genre. Indeed, narratives of the lives of enslaved Caribbean peoples appeared in a great variety of venues, particularly at the highpoint of the abolitionist movement in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many forums such as newspapers, novels, poems, and essays were specifically created in order to highlight slave voices. For example, when the Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter was created in 1823, the monthly and then eventually weekly newspaper provided an explicit forum for the publication and cir­ culation of “authentic facts” about the institution of enslavement as it existed in Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and India. Excerpts from Ashton Warner’s 1831 slave narrative appeared in the newspaper, as did “The narrative of Louis Asa Asa,” which was appended to Mary Prince’s 1831 narrative, along with many others. In addition, by docu­ menting and tracking the development of several slave engagements with the British courts, whether as victims of injustice or as plaintiffs in freedom suits, the newspapers reprinted court testimonies and depositions, which also included details about the lives of the enslaved. Moreover, representations of slave voices and life experiences were also in­ cluded in stories about medicine and science as well as in narratives and essays about spirituality. Scholars have noted over three million documents were published by the AntiSlavery Society alone (Cooper, 1998, 195–6). It stands to reason that a significant number of these documents would have included narratives of the lives of the enslaved in the Caribbean. Page 2 of 10

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Caribbean Slave Narratives And while the documents often highlighted slave lives and slave voices, the impetus for their initial creation often focused on educating white readers, not on providing the en­ slaved with an opportunity to express themselves on their own terms in writing. Indeed, some of the documents, particularly those created by pro-slavery factions, were explicitly invested in the continued support of enslavement. Therefore, in order to foreground the experiences of the enslaved Afro-Caribbean people apparent in many of (p. 364) these doc­ uments, the frequently racist and/or ethnocentric context of the text’s creation must be moved to the background. Consequently, one must read against the grain of the initial purpose of the text’s creation in order to foreground its articulation as a slave narrative. The practice of reading against the grain of the colonial archive, as Spivak argues in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” is necessary in efforts to illuminate the subtle and often unrecog­ nizable ways in which the subaltern voice may be manifest in colonial archives. Trevor Burnard’s examination of Thomas Thistlewood’s 10,000 page diary of his over 30-year residence in Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century is just one striking example of how historians have implemented Spivak’s suggested method of reading. Thistlewood’s diary records in excruciating detail the horrifying brutality that occurred on many Jamaican slave plantations, including the myriad and often sadomasochistic methods of punishment devised for ‘unruly’ slaves. And yet by reading against the grain of this text, Burnard was able to recover the lives of four African Caribbean slave women and detail the ways in which they were able to secure “a certain degree of autonomy” despite the extreme in­ equities of the institution (Sharpe, 1996, 46). Though Thistlewood’s narrative only records one line of explicit slave speech, Burnard was able to “hear” perhaps more than, and definitely other than, what Thistlewood had intended. This narrative multiplicity suggests that unlike many of their U.S. counterparts, Caribbean slave narrators probably did not construe themselves as constructing similar types of texts. Yet the similarities across the Caribbean slave narratives are compelling. In addition to exhibiting creole structures that are frequently elusive and fragmentary, many of the Caribbean narratives are also not necessarily organized as progressive narra­ tives of fugitiveness moving toward salvation and redemption. Moreover, many of the Caribbean slave narratives were not explicitly associated with official abolitionist dis­ courses and include texts such as Salone Cuthbert’s 1831 spiritual narrative and Abu Bakr al-Sadiqa’s 1835 narrative that lack sustained engagement with explicit abolitionist ideologies. And finally, many more of the narratives produced in the Caribbean communi­ cate specific details and memories of a life lived in freedom in Africa. However, the most significant distinction is that every Caribbean slave narrative is explic­ itly mediated in some way, by a white transcriber, editor, or translator. All of the narra­ tives are either dictated or translated. Only two of the narratives are self-written, and both of these, one written in Spanish the other in Arabic, were translated into English be­ fore publication. The multiplicity of voices in the Caribbean slave narratives became for many scholars evidence of its inauthenticity. Indeed, traditional understandings of the slave narrative frequently characterize them as autobiographies in which the self— strongly identified with individuality—is explained and justified. Even during the midPage 3 of 10

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Caribbean Slave Narratives nineteenth century, when the distinctions of the genre were beginning to be recognized, the narratives began to be celebrated for their singularity. Writing in 1849, Ephraim Peabody claimed that slave narratives were among the most remarkable productions of the age,—remarkable as being pic­ tures of slavery by the slave, remarkable as disclosing under a new light the mixed elements (p. 365) of American civilization, and not less remarkable as a vivid exhi­ bition of the force and working of the native love of freedom in the individual mind. (“Narratives of Fugitive Slaves” Christian Examiner, XLVII July 1849, emphasis mine) It is important to point out, however, that Peabody was speaking specifically about The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, which had be­ come an incredibly popular, best-selling book. This focus on singularity, which has histori­ cal roots, establishes that narratives that exhibit more rhetorically or structurally com­ plex forms, such as those that are dictated, translated, or otherwise mediated, are less frequently treated due to doubts over the slave narrator’s possible “control” of the narra­ tive. Ultimately for many, the essential rhetorical goal of the slave narrative was to “docu­ ment a struggle for monologism” or an attempt to permit only a single voice—that of the now freed ex-slave—to sound (Krupat 1985, 148). In order to become a legible subject, the slave in question had to write herself or himself into being, because wielding the au­ thorial pen was analogous to having the ability to construct one’s own identity. Hence, the reasoning went, if the slave did not write the narrative, she or he did not have “control” over the text, and therefore the narrative was not an authentic representation of a histori­ cal life (See Olney 1980 or Sekora 1987). However, when we consider that the enslaved were barred by law and custom from learning to read and write, these singular defini­ tions of the slave narrative genre become increasingly problematic. Though a slave might not have written the narrative in question, it does not necessarily follow that the editor had all the power. Indeed, as Walter Johnson has argued in Soul by Soul: Life in an Antebellum Slave Market, “we should not ignore the possibility that the narrators themselves had some bargaining power in their negotiations with their edi­ tors” (1999, 226). Slave narrators could choose what to reveal to their editors, when, and how. And in essence, the authority of the editor depended upon the narration by the slave. Furthermore, as Bakhtin explains, “‘language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions.’ It belongs to the other, and ‘expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s one intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process’” (1981, 299–300). Accordingly, the dictated slave nar­ ratives can be understood as inherently collaborative, dialogic texts in which both the voice of the slave speaker and the voice of the transcriber work together to create the narrator of the text. Although the editor or transcriber might have had the final word in arranging and ordering the final narrative, the oral storytelling of the narrator is a vital component to the eventual written product. Consequently, the term creole testimony feels Page 4 of 10

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Caribbean Slave Narratives particularly apt for describing the literary collaborations necessary for producing the tex­ tual voice in these slave narratives. Returning to Ephraim Peabody’s essay on “The Narra­ tives of the Fugitive,” he, too, alludes to the inherent polyvocality of the genre when he highlights one of distinctions of the slave narrative genre as the fact that they “disclos[e] under a new light the mixed elements of American civilization.” Certainly these Caribbean narratives are distinct from those narratives, which can be historically veri­ fied. And while the narratives may make it difficult to speak with historical certainty (p. 366) about the specifics of the experiences described in the narratives, they nonethe­ less can be said to offer representations or glimpses at what life was like for the enslaved in the Caribbean. Moreover, the notion of creole testimony communicates the necessarily syncretic formal structures of the Caribbean texts. It also serves to anchor these texts in one of the defin­ ing characteristics of the Caribbean region—the cultural hyper-syncretism commonly re­ ferred to as “creolization.” Among other things, the term creole speaks to the fact that these narratives exhibit elements from both oral and written traditions. Grounded in the combinatory social culture of the Caribbean, the term signifies that this is a “different” kind of testimony (to borrow terminology from Caribbean reggae music), a “version” or “dub” in the same way that Creole names the “different” language that developed in the contact zone of the Caribbean. Numerous scholars have linked the structures and textual format of West Indian or Caribbean texts to the supersyncretic culture that formed them. As Benitez-Rojo explains, “Caribbean literature cannot free itself of the multi-ethnic soci­ ety upon which it floats, and it tells us of its fragmentation and instability” (27). For ex­ ample, many of the Caribbean narratives exhibit comparatively ephemeral and fragmen­ tary forms. The earliest narratives are transcribed speeches: the 1709 “Speech Made by a Black at Guardaloupe [sic],” the 1736 “Speech of Moses Bon Sàam” and the proslavery response to Bon Sàam, “The Speech of John Talbot Campo-bell” (1736) (Krise 1999). Al­ though the speaker of each provides some details of his life experience, the speeches also emphasize a collective experience. And although Campo-bell’s speech was intended to dissuade Jamaican Maroon slaves from rising against the British and offers support to proslavery advocates, like the other speeches it too details the various abuses of the slave system that has affected them collectively as well as individually. Thus the hybridity of form in these narratives is compounded by a hybridity of content. One of the most intriguing examples of the inherent narrative hybridity and fragmentari­ ness associated with Caribbean slave narratives is the slave narrative of Joanna, the Suri­ namese slave wife of the eighteenth-century Anglo-Dutch mercenary, John Gabriel Sted­ man. Joanna was a mulatto female slave who Stedman took as his “wife” while he was sta­ tioned in Suriname. Stedman described and detailed his five-year relationship with Joan­ na throughout his narrative, which also provided details of his military engagements, as well as information about eighteenth-century Dutch Caribbean society. His decision to employ the rhetoric of sentiment and literary romance in the passages about Joanna, and its similarity to the (in)famous story of “Inkle and Yarico,” made Joanna’s narrative espe­ cially popular with novel-reading British audiences. The public was so enamoured with Joanna’s narrative that in 1824 an anonymous author would see fit to sift through Page 5 of 10

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Caribbean Slave Narratives Stedman’s narrative, collect and collate all the references to Joanna, and bind them to­ gether and create a new text, entitled Joanna’s Narrative, A West Indian Tale. Fourteen years later, the American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child would reprint the narrative and change its title in order to assert its value to abolitionist discourse as a slave narrative, The Narrative of Joanna, an Emancipated Slave of Suriname, which provided “vivid exhi­ bition of the pernicious affects of slavery” (Child 1838, 67). The fragmentary and elusive nature of most Caribbean slave narratives is also il­ luminated in the examples of the 1799 narratives of Ashy and Sibell and in the circa 1820 narrative of Florence Hall (Handler 1998 and The Historical Society of Philadelphia). All three narratives are handwritten documents and were found on loose pieces of paper in the archives of the Bodleian library and the Historical Society of Philadelphia, respective­ ly. Ashy and Sibell’s narratives are based on interviews conducted in 1799 by a white Bar­ badian named John Ford. The reason and context for the interviews is elusive; all that re­ mains are the interviews themselves, which record in dialect rather than standard Eng­ lish the life experiences of two Fantee (an area near modern Ghana) slaves, then living in Barbados. Though the narratives are not extensive—each is about one to two pages in length—they nonetheless provide vivid pictures of their narrators’ lives of freedom in (p. 367)

Africa. Florence Hall’s narrative is even more complicated, as it is undated and unsigned. Moreover, included in the same archival box are a variety of proslavery documents, which again serve to complicate questions about the initial reason and context for the docu­ ments’ creation. However, like the other narratives, and in a more sustained fashion, since her narrative runs to four pages, Hall’s narrative also offers a vivid picture of life in Africa, as well as a brief glimpse of the experience of the slave pens on the African Coast, the experience of the Middle Passage, and arrival in Jamaica. Another of the more interesting distinctions between Caribbean and U.S. narratives is that there are many more representations of life in Africa in the Caribbean slave narra­ tives than in narratives by their U.S. counterparts. The Caribbean narratives confirm the more explicit, rather than submerged, existence of certain African cultural traditions within Caribbean slave cultures. The prevalence of “Africa” within Caribbean slave narra­ tives is tied to the historical fact of larger numbers of African-born slaves in the Caribbean than in the U.S (see Beckles and Shepherd 2000 or Engerman 1976). Many of the earliest Caribbean narratives such as those by Moses Bon Sàam, Ashy, Sibell, and Flo­ rence Hall begin by documenting elements of their life experiences in Africa. Perhaps not surprising, these narratives all represent life in Africa as more desirable than that in the Caribbean. Ashy begins her narrative exclaiming, “Ah! Massah dis country here dat you call Barbadus–um no good-um no good Massah.” She then goes on to describe the much more proactive and activist spirituality she was familiar with in Africa, where after mak­ ing a sacrifice, god would descend to earth to do what he was bid, unlike the Christian god, who seemed to operate on a more abstract level. Another intriguing representation of prior life in Africa occurs in “The History of Abon Be­ cr Sadiki (Abu Bakr al-Sadiqa),” which appears in Richard Robert Madden’s travel narra­ tive, A Twelvemonths Residence in the West Indies (1835). Madden, a British Magistrate Page 6 of 10

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Caribbean Slave Narratives working in Jamaica, happened to see Abu Bakr al-Sadiqa, known in Jamaica as Edward Donlan, writing in Arabic while at a market. Madden, who had traveled extensively in the Middle East, recognized the script and began to question Donlan. Madden then asked alSadiqa to write his story so he could share it with others. What is fascinating about alSadiqa’s narrative is that although he had been enslaved in Jamaica for over 30 years, the narrative he chose to relate focused exclusively on his life in Africa. He provided exhaus­ tive detail about where he was born, the members of his family, his (p. 368) father’s wealth, and his own education as a Koranic scholar. After he was kidnapped in Africa, the narrative details his various journeys across the continent and his movements with the slave coffle to avoid detection by supporters of al-Sadiqa’s family, as well as inter-tribal conflicts. Little information about his enslavement in Jamaica, other than regret at being unable to practice his religion openly, appears in the narrative. After he records his narra­ tive, al-Sadiqa is manumitted by his master, and, remarkably, he eventually returns to Africa. Rhetorically speaking, the presence of “living memories” of Africa seems to have provided Caribbean slave narrators with an alternative aesthetic discursive vocabulary. In other words, within many of the Caribbean narratives, “freedom” is figured not as an ab­ stract entity of the future but of recent experience. For many Caribbean slave narrators, freedom was not something to be gained but something to be recovered. On the whole, these seemingly simple texts not only provide important resources for un­ derstanding the complexities of the experiences of slavery, but they also communicate the inherent diversity of the slave narrative genre and illuminate its historical and continuing effects across the Atlantic African Diaspora. Foregrounding a Caribbean slave narrative tradition, albeit a historically reflexive one, reveals that “Caribbean literary culture has a history and roots that go back centuries and which informs and illuminates contemporary Caribbean literary culture” (Krise, 2006, 2). Indeed, the same celebration of multiplicity and poetics of fragmentation that is so central to contemporary Caribbean cultural pro­ duction is also manifest in many of the historical documents of the lives of the enslaved. These slave narratives of the Caribbean provide key testimony, no matter how tenuous, and give textual “voice” to the complexities of slave cultures within early Caribbean colo­ nial histories.

References al-Sadika, Abu-Bakr/Edward Donlan. “The History of Abon Becr Sadiki” in R. R. Madden A Twelvemonths Residence in the West Indies. (1835 London). Westport, CT: Negro Univer­ sities Press, 1977. “Ashy[’s Narrative]” In Handler, Jerome. “Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barba­ dos.” Slavery and Abolition. 19.1 (1998): 133–34. Anonymous. Joanna, or The Female Slave, a West Indian Tale. (From Stedman’s Narrative of an Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam 1796.) Published for L. Relfe, S. & R. Bentley. London, 1824.

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Caribbean Slave Narratives Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Beckles, Hilary McD, and Verene Shepherd, eds. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Weiner, 2000. Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Condi­ tion. Trans. James E. Maraniss. 2 ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Burnard, Trevor. Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Durham, NC: Duke, 2003. (p. 369) Cooper, Helen. “‘Tracing the Route to England’: Nineteenth-Century Caribbean Interven­ tions into English Debates on Race and Slavery.” InThe Victorians and Race. Ed. Shearer West. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996: 194–212. Cuthbert, Salome. “Memoir of the Life of the Negro-Assistant Salome Cuthbert, a mem­ ber if the congregation at Grace Hill (compiled in part from her own narrative)” in Period­ ical Accounts relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren. Printed for the Brethren Society. 1831: 103–06. Engerman, Stanley. “Some Economic and Demographic Comparisons of Slavery in the United States and the British West Indies.” Economic History Review 29. 2 (1976): 258– 275. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life in the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Har­ vard University Press, 1999. Handler, Jerome. “Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barbados” Slavery and Abolition. 19.1. (1998): 129–140. Krise, Thomas W., ed. Caribbeana: An Anthology of British Literature of the West Indies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ——. “Glimpses of Oral Cultures in Early Caribbean Literature.” La Torre: Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. 11. 41–42 (2006): 519–528. Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. “The Memoir of Florence Hall.” Collection 1582: Powel Family papers. (1808–1820 ca.). The Historical Society of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA. Montejo, Esteban. The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. 1963. Trans. Jocasta Innes. Ed. Miguel Barnet. New York: Random House, 1968. “The Narrative of Archibald Monteith, a Jamaican.” Ed. Angelo Costanzo. Callaloo, 13. 1 (Winter, 1990): 115–130. Page 8 of 10

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Caribbean Slave Narratives Narrative of Joanna: An Emancipated Slave from Surinam. Ed. Lydia Maria Child. (From Stedman’s Narrative of an Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam 1796.) Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Peabody, Ephraim. “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves” Christian Examiner, XLVII July 1849. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself.1831. (Thomas Pringle ed.). Ed. Moira Ferguson. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Sekora, John. “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative.” Callaloo (1987): 482–515. Sharpe, Jenny. “‘Something Akin to Freedom’: The Case of Mary Prince.” Differences: A Journal of Cultural Studies. 8.1 (1996): 31–55. “Sibell[‘s Narrative].” In Handler, Jerome. “Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barba­ dos.” Slavery and Abolition. 19.1 (1998): 132–33. “A Speech by a Black of Guardaloupe [sic].” In Caribbeana. Ed. Thomas Krise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 93–100. “The Speech of Moses Bon Sàam.” In Caribbeana. Ed. Thomas Krise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 101–107. “The Speech of Mr. John Talbot Campo-bell.” In Caribbeana. Ed. Thomas Krise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 108–140. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Cul­ ture. Ed. G. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271– 315. (p. 370) Warner, Ashton. Negro Slavery Described by a Negro: Being the Narrative of Ashton Warner, A Native of St. Vincent. Ed. S. (Susannah) Strickland. London: Samuel Mauder, Newgate Street, 1831. Warner-Lewis. Maureen. Archibald Monteath: Igbo, Jamaican, Moravian. Kingston, Ja­ maica: University of West Indies Press, 2007. Williams, James. A Narrative of the Events since the First of August, 1834 by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica. (London: J. Rider, 1837). Ed. Diana Paton. Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Nicole N. Aljoe

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Caribbean Slave Narratives Nicole N. Aljoe is a member of the Department of English at Northeastern University. Her research andteaching centers on 18th and 19th century Black Atlantic writing, with a particular focus on Caribbean texts. She is the author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor of Jour­ neys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVa, forthcoming). Her current project focuses on contemporary Caribbean multi-disciplinary engagements with the neo-slave genre.

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature

Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature   Helen Thomas The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.013

Abstract and Keywords This essay explores the literary and discursive terrain within which the slave narratives functioned—the transatlantic world from which they emerged and the world that they ad­ dressed—and argues for the need to understand how they participated in contemporary readership, the eighteenth century book trade, and political debate. It examines the rela­ tionship between the slave narratives and British and American law, Romanticism, and di­ verse transatlantic attitudes toward colonial power, racial prejudice, and miscegenation. It also highlights the ways in which the authors of these narratives prioritized England as a land of liberty, freed from racial prejudice, yet suffered a very different experience on their arrival upon British soil. Consequently, this essay argues that while slave narratives on both sides of the Atlantic critiqued and transformed attitudes toward rights, liberties, and models of colonial power, they strategically participated in the emergence of a genre focused upon the ambiguous and fluid nature of black subjectivity, as slave, fugitive, racial other, and freed subject. Keywords: slave narratives, slavery, transatlantic, the “African” subject, law, romanticism, subjectivity, race, mis­ cegenation, otherness, Amelioration Act, Slave Trade Act, Slave Codes, Fugitive Slave Acts, 13th Amendment

THE concept of transatlantic cultural and literary dynamics is both compelling and com­ plex. It suggests the possibilities of diasporan frameworks, extended “imaginary commu­ nities” and departures often instigated by conflict or loss (Gilroy 1993, Anderson 1991). It suggests severance from traditional/native cultures and ideologies, as well as opportuni­ ties for new connections in the complex interplay of cultural and political crossings and mutable transatlantic exchanges and identities (Carretta 2003, 250). For those who left Europe for the Americas, the migration was usually one of optimistic social and financial improvement. For those who crossed the Atlantic from Africa, the experience was one of dispossession, alienation, and enslavement. For those newly enslaved Africans who crossed first from Africa to the Americas and then “back” over to Europe, concepts of identity, freedom, and servitude were further complicated, challenged, and compromised. It is in the slave narratives, published in Europe and America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that we see these conflicts, critiques, and transformations Page 1 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature most vividly and most forcefully. To follow that history, it is important to explore the liter­ ary and discursive terrain within which the slave narratives functioned. While debates over slavery permeated Britain and the Americas at this time, the publica­ tion of slave narratives on both sides of the Atlantic reflected and affected the changing attitudes toward rights, liberties, racial equality, and models of colonial power. This emer­ gent genre participated in the formation of “black literary identity” that was in some re­ spects limited by, but in others able to exceed, the restrictions and cultural expectations of the period. Such narratives illustrate the ways in which debates over slavery, power, authority, and freedom were fiercely contested across the Atlantic, and (p. 372) highlight the exchanges and transformations that resulted from these transatlantic “crossings.” The “fluid” status of their authors as displaced persons was defined by the ambiguous and fluctuating nature of black subjectivity, as either—or both—slave, fugitive, racial oth­ er, or freed subject. This fluidity of subjectivity is reflected in the “hybrid” nature of the slave narratives themselves—as part conversion narrative, criminal confession, sea ad­ venture, picaresque novel, captivity narrative, and spiritual autobiography (Gould 2007, 13). As Valerie Smith has argued, these slave narratives not only demonstrate the central­ ity “of slavery to our individual, racial, gender, cultural and national identities” but also highlight the “elusive nature of freedom” (Smith 2007, 168). Like J. M. W. Turner’s paint­ ing of 1840, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead, Dying, Typhoon Coming On), much of the writing by slaves exposes the violence, trauma, and tragedy of these re­ peated transatlantic crossings. These narratives articulate the impact of migration and transportation upon notions of subjectivity as well as interrupted or fragmented concepts of belonging. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo’s early narrative of 1734, for example, described his capture from Gambia, his transportation as a slave to Maryland, his travels to England, and his ultimate return, with the help of the British Court, to Africa (Curtin 1967, 17). Likewise, Dimmock Charlton’s much later narrative of 1859 described the author as a “British Subject” who had been captured from Guinea, transported on an American slave ship that was captured by the British and then recaptured by the USS Hornet during the War of 1812, and his subjection to repeated exchanges between national powers (as a prisoner of war) and slave masters before he made his way to England, where he became a public charge (Grant 2001). As debates over power, colonial government and systems of authority, freedom and equal­ ity crisscrossed the Atlantic, legal attitudes toward slavery differed significantly in Ameri­ ca and England during this period. Challenges to slavery were not only presented within the slave narratives but also within Romantic literature, with both genres centering around concepts of liberty, freedom, and subjectivity. In English law and the common law of the British colonies up until 1807, no legislation directly legalizing slavery was passed, although several acts of Parliament existed to regulate the shipping and transportation of slaves in British vessels from Africa, as well as the height between decks on British slave ships. In the British colonies, a number of related statutes were passed, including the Amelioration Act of 1798. This Act, passed on the Leeward Islands and extending to slaves on the British Caribbean colonies, regulated ownership of slaves and included pro­ visions for financial penalties for inflicting excessive cruelty upon slaves. As evidence of Page 2 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature these “new rights” for “British” slaves, in May 1811, Arthur William Hodge, a British West Indian slave-owner and member of the Council and Legislative Assembly, was hanged for the murder of one of his negro slaves. During the trial, Hodge was also ac­ cused of causing the deaths of three other male slaves by whipping and of two female slaves who had been killed by having had boiling water poured down their throats. Lord Mansfield’s decision in the Somerset Case of 1772 had placed the subject of slavery and the rights of blacks in Britain and its colonies firmly into the public and parliamen­ tary sphere. However, although the Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the slave (p. 373) trade, prohibiting British merchants from exporting people from Africa, it did not make slavery illegal or alter the status of existing slaves. British enslaved Africans were not for­ mally freed until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which declared that all slaves in the British colonies were to be “absolutely and forever manumitted” and granting £20 million from public funds to slave owners as compensation. In the American colonies, positive law was generally required to make slavery lawful in the various states. The colonization of Virginia by the English in 1607 had brought slav­ ery to America, although no laws enforcing slavery in Virginia existed at the time. Howev­ er, half a century later, the Slave Codes of Virginia (1662) determined that “all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother” while the Slave Code of Virginia 1682 enacted that “all servants…imported into this country, whether Negroes, Moors, mulattoes or Indians…are hereby adjudged, deemed and taked to be slaves to all intents and purposes.” Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641; followed by Connecticut (1650), Maryland (1663), New York and New Jersey (1664). The legal separation of the American colonies from the Kingdom of Great Britain follow­ ing the American Revolution of 1775–1783 and the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 made slavery a contentious transatlantic issue. However, it was Britain’s ban on the transatlantic slave trade and America’s subsequent Fugitive Slave Acts that brought transatlantic relations between England and America to a crux. Both in practice and in law, these two contending powers had declared their conflicting attitudes to both slavery and toward blacks, and this ideological chasm was clearly articulated within many of the slave narratives published in Britain as well as the writings of British and American Ro­ mantics. William Blake’s early prophetic book, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) reflected this transatlantic conundrum over rights and liberties, heralding America as a vision of the future, now freed from British tyranny, yet still tyrannical in its treatment of slaves: Enslav’d, the Daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamentation Upon their mountains; in their valleys, sighs toward America…. Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north and south: Stamp’d with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun; They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge; Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature (Blake 1988, 46). Recalling his time in Britain, the American ex-slave Frederick Douglass referred to Eng­ land as a place where blacks could “inhale a pure atmosphere, and lift up the voice against oppression,” and Samuel Ringgold Ward, author of Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (London, 1853), declared that in England he was made to feel “an equal brother man” (Ward, 1855). Likewise, the fugitive slave William G. Allen emphasized the “light of English liberty” and described England as a place entirely free from “prejudice against color”: “Here the colored man feels himself among friends, and not among enemies….Color claims no precedence over character, here; and, consequently, in (p. 374) parties given by the ‘first people’ in the kingdom, may be seen persons of all colors mov­ ing together on terms of perfect social equality” (Allen 1853, 116). In his narrative The American Prejudice Against Color. An Authentic Narrative, published in London in 1853, Allen declared not only his interracial status—“I am a quadroon, that is, I am of onefourth African blood, and three-fourths Anglo-Saxon”—but also exposed the threats he had received in America following his engagement and marriage to a white woman, Mary King: “Previous to the death which I was to suffer in the spiked barrel, I was to undergo various torturings and mutilations of person, aside from the tarring and feathering—some of these mutilations too shocking to be named in the pages of this book” (Allen 1853, 2). Allen’s transatlantic journey and his subsequent publication also revealed the prejudice of white abolitionists against mixed-race relationships, as did Equiano in his published let­ ters. Whereas Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery continued in America un­ til it was finally outlawed by the 13th Amendment in 1865. Moreover, although Britain discouraged interracial relations on its shores, there were no laws preventing such rela­ tions, whereas racial segregation continued as a legally endorsed condition in America until after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. When the fugitive slave, William Wells Brown, arrived in England and published his Three Years in Europe (London, 1852), he highlighted the potential interest of his narrative not only to the “reading public of Great Britain” but also to “American readers.” During his visit, Brown demonstrated his interest in the Romantic poets by visiting Tintern Abbey (the subject of Wordsworth’s poem), Lord Byron’s residence, Wordsworth’s grave, and Coleridge’s son’s grave. Brown highlighted the “marked difference between the English and the Americans” in terms of attitudes toward “persons of [his] complexion”: In America I had been bought and sold as a slave in the Southern States. In the socalled Free States, I had been treated as one born to occupy an inferior position,— in steamers, compelled to take my fare on the deck; in hotels, to take my meals in the kitchen; in coaches, to ride on the outside; in railways, to ride in the “negrocar”; and in churches, to sit in the “negro-pew.” But no sooner was I on British soil, than I was recognized as a man, and an equal. The very dogs in the streets appeared conscious of my manhood (Brown 1852, 8).

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature According to Brown, this recognition of his manhood, this cultural and socio-political change in attitude toward him, was merely the effect of crossing the Atlantic: “Such is the difference, and such is the change that is brought about by a trip of nine days in an At­ lantic steamer” (Brown 1852, 8). Yet as William Andrews and others have noted, the myth of England as a place free of racism was also challenged by black visitors from America (Andrews 1988, 191). Al­ though James Watkins arrived in England with joy “unbounded” with the thought, “NOW I AM FREE!,” he soon discovered that he was still a person non grata. Similarly, Ward re­ counted his experience of English racism when he was prevented from eating (p. 375) with white passengers on board the English steamer Europe, when he sailed to Britain in 1853. According to Ward, only when blacks had achieved sufficient economic power would they acquire “some value as customers” (Ward 1855, 231–233). In July 1851, Brown sent a letter to Frederick Douglass advising that fugitive slaves ought not to flee to England unless they wished to become beggars (Brown 1855, 118). Brown’s dissatisfac­ tion with England was typical of many who reached its shores. As black fugitives from America realized that England was not free from prejudice, they fled once more, in pur­ suit of a form of fulfillment and equality that, according to Ward, lay beyond the bound­ aries of western democracy and Christianity: “What the Negro needs is, what belongs to him—what has been ruthlessly torn from him—and what is, by consent of a despotic democracy and a Christless religion, witholden from him, guiltily, perseveringly” (Ward 1855, 87). Such contentions over the integrity of the guiding philosophical and theological institu­ tions of the United States and Great Britain contributed to shifts in literary history as well as political and social history. The transatlantic discourse over concepts of rights, liberty, and equality—together with the increasing presence of blacks in Britain and the Americas —significantly influenced literary genres on both sides of the Atlantic. Consequently, fur­ ther consideration must be given to the ways in which British and American Romanticism responded to slavery and to emerging concepts of the (black) individual subject (Thomas 2000). Traditionally, British Romanticism has been associated with the literature and art produced in England in response to the politics and discourse of liberty with which the eighteenth century had begun (heralded by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and the po­ etical works of John Milton) and the political and philosophical ideals of the French Revo­ lution of 1789. However, Romanticism’s links with slavery, abolitionist discourse, and the slave narratives has remained marginalized, despite the centrality of the individual sub­ ject to concepts of freedom and servitude. As Dwight McBride has pointed out, literary Romanticism in England (roughly 1789 to 1832) coincided “with the rise of British aboli­ tionism…and the fierce parliamentary debates over the cessation of England’s participa­ tion in the international slave trade, which ended in the passage of the Abolition Bill in 1807 and…the Emancipation Bill in 1833” (McBride 2002, 18). Indeed, eighteenth centu­ ry abolitionism was championed by many of England’s respected Romantic writers—in­ cluding Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Blake, Anne Yearsley, Hannah

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature More—and their literary precursors, such as William Cowper, Thomas Chatterton, and John Newton. The publication of British and American Romanticism, as well as the narratives by the slaves themselves, owed much to the spectacular and unprecedented expansion in transatlantic printing and dissemination of literary texts during the eighteenth century. Named “the long Revolution” by Raymond Williams, this process significantly trans­ formed the social basis of literature (Williams 2001). Whereas in England during the six­ teenth and seventeenth centuries literary and cultural production had been controlled by the Court and the Church (there were only 20 printing presses in England and newspa­ pers and periodical journals did not exist), the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that printers were able to set up businesses for the first time in provincial towns. (p. 376) As a result, the number of newspapers, periodicals, and magazines rose dramatically, as did their importance. By 1724, 75 printing houses were in operation just in London, and by 1757, this figure had increased to well over 150. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were over 600 presses employing more than 3000 journalists. In 1776, Price’s radical Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty sold 60,000 copies, and Paine’s revolutionary Rights of Man sold 50,000 in the first few weeks of its publica­ tion, with total purchases reaching an estimated 1.5 million (Williams 2001, 184). Paine had earlier compiled an attack on American slavery in his essay, “African Slavery in Amer­ ica,” written in 1774 and published March 8, 1775 in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. In this essay, Paine appealed to the forces of “justice and humanity”: “Should not every society bear testimony against it, and account obstinate persisters in it bad men, enemies to their country, and exclude them from fellowship; as they often do for much lesser faults?” (Paine 1775). Soon after the publication of this essay, the first antislavery society in America was formed in Philadelphia on April 14, 1775, with Paine as its founding member. A year later, in the Crisis, December 23, 1776, Paine described America’s relationship with Britain as not dissimilar to that between slave and master, and signaled the need for “conflict” against such “tyranny”: “Tyranny, like hell, is not eas­ ily conquered; yet we have this consolation with this, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph…Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but to ‘bind us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER’ and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth” (Paine 1776). Following his expulsion from America, Paine returned to London in 1787 and became a friend of the Romantic poet William Blake and the political philoso­ pher and novelist William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft). One of the most influential booksellers in London at the time was Joseph Johnson, whose publishing activities (approximately 50 imprints per year over a period of 48 years) rein­ force the interconnections between Romanticism, abolitionist literature and the slave nar­ ratives. Known as the “father of the book trade,” Johnson published William Cowper’s Po­ ems (1782) and The Task (1784), John Newton’s Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade (1788), Anna Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791), Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), Captain John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Page 6 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790/1796) which was also illustrated by William Blake, Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Soli­ tude’ (1798), and commissioned over 100 engravings from Blake. Johnson’s publication of Joseph Priestley’s support for American colonial independence, Observations on the Na­ ture of Civil Liberty (1776) sold over 60,000 copies in a year. In 1777, Johnson published Laws Respecting Women, a text that advised women of their “natural rights” and their le­ gal rights as explained “by the Practice of the Courts of Law and Equity,” and his friend­ ship with Mary Wollstonecraft resulted in the publication of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Mary: A Fiction (1788), and hundreds of articles for his periodical, the Analytical Review, which included a review of Equiano’s slave narrative An Interesting Narrative, published in London in 1789. Although Equiano had chosen to protect his copyright and to publish his own slave (p. 377) narrative by subscription (whereby buyers committed to purchase before publication), he too distributed his text through Johnson’s bookshop in London. Thus Johnson’s publication of slave narratives, as well as abolitionist and Romantic texts, signals not only the bookseller’s interest in abolitionist and Romantic literary works but also the interconnections made by the readers and writers of these texts and their shared philosophical, political and literary influences. Further to Debbie Lee and Dwight McBride’s claims that “the African presence shaped the British Romantic imagination” and reinforced ties between racialized discourse and Romanticism, it is also apparent that the slave narratives participated in and extended “Romantic concerns” such as the configuration of an autonomous self, the nature of selfconsciousness, the value of political and social revolution, and the role of the artist as po­ litical leader or religious savior (Mellor 1995, 31). The slave narratives demonstrated the “rational capacities” of their authors, as well as their creative and protean natures, priori­ tizing concepts of equality and political and social revolutionary change. They highlighted abuses of power, most especially racial, cultural, and patriarchal abuses, and endeavored to “rouse the passions” in order to “amend the heart” (Wollstonecraft 1798, 4). Moreover, the writings by slaves often employed all three of the narrative strategies defined by An­ na Barbauld in her Preface to Samuel Johnson’s Correspondences (1804)—the omniscient narrator, the first-person narration, and the epistolatary correspondence (Mellor 1995, 40–41). Such slave authors participated, along with women writers of the time, in a revolutionary reordering of artistic forms, from the epic poem to the elevation of the moral and realist novel beyond that of the romance. In so doing, the slave narratives interacted with con­ cepts of Romanticism, yet also participated in the development of the novel in its function to “promote the growth of morality” as defined by Clara Reeve, in The Progress of Ro­ mance (1785) and Anna Barbauld in The British Novelists (1810): “The invention of a sto­ ry, the choice of proper incidents, the ordinance of the plan, occasional beauties of de­ scription…the successive emotions of love, pity, joy, anguish, transport, or indignation, to­ gether with the grave impressive moral resulting from the whole, imply talents of the highest order, and ought to be appreciated accordingly” (Barbauld 1810, 2–3). Many of the Romantics’ literary predecessors had also expressed abolitionist or anti-slavery senti­ ments. Thomas Chatterton expressed his disgust of slavery in his ‘African Page 7 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature Eclogues’ (1770), poems that condemned the inhumanity of English slavers (the “pallid shadows” of the “children of the Wave”) and stressed the innocence of Africans. William Cowper’s poetical work not only provided the Romantics with the conversational style and “harmony of blank verse” that influenced Coleridge’s conversation poems and Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and The Prelude, but also provided a powerful model of antislavery polemic (Griggs 1956–71, 279). His poem ‘Charity’ (1782) described trade across the Atlantic as predominantly “genial intercourse” across “the golden girdle of the globe” but condemned the slave trade as shameful and demeaning: “Canst thou, and honour’d with a Christian name,/Buy what is woman-born, and feel no shame?” His poem, The Task, one of the most popular poems of the eighteenth (p. 378) century, also contained clear criticisms of the slave-trade and postulated England as a place of freedom for the en­ slaved: I would not have a slave to till my ground, To carry me, to fan me while I sleep, And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth That sinews bought and sold should ever earn’d… Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free; They touch our country, and their shackles fall

(Cowper 1785, 29, 40) Admired by Wordsworth and Coleridge, the poetical works of Erasmus Darwin, such as The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Botanic Garden (1791), also contained central criticisms of British slavery: Here, Oh Britannia! potent Queen of isles, On whom fair Art, and meek Religion smiles, Now Afric’s coasts they craftier sons invade, And Theft and Murder take the garb of Trade! —The Slave, in chains, on supplicating knee, Spreads his wide arms, and lifts his eyes to Thee; With hunger pale, with wounds and toil oppress’d, “Are we not Brethren?” sorry choaks the rest; —Air! bear to heaven upon thy azure flood Their innocent cries!—Earth! cover not their blood!

(Darwin 1791, 414–430) John Newton’s Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade (1788) defined his previous silence about the slave trade as a “crime” and his literary testimony as a “public confession” (Newton 1788). As the captain of three English slave-trading ships, Newton, who became a friend of Cowper and Wilberforce, had made several voyages across the At­ lantic in the Duke of Argyle (1750) and in the African (1752–1754). Newton’s work de­ scribed the horrific conditions on the slave ships as they crossed the Middle Passage, as well as his own enslavement to African duchess Princess Peye. Similarly, Edmund Burke, whose analysis of the sublime and responses to the French Revolution inspired much Ro­ Page 8 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature mantic writing, published his “Sketch of a Negro Code” (1780), in which he proposed an orderly plan for abolition and emancipation, including a prohibition of separating slaves from their spouse and the possibility of a slave purchasing “the freedom of himself, or his wife or children, or any of them separately.” Burke had also opposed the seating of slave­ holders at Westminster. Coleridge and Wordsworth’s links with slavery and abolitionism appear to have been cat­ alyzed by their friendship with Thomas Clarkson and Josiah Wedgwood. Clarkson, togeth­ er with Granville Sharp, had founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and spent the following two years gathering evidence against the slave trade, in (p. 379) order to bring the abolitionist campaign to Parliament and to prompt William Wilberforce into tabling a Bill to Abolish the Slave Trade. In 1792, Coleridge composed his “Ode on the Slave Trade” during his first year at Cambridge. In 1794, Clarkson moved to the Lake District because of ill health and became a good friend of Wordsworth. Four years later Wordsworth published The Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge, a collection of po­ ems heralded as marking the beginning of the English Romantic movement, with its insis­ tence upon the vernacular and uneducated country peoples as fitting subjects of poetry. Coleridge also gave a lecture On the Slave Trade in Bristol on June 16, 1795. An article based upon this lecture was published in his political magazine The Watchman on March 25, 1796 in which the poet criticized the “evils arising from the formation of imaginary Wants” and the enormities of the “inhuman Traffic” which “the gloomy Imagination of Dante would scarcely have dared to attribute to the Inhabitants of Hell” (Coleridge 2004, 346). Coleridge declared that the “guilt of [the Slave-trade] rest[ed] on the consumers” and reminded his audience of the Christian axiom of doing “unto others as ye would that others do unto you”: “Would you choose to be sold? To have the hot iron hiss upon your breasts, after having been crammed into the hold of a Ship with so many fellow-victims, that the heat and stench, arising from your diseased bodies, should rot the very planks” (Coleridge 2004, 347). “Sensibility,” argued Coleridge, was not the equivalent of “Benevolence.” For him, the fine lady who weeps “over the refined sorrows of [the novels of] Werter or of Clementina” as she “sips a beverage sweetened with human blood,” high­ lighted the inadequacies of the sensibility genre: “By making us tremblingly alive to tri­ fling misfortunes” it prevented benevolence and instead “induced effeminate and coward­ ly selfishness” (Coleridge 2004, 347). For Coleridge, action—by which he intended parlia­ mentary and legislative change—and self-denial were the only true forms of benevolence. Although Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805) suggested the poet’s distance from those who par­ ticipated in the “contention which had been raised up/Against the traffickers in Negro blood,” his ode “To Thomas Clarkson On the Final Passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (1807) referred to Clarkson as a “firm friend of human kind,” and his po­ em to the ex-slave and leader of the Haitian Revolution “To Toussaint L’Overture” pub­ lished in 1803, celebrated the liberationist spirit that continued after the black revolutionary’s death: Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Page 9 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind

(Wordsworth 1805, Book 10). After 1807, abolitionist writers such as Leigh Hunt increasingly directed their attention toward ending slavery altogether, at home and abroad, delivering speeches, publishing (p. 380) slave narratives, and writing poetry and prose exposing the brutality and inhu­ manity of slavery. Hunt, a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, and described by Nicolas Roe as one of the “forgotten giants of English Romanticism,” published a polit­ ical weekly journal, the Examiner, which called for social reform and the abolition of slav­ ery. His poem, “The Negro Boy” was published in Juvenilia; or A Collection of Poems (London, 1801) and depicted the plight of the wandering “negro” child in his poverty, des­ peration, and eventual release through death. Female writers of the Romantic period also contributed to the condemnation of slavery. In 1788, Helen Maria Williams’ A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the SlaveTrade (1788) applauded Parliament’s regulation of the size of slavery ships making the transatlantic crossing: Britain, the noble blessed decree That soothes despair, is framed by thee!… Oh, first of Europe’s polished lands To ease the captive’s iron bands; Long as thy glorious annals shine, This proud distinction shall be thine!

(Keen, 2004, 316) In 1796, Johnson’s Analytical Review declared that “the muses cannot be more worthily employed, than in pleading the cause of humanity; and humanity never demanded an ad­ vocate more importunately, than in the person of the Afric slave” (Keen 2004, 3156). The editors suggested that it was up to the “powers of poesy” to achieve this “good cause.” Hannah More’s poem, Slavery (1788), published to coincide with the first Parliamentary debate on the slave trade, quoted as its epigraph lines from James Thompson’s poem, Lib­ erty (1735–1736): “O great design!/Ye sons of Mercy! O complete your work;/Wrench from Oppression’s hand the iron rod,/And bid the cruel feel the pains they give.” More, a friend of Wilberforce and his fellow Evangelicals in the Clapham sect, argued that “LIBERTY,” or Heaven’s “bright intellectual sun” should be extended to all parts of the globe: Was it decreed, fair Freedom! At thy birth, That thou shoud’st ne’er irradiate all the earth? While Britain basks in thy full blaze of light, Why lies sad Afric in total night? Page 10 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature (More, 1788) Charlotte Smith’s volumes of poetry, including Elegiac Sonnets (1784) had a strong influ­ ence upon early Romanticism but it was in her poetical collection Beachy Head (1807) and her novel The Old Manor House (1793) that her critique of slavery was most visible. Smith, friend of the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, and wife of the son of a Barbados plantation owner, had her work reviewed (p. 381) by promi­ nent periodicals of the time including the Anti-Jacobin Review, the Analytical Review, the Critical Review, the Monthly Magazine and the Gentleman’s Magazine—all of which re­ viewed the work of most of the Romantic poets. Mary Wollstonecraft, a key eighteenth-century writer, philosopher, and feminist, reviewed Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative two months after its publication in 1789. A year later she produced A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), followed by her feminist philo­ sophical tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792) and her unfinished work, Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Women: (1798) published posthumously by Joseph Johnson and edited by her husband, William Godwin. In these texts, Wollstonecraft frequently described women in England as “slaves.” In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was republished in America by Peter Edes, whose paper, The Boston Gazette had instigated and financed the Boston Tea Party, Woll­ stonecraft argued that British women were being kept in a “perpetual state of childhood” as they were taught only to please and amuse. Such inequality, she suggested, threatened the heart of British democracy and the development of British society. By keeping them as “convenient slaves to men,” women became indolent wives and inconsistent mothers, while men became “degraded masters.” Wollstonecraft’s proposal for a “revolution in fe­ male manners” was based upon the rational capacity and equality of woman: “for the rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she [woman] be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue” (Wollstonecraft 1792, 1). In The Wrongs of Women: or, Maria (1798), the narrator declares: “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (Wollstonecraft 1798, 11). In the eyes of British law, women, like the slaves, were insignificant, voiceless, without history, yet even the judge at Maria’s trial condemns the habit of letting women “plead their feelings.” According to Maria, being born a woman equates to being “born to suffer”; becoming a wife means becoming subjected to a master’s will: “Marriage had bastilled me for life” (Wollstonecraft 1798, 133, 87). Although both British and American Romantic writers responded to changing ideas of lib­ erty, notions of the human subject, and transatlantic laws concerning property, rights, and slavery, these concepts were central to the work of the slave narrators in their efforts to transform the legal order in relation to the status of slaves and their descendants and to narrate the experience of the transatlantic, diasporan subject. As Maria Aristodemou has suggested, narratives are “not neutral” but also “suggest, create and legislate mean­ ings” (Aristodemou 2007, 3). The writings by slaves endeavored to persuade, influence, and hasten the process of change—by critiquing the law’s powers over subjects, lives, and ideas of property—and thereby challenging “juridico-political contracts” (Aristedemou Page 11 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature 2007, 14–25). Such writings—in the form of slave narratives, letters, and poetry—disrupt­ ed old concepts of black subjects and slaves and endeavored to create new transatlantic, transcultural identities, and in so doing, they exceeded their status and subjecthood as defined by transatlantic laws. Whereas transatlantic legal (and at times, literary) language tended to “abstract and de­ tach itself” from the everyday experience of the slaves, the slave narratives exposed (p. 382) the gaps and discontinuities within that law by presenting the intimate experi­ ences and powers of the black speaking subject—as performer, spokesperson, and legal agitator. While the writers of official documents endeavored to “disguise their status as linguistic artifact” and “maintain the illusion of omniscience,” the slave narratives ex­ posed the artificiality of those constructions. By contrast, they foreground the emotions, contradictions, and subjectivities previously bound by slave laws that had endeavored to control not only their “bodies,” as Foucault suggests, but also their children’s bodies and their time (Foucault 1994, 81). Resisting the slave laws of the (white) transatlantic fa­ thers and their codes of meaning, these narratives ushered the entrance of the slaves as subjects rather than objects, and presented their efforts to gain liberty and create new styles of writing, with their own laws.

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature In her letter to the Rev. Samson Occom, February 11, 1774, the slave-poet Phyllis Wheat­ ley commented upon the “invaders” of the land of Africa and the “vindications” of Africans’ “natural rights.” The letter attests to the spirit of freedom she believes inhabits the individual soul: “In every human breast God has implanted a principle, which…is im­ patient of oppression, and pants for deliverance; and by the leave of our modern Egyp­ tians I will assert, that the same principle lives in us” (Wheatley 1988, 176–177). Wheatley’s poems employed the heroic couplet often used by female Romantic writers and literary precursors (as opposed to blank verse), while her use of the elegiac form and frequent references to the sublime and the powers of the “imagination” concur with many of the tropes and styles employed by the Romantics. For Wheatley, the sublime was simul­ taneously political, aesthetic, and contemplative. In her poem “To a Gentleman on His Voyage to Great-Britain for the Recovery of his Health,” composed in 1767, Wheatley de­ scribes her poetic efforts to “paint the…vast Atlantic” together with its “stupendous… wonders” and “healing power” as she prays that it will transport her addressee (Joseph Rotch) to Britain’s shore where she hopes he will recover. Wheatley’s fascination with the Atlantic and the experience of those who crossed it is also made clear in her “Ode to Nep­ tune” which was dedicated to Mrs. Susanna Wright on her voyage to England in 1772, and in “Liberty and Peace,” Wheatley described the power of Britain’s naval forces which “swept th’Atlantic o’er” (Wheatley 1988, 76–77). Likewise, her recently rediscovered ode “Ocean,” written in Boston in 1773 but not contained within her published volume, pre­ sented a more extended contemplation of the powers of the Atlantic. In this poem, the ocean is both “a boundless whole” and “floating azure,” the site of battle and conflict be­ tween wind and the sea gods. But it is also a place of transaction and transportation, as described by the ship “from Boston’s port” called London, which “proudly scims the sur­ face of the deep” as it moves “dauntless” over the “rough surge”: Should you, my lord… Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung. I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatchd from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat…I [can] then but pray Others may never feel the tyrannic sway

(Wheatley 1988, 76). Wheatley’s own voyage back across the Atlantic in 1773 resulted in her freedom, as precipitated by her friends in England—“my Master, has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom” (Wheatley 1988, 170). Her journey to England had result­ ed in introductions to London’s elite and dignitaries, including Lord Dartmouth, Lady Cavendish, the poet Mrs. Palmer, Dr. Gibbons, and Granville Sharp. The year before Wheatley’s visit, Sharp had briefed the lawyers of the runaway slave, James Somerset, whose trial resulted in Lord Mansfield’s famous decision of 1772. Wheatley’s six-week stay in England also brought her success in finding a publisher for her volume of Poems (publishers in Boston had been unwilling to publish her work) with help from Selina Hast­ ings, the Countess of Huntingdon who also promoted the writings of other slaves such as Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano, and Samson Occom. However, Wheatley died in (p. 383)

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature poverty in America in December 1784, aged 31. She had written over 100 poems (many of them still lost) and had had three children, all of whom had died in their infancy, yet her “An Elegy on Leaving” written five months before her death, presented a note of stoicism and calm in relation to imminent departure: Farewell! Ye friendly bowr’s, ye streams adieu, I leave with sorrow each sequester’d seat… Those rural joys no more the day shall crown, No more my hand shall wake the warbling lyre. But come, sweet Hope… Bring calm Content to gild my gloomy seat, And cheer my bosom with her heaven’ly ray.

(Wheatley 1988, 156) Whereas Wheatley, once enslaved, made only one transatlantic crossing between America and England in her lifetime, the oceanic crossings described by the slave Olaudah Equiano, as he traveled repeatedly between England, the West Indies, Virginia, and Geor­ gia, reflected the increasing complexity of the black diaspora and of the slave’s identity. First published in London in 1789, Equiano’s slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, was published 16 years after Wheatley’s text and 17 years after Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative of the Most Remarkable Partic­ ulars (1772), and rapidly went through several editions, thereby fueling the growing antislavery movement in Britain. Among the subscribers to The Interesting Narrative were Thomas Clarkson, the Countess of Huntington (Wheatley’s patron), Josiah Wedgwood, Granville Sharp, and Richard Cosway. One of the founders of the Royal Academy in Eng­ land, the artist Cosway, was also the master of Ottobah Cugoano, who had published his own account of his life as a slave, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, two years earlier, in 1787, a text that went through three reprints in the same year of publication. Equiano had corresponded with Josiah Wedgwood (a friend of Wordsworth) several times prior to his visits to Bristol in August 1793 and September 1793 and contributed to a letter to Granville Sharp written in De­ cember 1787 by those who considered themselves “part, (p. 384) or descendants, of the much-wronged people of Africa” in order to thank Sharp for his “humane consideration” of their “brethren and countrymen unlawfully held in slavery” (Equiano 2003, 328–329). In his narrative, Equiano declared that upon his arrival in England, he felt “quite at ease with these new countrymen” and relished their “society and manners”: “I had the stronger desire to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit and imitate their manners.” As with other Romantic writers and poets, Equiano quotes from the works of Milton, using his description of hell in Paradise Lost (1:65–68) to articulate the horrors of slavery that he witnessed on the island of Montserrat: Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can barely dwell. Hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end Still urges. Page 14 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature (Milton 1667, Book One, 65–68). And yet, although Equiano’s Interesting Narrative describes the horrors of his enslave­ ment and his subsequent efforts to gain his freedom, his focus upon the sea—as he trav­ els from Barbados to Virginia to England, Holland, Nova Scotia, and Gibraltar—suggests that the ocean functions as “home” in many respects. Moreover, Equiano’s disillusion­ ment with the government’s scheme to repatriate black slaves “back” to Africa highlights the problem of “return” for those who had made the transatlantic voyage as slaves. Equiano’s comments to James Tobin, published in the Public Advertiser of January 28, 1788 on the benefits of intermarriage between a “black man” and a “fair female” radical­ ly exceeded the demands of many philanthropic abolitionists, as did his marriage to a white woman, Susanna Cullen in 1792. Yet for Equiano, “a more foolish prejudice…never warped a cultivated mind”—for him, interaction of the sexes “of both Blacks and Whites” ought to yield more benefit than a prohibition: “Why not establish intermarriages at home, and in our Colonies? and encourage open, free and generous love…without distinc­ tion of the colour of a skin?” (Equiano 2003, 332). The fact that England was not ready to promote interracial marriages is exemplified by the changed ending to Maria Edgeworth’s controversial novel, Belinda (1801), also published by Joseph Johnson. In the first two editions, the heroine’s black servant, Juba, married an English farm girl, and the heroine herself almost marries a rich West Indian Creole, but these transracial relations and desires were omitted in later versions of Edgeworth’s text. As Kathyrn Kirkpatrick has argued, in order for Belinda to merit inclusion in Barbauld’s British Novelists Series in 1805, “Edgeworth had to make her colonial characters less visible, less integrated into British society” by banishing the “spectre of inter-racial marriage” (Kirkpatrick 2008, xxii). Moreover, Coleridge described the relation of Othello’s blackness in relation to Desdemona’s whiteness as “monstrous” (Howard 2005, 144). Across the Atlantic, American Romanticism—as delineated in works by Bryant, Irving, Cooper, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson—highlighted moral issues and faith in individualism, intuitive perception, rejection of rationalism, and a fo­ cus upon the natural world in contrast to the corruption of human society. Yet American Romanticism (approximately 1836 to 1865), as McBride has noted, (p. 385) coincided with the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833) and the rise of Garrison aboli­ tionism, which culminated in the epic conflict of the Civil War (McBride 2002, 18). Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) presented poetry “organic” in form and united to a concept of democracy that was pervasively egalitarian. In 1833 Emerson traveled to Eng­ land where he met Wordsworth, Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle and pub­ lished his essay Nature (1836), which echoed and developed some of the ideas and con­ cerns of British Romantics: “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood” (Emerson 1836). He also advocated the need for a literature that reflect­ ed the new world of America and its ideals: “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts./Let us demand our own works and laws and worship” (Holman 1992). Emerson also openly supported abolition. In his “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in Page 15 of 20

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature the British West Indies,” August 1, 1844, Emerson argued: “The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another is degraded…Man is one…The genius of the Saxon race, friendly to liberty; the enterprise, the very muscular vigor of this nation, are inconsistent with slav­ ery” (Emerson 1995, 88). Likewise, in his “The Fugitive Slave Law Speech” of March 7, 1854, he declared: “Liberty is aggressive. Liberty is the Crusade of all brave and consci­ entious men. It is the epic poetry, the new religion, the chivalry of all gentlemen. This is the oppressed Lady[,] who true knights on their oath and honor must recue and save” (Emerson 1995, 88). At a meeting at Concord in 1856, Emerson declared: “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.” Later at a public lecture in Washington, D.C. on January 31, 1862, he declared that slavery was not “an institution” but “destitution”: “Emancipation is the demand of civilization” (Baker 2007, 232). Walt Whitman’s volume, Leaves of Grass, was, in a sense, a response to Emerson’s essay The Poet (1845). In its avocation of America’s need to create a new form of poetry that re­ flected the new country’s vices and virtues, Leaves of Grass—which went through six American editions—presented a development of the ideas expressed in the preface to Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798. In the inscriptions to the 1871– 1872 edition, Whitman described the poet as one who had absorbed his country and whose symbiotic relationship with society was to be reinforced by the rejection of the ele­ vated hero and the celebration of the common people via the use of the first person narra­ tor: One’s-self I sing—a simple, separate Person; Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of Physiology from top to toe I sing; Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the muse I say the Form complete is worthier far; The Female equally with the male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful—for freest action form’d, under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.

(Whitman 1871, 7) Yet despite the similarities and contiguities, there were, however, significant polit­ ical and cultural differences between the slave narratives and British and American Ro­ manticism. Although they frequently employed liberationist discourse, Romantic authors rarely celebrated or announced racial equality or interracial relations. Likewise, as An­ drews suggests, whilst white Romantics such as Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson “af­ firmed a self anterior and superior to time,” black autobiographers insisted that the self “was perpetually, inescapably, a function and product of time” (Andrews 1988, 202). As the slave narratives and the poetical works by slaves reveal, the self could not pass through the traumas of slavery or escape without being permanently affected by such ex­ periences. Having crossed the ocean, the dispossessed, transatlantic black “self” could not become a purified, transcendental distillation of its “original” self or become “one” (p. 386)

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature with the ideal “One-Self” of the “host” culture as described by Walt Whitman. Even out­ side slavery, black writers of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s realized that they were still not “free” or equal within the democracy of the “One-Self” (Andrews 1988, 203). As a consequence, the overlaps and links between British and American Romanticism and the writings of the slaves, as once articulated via their shared concerns for the “freedom” of the self, became further exasperated by continued racial slavery and racial segrega­ tion, both legal and covert. Despite the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833 and the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment in the United States in 1865, interracial re­ lations continued to be seen as radical violations of racial/sexual conduct on both sides of the Atlantic, while the emergence of pseudo-scientific racial theories and the unprece­ dented increase in colonial expansionism and territorial possessionism, as exemplified by Britain’s “imperial century,” 1815–1914, further ostracized the needs and concerns of blacks in the postslavery world. That “freedom” did not achieve “equality” was a para­ digm already described by the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century slave narratives; instead, new literary forms would be needed to articulate the simultaneous marginalization, multiplicity, and fluidity of postabolition, transatlantic selves.

References Allen, William G, The Liberator, June 20, 1853, 116. Allen, William G The American Prejudice Against Color. An Authentic Narrative. London, 1853. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na­ tionalism. 1983 repr; London, Verso, 1991. Andrews, William, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiogra­ phy, 1760–1865. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Aristodemou, Maria, Law and Literature: Journeys From Her to Eternity. 2000 repr; Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Baker, Carlos, Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. New York: Viking Press, 1996. Barbauld, Anna, The British Novelists. London: Rivington, 1810. Blake, William, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William, ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988. (p. 387) Brown, William Wells, Three Years in Europe: Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met. London: Charles Gilpin, 1852. Brown, William Wells American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad. Boston: Jewett, 1855.

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature Burke, Edmund, ‘Letter to the Right Honorable Henry Dundas; with the Sketch of a Ne­ gro Code’(1780) in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1826. 12 vols., Vol. 6, 255–290, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ 15702/15702-h/15702-h.htm (Accessed 15.07.13). Carretta, Vincent, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2003. Chatterton, Thomas, ‘African Eclogues’, The Rowley Poems. 1777. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, On the Slave Trade (1795) in Paul Keen, ed., Revolutions in Ro­ mantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–1832. Ontario, Canada: Broad­ view Press, 2004, 345–347. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor ‘Fears in Solitude’ (1798), The Complete Poetical Works of Sa­ muel Taylor Coleridge, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29090/29090-h/29090h.htm#stcvol1_Page_256 (Accessed July 15, 2013). Cowper, William, ‘Charity’ in Poems: By William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. Lon­ don: J. Johnson, 1782. Cowper, William The Task. A Poem in Six Books. London: Joseph Johnson, 1785. Cugoano, Ottobah, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. London: T. Becket 1787. Curtin, Philip, Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Darwin, Erasmus, The Botanic Garden, London: Joseph Johnson, 1791. Book One. Douglass, Frederick, “Letter to Garrison” in My Bondage and My Freedom, ed. Dr. James M’Cune Smith. New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855. http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/202/old/bfree10.txt (Accessed 15.07.13) 368–370. Equiano, Olaudah, An Interesting Narrative, ed. Vincent Carretta. Harmondsworth: Pen­ guin, 2003. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Nature. Boston: James Munroe, 1836. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myer­ son. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Foucault, Michel, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James Faubion. St. Ives, England: Penguin, 1994. Gilroy, Paul Small Acts: On the Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993.

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature Gilroy, Paul The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gould, Philip, “The Rise, Development, and Circulation of the Slave Narrative,” ed. Au­ drey Fisch, The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 11–27. Grant, Donald and Jonathan Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia. London: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Griggs, Earl Leslie, (ed.), The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1971, Vol. 1. Holman, Hugh and William Harmon, A Handbook to Literature, 6th edition. New York: Macmillan, 1992. Howard, Jean and Marion O’Connor, Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. Oxford: Routledge, 2005. (p. 388) Keen, Paul, Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780– 1832. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2004. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn, ed., “Introduction,” Belinda. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, ix–xxv. McBride, Dwight, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Mellor, Anne, “A Criticism of Their Own: Romantic Women Literary Critics,” in John Beer ed., Questioning Romanticism. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995, 29– 48. Milton, John, Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books. London: Samuel Simmons, 1667. More, Hannah, Slavery, A Poem. London: T. Cadell, 1788. Newton, John, Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade. London: J. Buckland and J. John­ son, 1788. Smith, Charlotte, Elegiac Sonnets, And Other Poems. London: Jones and Company, 1784. Smith, Charlotte The Old Manor House. London: J. Bell, 1793. Smith, Charlotte Beachy Head, With Other Poems. London: J. Johnson, 1807. Smith, Valerie, “Neo-Slave Narratives,” The Cambridge Companion to the African Ameri­ can Slave Narrative, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 168–188.

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Slave Narratives, the Romantic Imagination and Transatlantic Literature Thomas, Helen, Romanticism and the Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ward, Samuel Ringwold, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro. London: John Snow, 1855. Wheatley, Phyllis, The Collected Works of Phyllis Wheatley, ed. John Shields. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Williams, Helen Maria, A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade. London: T. Cadell, 1788. Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution. London: Broadview Press, 2001. Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass. New York: Smith & McDougal, 1871, http:// whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1871/images/leaf005r.html (Accessed August 8, 2010). Wollstonecraft, Mary, Mary: A Fiction. London: J. Johnson, 1788, http:// www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16357/pg16357.txt (Accessed July 15, 2013). Wollstonecraft, Mary A Vindication of the Rights of Men. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790. Wollstonecraft, Mary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. London: Joseph Johnson, 1792. Wollstonecraft, Mary “On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature,” in Posthu­ mous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. William Godwin. London: J. Johnson, 1798, 4 vols., Vol. 2, 159–178. Wollstonecraft, Mary Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman in Posthumous Works of the Au­ thor of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. William Godwin. London: J. Johnson, 1798, 4 vols., Vol. 1.

Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas, University College Falmouth

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative

“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Narrative   Daphne A. Brooks The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.023

Abstract and Keywords This article explores the enslaved musician Blind Tom’s sonic repertoire as an alternative to that of the discursive slave narrative, and it considers the methodological challenges of theorizing the conditions of captivity and freedom in cultural representations of Blind Tom’s performances. The article explores how the extant anecdotes, testimonials and cul­ tural ephemera about Thomas Wiggins live in tension with the conventional fugitive’s nar­ rative, and it traces the ways in which the “scenarios” emerging from the Blind Tom archive reveal a consistent set of themes concerning aesthetic authorship, imitation, re­ production and duplication, which tell us much about quotidian forms of power and subju­ gation in the cultural life of slavery, as well as the cultural means by which a figure like Blind Tom complicated and disrupted that power. Keywords: sound, listening, sonic ekphrasis, echo, memory, reproduction, imitation, transcription, notation, impro­ visation

For my master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour, had just left me with stinging, scorching words, words that scathed ear and brain life fire! —Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, un­ derstand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was, myself, within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. —Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (1845) He is a human phonograph, a sort of animated memory, with sound producing power. Page 1 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative —Willa Cather, Nebraska State Journal

To Tell a Sound Story THE ear is the delicate conduit through which fugitive authors have both (re)enacted their subjugation and performed the wondrously complex dimensions of their freedom. Two iconic scenes in the twin pillars of the slave narrative genre, Harriet Jacobs’s Inci­ dents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (1845), figure the shifting material condition of their respective pro­ tagonists by way of the ear. Jacobs’s heroine Linda Brent falls prey to the advances of her rapacious master Dr. Flint, whose “stinging, scorching words…scath[e] ear and brain (p. 392) like fire” (29) in a passage that turns on vivid sexual metaphor and uses the ear of the female captive as the portal through which “innocent” girlhood transforms into “pre­ maturely knowing” (45) sexual chattel. Jacobs not only recreates her own “fall” through the ear in order to illuminate the moral exigencies surrounding the plight of women in slavery but also, by making that organ the site of sexual vulnerability, she paradoxically challenges her audience to preserve the “purity” of their own ears by awakening them to her plaintive call for liberation (“hear my voice, ye careless daughters!”). To listen as a captive in Incidents is to be rendered abject, whereas to see (through the aperture of a cramped garret space) is but one of the many ways that our heroine choreographs her lib­ eration. Douglass’s “big ears” are, in contrast, the evidence of his own emancipated enlighten­ ment in one of the most influential and oft-cited passages in (African) American litera­ ture. Writing from the realm of fugitive author(ity), Douglass recounts the sound of cap­ tive song, emotionally and structurally as “dense” as the woods in which this music takes root/route, and he beckons readers to a retrospective hearing shaped by liberated dis­ tance. Douglass as ear translates the “wild” elixir of euphoria and despair coursing through the music of the enslaved into earnest testimony about what “the mere hearing of those songs would do to impress some minds with the horrible character” of slavery (26). But his sound story squarely attests to his own intellectual freedom, his marked dis­ tance from bondage, and his ironically heightened ability to recognize “the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs” as a sign of his analytically elevated re­ moval from “the circle” of enslavement.” As the contemplative fugitive who listens to his own past, Douglass’s theorization of the insurgency of slavery’s soundscape is but one of the many elegant and ideologically virtuosic ways in which The Narrative of the Life conjoins the realm of (resounding) reason with freedom itself. In both cases, Jacobs and Douglass instrumentalize their own ears in the service of signa­ ture tropes in their respective discursive narratives. We are invited to imagine (horrifical­ ly in the case of Jacobs, sublimely in the case of Douglass) what we cannot hear but what attests to the torturous state and brave resolve of the captive, and the pivotal role that sound memory plays in the canonical slave narrative form. Both texts also challenge us to consider the extent to which performative listening and sonic expressiveness might con­ Page 2 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative stitute alternative forms of the former slave’s narration by way of articulating that which exceeds and complicates the written word. No figure in the cultural history of slavery would more fully manifest and aestheticize the sonic politics of enslavement than classical musician, trans-Atlantic celebrity and bonds­ man Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, a performer who was, himself, a kind of “ear” to slave culture, as well as its roiling, stubborn afterlife and a person whose sonic labor in captivi­ ty opens up new questions about the varied means by which the enslaved document their bondage and create commentary about their condition. Having left behind no conventional writings of his own and having apparently never quested to “tell a free story” in the most legible ways that one associates with the slave narrative genre or abolitionist aesthetics, the physically disabled and cognitively chal­ lenged Blind Tom remains a conundrum to scholars of nineteenth-century American cul­ ture. Neither “free” for most of his life (which lasted well beyond the Civil War) nor a man of letters or conventional public speaker, he nonetheless generated a matrix of (p. 393) cultural representations that stretch and disrupt our definitions of black abjection and lib­ eration in the age of slavery. As critical race theorist Stephen Best suggests, Tom’s classi­ cal piano performances in which he barreled through the work of heavyweights such as Beethoven and Liszt, must be understood within the peculiar juridical context of slavery that “place[s] on display unsettled transformations of sound from forms exchanged be­ tween” musicians “to properties circulated between things (i.e., piano and slave).” With no legal recourse to owning his unique brand of “acoustic phenomena,” Tom (quite literal­ ly) played out a struggle for self-authorship and self-possession on the concert-hall stage and in the realm of nineteenth-century popular music culture (Best, 56–60). My aim is to recuperate the archival traces of that struggle and read Blind Tom’s reper­ toire as a kind of alternative narration of the bondsman to that of the canonical slave nar­ rative protagonist/author. If, as historian Mark Smith asserts, “antebellum slave narra­ tives and their audiences listened to more than just songs and literary texts; they commu­ nicated and listened to myriad other sounds of slavery…including the gruesome noises and silences of premodern bondage…,” then we might think of Blind Tom’s work as a mu­ sical analogue to the genre in all of its acoustic capaciousness (Smith, 156). As both a fas­ tidious classical pianist as well as an eccentric “human phonograph” who reproduced the sounds in his midst, he created an archive of sound commentary about the world in which he lived and performed and the one which tenaciously held him in bonds. In this way, Blind Tom’s sonic repertoire emerges as the means by which he “underwrites” the self in expressive forms that move outside of conventional slave narrative aesthetics (Olney, 156–7). Neither fully subjugated (like Jacobs) by his ear nor radically liberated (like Dou­ glass) by his tremendous relationship to sound, Blind Tom’s life and career encourage us to forge new critical methodologies to consider the multisensory dimensions of enslave­ ment as well as the dissident, sonic modes of enslaved narration (Jenson-Moulton, “‘Spec­ imens’ and ‘Peculiar Idiosyncracies’”).

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative

“Metamorphoses in the Acoustic”: Performing the Blind Tom Slave Narrative …what Tom made available for scrutiny…was the implication of metamorphoses in the acoustic… —Stephen Best (59) His ability to name any combination of notes, no matter how disconnected and puzzling the intervals, was fully proved… —Anonymous (Marvelous Musical Prodigy, 29) He was born on May 25, 1849 to the captive woman Charity Wiggins and a field worker named Mingo, enslaved by General James Neil Bethune and family in Columbus, (p. 394) Georgia, and there is no major literary text that documents his life, no narrative that traces his “heroic transformations,” no tale of a defining moment when he would “rise up and find his voice,” no treatise of his on the evils of slavery, and no passionate appeal to his northern brethren to abolish the system that held him in bonds. In nearly every recog­ nizable way, Blind Tom Wiggins’s odyssey defies the conventions of the classic slave nar­ rative genre. Having never authored an autobiographical text, Blind Tom exists outside of the tradition in which the bondsman-turned-author testifies to his own humanity and fra­ ternity with white sympathetic readers. He neither worked to cultivate an aesthetics of moral transparency in his public persona nor did he produce a suspenseful, artfully ren­ dered narrative of the life. He did none of these things in part because of his multiple dis­ abilities. As one of 12 children born to Charity, and blind since infancy, he was said to have struggled with aspects of severe social dysfunction from his earliest years forward. In a recent biography, Deidre O’Connell likens Tom’s turbulent nighttime fits and combat­ ive daytime behavior to that of “Early Infantile Autism,” observing that his “echolalia, heightened sensory discrimination and [his] ability to recall seemingly meaningless de­ tails alert[ed]” his captors “to the possibility of an autistic spectral disorder, his striking lack of common sense clinching the verdict” (35) (Davis and Baron; Jensen-Moulton, “Finding Autism”; Sacks, liner notes; Sacks, Musicophilia). The pursuit of standard speech and literacy is thus not a central theme in the Blind Tom story. Yet as O’Connell, pioneering black musicologist Geneva Southall and other scholars insist, Blind Tom’s “extraordinary sensory powers” in many ways defied conventional medical diagnoses and, as I suggest below, produced insurgent articulations of expressive alterity that defy categorization. Blind Tom’s virtuosity as a mimic of sounds, his vast repository of social memory, “sensory information” and “aural pictures,” and above all his ability to translate and reproduce that information in performative contexts both catapult­ ed him into the realm of nineteenth-century celebrity culture and left him vulnerable to triply complex exploitation and disenfranchisement—as a slave, as a disabled musician,

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative and as an entertainer whose (stolen) livelihood rested in part on meeting the prejudicial demands of a “freak show” circuit shaped by P.T. Barnum and others (O’Connell, 35-6). Having debuted in 1857 at the age of eight at Temperance Hall in Columbus, Georgia, and having been subsequently placed under the supervision of road manager-impresario Perry H. Oliver, Tom toured throughout the south and eventually the north and abroad. In the process, he journeyed to the center of the culture of spectacle. Playbills from the first decade of his career trumpet the coming of “the blind Negro boy…Sightless and Untu­ tored from Birth…. a composer and musician of skill and excellence” who “can produce correct music with his back to the piano! In fact, he is a WONDER…” “He is presented to the public,” announces another, “as surpassing everything hitherto known the world as a MUSICAL PHENOMENON.” The Blind Tom publicity machine found a comfortable home in the “freak show” celebrity culture that exploited figures such as Joice Heth, MillieChristine, and William Henry Johnson, “stars” whose racialized corporeality putatively manifested social deviance for the masses (Adams; Biographical Sketch of MillieChristine; Reiss; Thomson). Yet Blind Tom as cultural agent stands apart from these other figures. For it was his virtuosic talents crossed with his “blackness” that caused such a stir among white audiences and critics who thought it impossible for (p. 395) these two categories to co-exist. How is it possible that this “grinning, idiotic, Congo boy,” a “fullblooded negro” who “appears more like an ape than a man” could execute a repertoire consisting of “characteristics and parlor expressions,” concertos (by Chopin, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and others), as well as marches (by Liszt) and “fantasias, caprices and etudes (by Thalberg, Gottschalk)” and numerous other programs (St. Louis, Dwight’s Journal May 1861)? Here was a circus “wonder” to behold indeed. Accounts of his live performances, of which there are many, suggest that in Blind Tom concerts every scene was one of “subjection,” where race and disability were thrown into temporary “relief” by a mastery of “the most difficult works by Beethoven, Mozart, Hertz and others of equal reputation” (Southall, Blind Tom, the Black Pianist-Composer, 14). The more challenging the composition, the more delicious was his act to audiences who marveled over the incongruity of “a half-idiot looking boy” who “has powers as a musical performer, such probably as no one has ever attained by any amount of art or practice” (“Musical Genius—Blind Tom”). Musical genius thus cemented Tom’s black “freakish” capital, over which General Bethune guarded closely, obsessively, and litigious­ ly for nearly 35 years until losing legal “guardianship” of Tom in 1887 to his son John’s widow, Eliza Lerche. Tom died in 1908 in Hoboken, New Jersey, isolated and cloistered away by Lerche—an equally expedient handler—but having lived a life largely onstage, largely praised and yet forever scrutinized by the incredulous white masses, performing for confederate, Yankee, and eventually English and French audiences through the turn of the century. How do we read the life of Blind Tom? His story demands that we shift the criteria and critical methodologies that we use to explore the culture of captives so as to attune our­ selves to the sounds of the fugitive who scores a kind of “strange, weird improvisation[al]” freedom within the very confines of enslavement. We must imagine the Page 5 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative extant anecdotes, testimonials, and cultural ephemera about Thomas Wiggins as being in formalistic tension with the conventional fugitive’s narrative. Though distinct from canon­ ical texts that vociferously condemn the institution of slavery, the “scenarios” of the Blind Tom archive adhere to a consistent set of themes concerning aesthetic authorship, imita­ tion, reproduction and duplication that convey much about quotidian forms of power and subjugation in the cultural life of slavery, as well as the cultural means by which a figure like Tom complicates and troubles the terms of that power. In short, these materials re­ veal a fugitive who ran (masterful, exquisite, dizzying circles) even while in bonds (Taylor, 28–9). To illustrate what I mean, I’ll first turn to a brief consideration of the well-circulated, Blind Tom promotional pamphlet in order to demonstrate how this text both adheres to and also disrupts slave narrative aesthetics. I’ll then explore two influential articles that shaped the discourse on Tom as a way to consider the representational struggles bound up with his iconography. Taken together, these texts reveal the ways that Blind Tom’s act(s) slipped through and around convention and “puzzled the intervals” of sonic expres­ siveness by creating what we might think of as enclaves of performative opacity. (p. 396) Comprised of a “sketch of the life,” “testimonials,” a repertoire list with lyrics and critical endorsements from the trans-Atlantic press, The Marvelous Musical Prodigy pamphlet is like the slave narrative with its “mixed production” of documents, but it is also a curious text that shores up enigmatic constructions of Blind Tom’s persona that defy familiar rep­ resentations of the enslaved (Olney, 151, Andrews 1–18). Its opening profile, “Blind Tom: The Great Negro Pianist” traffics in the kind of promotional shock so common in showculture pamphlets. “His peculiarities,” the text declares, “were so singular…his powers so wonderful, even in their first manifestations, as to astonish and bewilder all who wit­ nessed them” (Marvelous Musical Prodigy, 3). It is a tale of the “marvelous,” a black and blind boy who exhibits near mystical “powers” from infancy. It is a tale of possession, one in which “musical sounds exer[t] a controlling influence over him” (4), one in which Tom is seemingly beholden to sound, not to his masters. It is a tale of a child born into chattel slavery and yet still enchanted by his acoustic universe: butter churning, dishes and pans rattling, babies crying, the rain and thunder of fierce Georgia storms, and the piano played by his young mistresses in the parlor. It is not a tale ‘“Written by Himself, with the standard opening ‘I was born”’ (Olney, 155). Rather, the anonymous narrator assumes the role usually assigned to the former slave-author who emerges as the principal “truthteller,” the presumably transparent figurehead on hand to “furnish facts” (MMP, 4) for readers’ scrutiny. Tom, conversely, exists at a remove from writer and reader alike, “‘a liv­ ing miracle,’ unparalleled, incomprehensible, such has not been seen before, and proba­ bly will never be seen again” (MMP, 9). Like the “authenticating machinery” of slave narrative texts, Tom’s agency and abilities are subject to the corroboration of testimonials (“I lifted him to the piano; he played sev­ eral pieces…the Professor then performed a piece of his own composition…. To my sur­ prise ‘Tom’ played it immediately…” [MMP, 9]) and press reviews (“He not only performs solos with a full command of all the dexterity which distinguishes pianoforte soloists, but is able to play from memory…” [MMP, 26]), but it is the music in The Marvelous Musical Page 6 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative Prodigy, on its back and inside covers and in the middle of the text itself, that tells a con­ trapuntal tale of self-authorship, one that veers away from the form’s insistence on a “truth that depended on the degree to which his artfulness could hide his art.” Instead, Tom’s “art” defies the “truthful” order established by the genre. Listen closely to the archive for traces of a complex, enigmatic “self” that plays itself out across a vast reper­ toire of songs—from classical to folk to unusual acoustic re-presentations; alluring “de­ scriptive” music attributed to Tom himself (“Water in Moonlight,” “Daylight” and “Noc­ turne”) and quirky environmental “imitations” (of sewing machines, musical instruments and people) cut a dissonant trail through his classical set pieces. This sonic ekphrasis, this “sound centered…Impressionism,” as Amiri Baraka calls it, anchors Tom’s ecological and cosmic alterity that lives in the intervals of this text and quietly crests as the back­ ground noise to (white), starry-eyed witnessing. “Oh, give me a home by the sea,” read the lyrics of the penultimate vocal composition included in the pamphlet, “where wild waves are crested with foam/Where shrill winds are caroling free…a home, a home, a home by the deep heaving sea” (MMP, 19). Like the vibrancy of Phillis Wheatley’s pas­ toral, like the stirring, existential possibility bound up in Frederick (p. 397) Douglass’ en­ counter with the Chesapeake Bay, Tom’s communion with nature is all awash in the glory of the “the ocean’s loud roar” that speaks back to him, instilling in him “its stormiest glee” (MMP, 19). This we might recognize as Tom’s “acoustic metamorphoses,” the mo­ ment when his persona transforms from “thing” into sound. The quirks and idiosyncracies of Blind Tom’s sounded self are thus fugitive forms that we might track on the other frequencies of cultural texts left behind. As is the case with the majority of nineteenth-century black performers, his legacy lives on overwhelmingly in press publications, historical documents and memorabilia produced and preserved by white journalists, scholars, spectators, and fans (Trotter). In particular, texts by two icon­ ic white women authors offer florid accounts of Tom’s performances that, although lit­ tered with racial Darwinian mythologies and “the ugly jumble of white supremacist mum­ bo jumbo,” nonetheless illuminate the extent to which archival documents hold the traces of a free(style) story within the confines of the dominant Blind Tom script. Although separated by some three decades, Rebecca Harding Davis and Willa Cather’s respective reportage on his performances are by turns crude, maudlin, detailed, and col­ orful portraits of Blind Tom on stage. Each text strikes a balance between literary real­ ism, ethnological discourse and theatrical playbill hyperbole, and each turns on the narrator’s initial incredulity toward a seeming “idiot” whose sophisticated musicianship ultimately wins over critics and audiences alike. Neither text fills the perpetually gaping void in Blind Tom studies that will seemingly always remain—the one that beckons, in the tradition of the classic genre, for a moment of recognition regarding one’s own wretched condition and the resolve to be free by any means necessary. Yet in making a case for the superlative and singular talents of a bondsman living a life of spectacular entrapment, and by generating vivid representations of his stage aesthetics, physical and gestural ec­ centricities, and musical “gifts,” both Davis and Cather’s accounts illustrate the extent to

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative which the archival trace of Blind Tom performances constitute a genre unto itself, the sonic slave narrative. Davis’s 1862 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Blind Tom,” is significantly longer than Cather’s one-page account, and it loosely engages with the slave narrative form, beginning with the protagonist’s birth into the chaos of the peculiar institution with “no clan, no family names…chosen by God to be anointed with the holy chrism…[who] is only ‘Tom’…” One year removed from her realist meditation on the exploitation of the labor class in Life in the Iron Mills, Davis reads Tom as “the lowest negro type, from which only field-hands can be made” (105). From “unconscious[ly]…wear[ing] his crown as an idiot might” (104) to finding the “ecstasy of delight, breaking out at the end of each successful fugue into shouts of laughter, kicking his heels and clapping his hands” (105–6) at the piano like a toddler, Davis’s Tom navigates rather than escapes the material subjugation of slavery and the psychological abjection of disability by way of music. Even as the text constructs Tom out of the language of racial science as an “agreeable monster,” as “[p]hysically…and in animal temperament” a “negro” who “ranks next to (p. 398) the lowest Guinea type: with strong appetites and gross bodily health” (107), the musical Tom defies the straight-jacket of racial categorization, the myth of the rote mimic who merely “repeat[s] the airs they drummed” (106) out before him. He defies the limita­ tions of the “possessed” black cipher through whom “some ghost spoke” (106). Davis cel­ ebrates Tom’s “comprehension of the meaning of music” and the “scientific precision of his manner of touch” (108) as evidence of “a prophetic or historical voice which few souls utter and fewer understand” (108). But we might think instead of these “strange, weird improvisations of every day” (109) in Tom’s repertoire, his ability to “stow[e] away” and then play “old airs, forgotten by every one else” but him (106) as evidence of the complexities of his masterful, aesthetic subjec­ tivity. With “every note intact…with whatever quirk or quiddity of style” endemic to the music that he had heard reproduced by audience members and still more, with “har­ monies…he had never heard, had learned from no man” (106), the Tom of Davis’s profile scores a heterogeneous repertoire for astounded onlookers. Having “heard him sometime in 1860” (109), Davis recounts a series of concerts in “a great barn of a room, gaudy with hot, soot-stained frescoes, chandeliers, walls splotched with gilt” and populated by a “large” audience featuring “siftings of old country families…” (109–110). Up at the piano, ogled by the masses who watch in wonder as the “head fell farther back,” as “the claws began to work,” as selections from Weber and Beethoven fill the air, this Tom “without waiting for the audience, would himself applaud violently, kicking, pounding his hands to­ gether” (110). Davis’s Tom depends here on the “approving pat on the head” from his master (110), and he remains a steadfastly tragic figure whose “stubby little black fin­ gers…wande[r] over the keys” and speak for a “beautiful caged spirit” that “struggle[s] for breath under the brutal form and idiotic brain” (110). That he can “play secondo to music never heard or seen implies,” she concludes, his “comprehension of the full drift of the symphony.” It is the gesture that manifests a vulnerable artistic humanity that some­ how exists beyond the conditions of material entrapment. Davis’s essay yokes together Page 8 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative racial romanticism, racial science, populist cultural sentiment, and music criticism. But it is also a work that hints at the opaque workings of a black radical imagination. Though clearly indebted to Davis’s Civil War remembrance of Tom, Cather’s brief 1894 account lingers a bit longer on the spectacle of Tom’s public privacy and his putatively baffling inner dialogue in the act of performance. As she observes, It was a fair audience that gathered at the Lansing last night to listen to Blind Tom. Certainly the man was worth hearing—at least once. Probably there has nev­ er been seen on the stage a stranger figure or one more uncanny. He is a human phonograph, a sort of animated memory, with sound producing powers. It was a strange sight to see him walk out on the stage and with his own lips—and another man’s words—introduce himself and talk quietly about his own idiocy. Then, too, he would applaud himself, and apologize, still in the third person, for his lack of courtesy. There was an insanity, a grotesque horribleness about it that was inter­ estingly unpleasant (Cather, 166). The “panoply of voices” so central to the slave narrative form turns “uncanny” and unsettling in Cather’s version of the Blind Tom act, where his own orchestral polyva­ (p. 399)

lence threatens to render him impervious to onlookers who find his disorienting noise “grotesque,” “insane,” and appealingly distasteful. His peculiar status as a disabled performer with extraordinary theatrical gifts would earn Blind Tom unusual “privileges” both in slavery (access to the master’s parlor) and later in the Jim Crow era (access to segregated hotels), and yet these same gifts resulted in the extended duration of his lengthy performative servitude such that he was called by some the “last American slave” (O’Connell, 211). And it is for these reasons that we might more closely consider the resonance of his iconicity in the culture of slavery and beyond. Like an historical echo, he reverberates through the mouths of others, presently absent, par­ tially remembered, opaquely rendered. Tuning up, then, to the lost traces of his history, listening for the echo of Blind Tom returned to us gives us another dimension to consider “wide stretches of lacunae that speak above all of absence” in the slave narrative archive (Radano, 51). The Blind Tom echo chamber thus beckons us to listen in hermeneutic stereo to the evi­ dence of things not heard, so that we might pick up what Ron Radano calls “the reso­ nance” of the “unforgotten,” the “echo of the original,” “the sound of that which has al­ ready sounded.” In his pursuit of the “countervoice of slavery’s past,” Radano “listen[s] for a story with no beginnings” and he pursues “fragments of texts that sound forth in­ scriptively from the noisy legacy of colonial violence” (53, 67). Meanwhile, Alexander We­ heliye, busy at the Phonographies turntable, reminds us of how to “listen around corners” to a “sonic Afro-modernity” that “emerges at the spatiotemporal crossroads” to “produc[e] a flash point of [black] subjectivity gleaned in and through sound.” His work plays out the ways that sound in black diasporic culture “occupies a privileged place pre­ Page 9 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative cisely because it manages to augment an inferior black subjectivity—a subjectivity creat­ ed by racist ideologies and practices in the field of vision—establishing venues for the constitution of new modes of existence.” Likewise, Josh Kun heads out onto the audio-top­ ic frontier, “focus[ing] on the social spaces, geographies and identities that music can en­ able, reflect, and prophecy” and “listen[ing] for music that is already made but not yet heard, music that makes audible racialized communities who have been silenced by the nationalist ear” (Kun, 23–25). Their works invite us to consider the enchanting echolalia of Blind Tom, embedded in dominant texts, and to explore these sounds as sites of historical inquiry that continue to expand how we engage the culture of slavery. Echolalia is, in fact, a concept that we might further theorize in studies of Blind Tom since it might serve as a sonic model for re­ cuperating the archival material traces of his social subjectivity, as well as the dimensions of his cultural agency. The case of Blind Tom challenges us to better hear the intricacies of his sonic mimicry and performative listening as cultural acts that disturb and revise the politics of “authentic” black selfhood in the nineteenth century.

Ghostwriting Sound: Repetition and Repro­ duction in the Blind Tom Saga (p. 400)

Whether or not they found merit in his musicianship, the arguments nearly always re­ turned to the question of imitation. Was Tom’s act pure mimicry or something more? As Best observes, “[w]hen imitating, Tom became, in the act of repetition, a creative human subject, however qualified that creativity and marginal that subjectivity might have been. When duplicating, repetitions made him a mere mimetic contrivance” (57–8). Tom was in both a familiar and an ironic bind compared to that of the ex-slave narrator whose task was putatively limited to that of duplication, whose “claim…must be his claim, that…he is not fictionalizing…and not performing any act of poiesis” (Olney, 150, emphasis his). Con­ versely, in the realm of Tom’s musical bondage, the terms of credibility hinge instead on creativity as opposed to transparency. It is for these reasons, then, that the terms of Tom’s “free(style) story” were waged most tenaciously and ferociously in the realms of transcription and composition, realms that still remain partially obscure(d) to many schol­ ars researching his career. One of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the Blind Tom archive is that of authorship. Though lauded in the press and his promotional pamphlet for keen compositional skills from a young age, the particularities concerning the production of his sheet music remain murky. If “The Rainstorm,” said to have been composed by Tom when he was 5 years old and published some 10 years later, would become one of his most popular songs, it was also a work—like the vast majority of his musical pieces—whose materiality eludes his­ toricization. Although The Marvelous Musical Prodigy makes legendary the scene of Tom’s improvisational invention as a child in the master’s parlor, “having been there dur­ ing a severe thunderstorm” and walking “to the piano…play[ing] what is now known as his Rain Storm and [saying] it was what the rain, the wind, and the thunder said to Page 10 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative him…” (MMP, 7), less clear are the other figures who engineered the processing and dis­ tribution of his music at mid-century and during the rise of the sheet music publishing in­ dustry (Southall, Post-Civil War, xviii; O’Connell, 51–53).

Figure 24.1 “Blind Tom, the Musical Prodigy,” illus­ tration. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Schom­ burg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative

Figure 24.2 “Grand March Resurrection,” composed by Blind Tom, published by E. Bethune, Highlands, N.J. (Copyright 1901 by E. Bethune). Courtesy of Manu­ scripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schom­ burg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

The marketing of Blind Tom’s sheet music remains a significant if oft-overlooked narra­ tive to piece together since it figures in larger questions surrounding his representational control and the terms of his intellectual property. One illustration of the musician, which shows him in perhaps his teen or young adult years, alone and seated, with eyes closed, and holding in his left hand a copy of “Rain Storm by Blind Tom” sheet music drives home the suggestion that the discursive, notational text is his proud creation. While this illus­ tration draws a distinction between producer and commodity, artist and art work, the ex­ tant sheet music itself often conflates the two, “selling” Tom on the cover of these musi­ cal works from the post-war period, yoking (former) human chattel with leisure goods for the bourgeois home. These texts, like those without the portrait imprint, list Tom as the sole composer of the musical work. (p. 401) (p. 402) In at least one instance, the “authen­ ticating machinery” of a press review from The Baltimore Sun made its way into his sheet music material and further blurred the lines between high (classical) and low (show busi­ ness) culture on which Tom’s career balanced (Stepto, 225).

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative

Figure 24.3 “Cyclone Gap,” composed by Blind Tom, Published by E. Bethune, Highlands, N.J. (Copyright 1887 by Elise Bethune.). Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foun­ dations.

To some critics, there can be no doubt that Thomas Wiggins is the author of this music. Music historian Thomas Riis points out, for instance, that, “[w]hile many observers ex­ pressed disbelief about the most outlandish claims made for Tom’s talent, no ghost writ­ ers for his pieces have been alleged by credible sources.” Yet what interests me here are the gray areas regarding how the musical texts attributed to Tom were (mis)handled and manufactured for the masses. Although Riis alludes to “the teachers who transcribed his work,” rarely have scholars considered the curious parallels between this kind of ex­ change between composer and listener/scribe with that of the dynamic between ex-slave author and amanuensis (Riis). If we think of the (p. 403) transcriber as bearing something in common with the editor and ghostwriter of the slave narrative form, then we would have to keep in mind how it is the transcriber “who contextualizes the essential facts of the narrator’s dictation and thus has much to do with how they will be received as institu­ tional facts by their white readers” (Andrews, 20).

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative

Figure 24.4 “Tom, the Blind Negro Boy Pianist, Only Ten Years Old. Oliver Gallop and Virginia Polka,” by Thomas Green Bethune. Courtesy of Music Division, The New York Public Li­ brary for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative

Figure 24.5 “Daylight” by Blind Tom Wiggins. Blind Tom Wiggins Sheet Music. Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Two self-identified transcribers of Blind Tom’s music appear in the archives. In an article covering the custody battle over Tom in 1886, The Washington Post reports that a “Profes­ sor Joseph Poznanski” had testified in court that he “taught Blind Tom music two hours a day for nine years” and that “he believed him to be rational with respect to only (p. 404) (p. 405) (p. 406) (p. 407) two things—music and eating.” In response to the court’s inquiry about the details of his instruction, Poznanski describes the scene as follows: Well, we had two pianos in one room. I would play for him, and after listening a while he would get up, walk around, stand on one foot, then on the other, pull his hair and knock his head against the wall. Then he would sit down and play a very good imitation of what I had played, with additions to it. Q: Would he retain his knowledge?— A. Oh yes; his memory was something prodigious…. I wrote his compositions many times. He always had them written under other names than his own. While he played the piano I would write the music (Emphasis added; O’Connell, 201–204, 211, 216–221). Poznanski buttresses all of the speculations regarding Tom’s musical skills as mere rote mimicry. Brute and impetuous, he replays the sounds of his master/teacher, producing “a very good imitation.” All we have is Poznanski’s word here, but his words also hold the

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative ghostly remnants of Tom’s “additions,” traces of the captive artist leaving his (black) marks on the page (Moten). More sensational is an article published two decades earlier in Dwight’s Journal by selfdescribed “German musician” H. J. Wiesel. Appearing just three weeks after the Emanci­ pation Proclamation, Wiesel’s article is the most extensive and contentious of the re­ sponses to Rebecca Harding Davis’s essay, and it positions the author as an experienced artist and composer in an epic transcribing encounter with Tom and his handlers. Aimed at debunking Davis’s profile of the musician as nothing more than “myth” and “a piece of pretty romance,” Wiesel declares that he will “vindicate” “truth” by way of reporting his observations about an 1862 concert that he attended in Maryland. “Then Tom began to play,” writes Wiesel, “we don’t remember what it was, we know it was not over well done…. nothing but simple polkas, marches, Schottisches, &c., pieces in which he tena­ ciously clung to the tonic and its related harmonies….” Wiesel’s critique is tempered by allusions to Tom’s competency as a musician, his ability to “accentuate” and keep tempo which “evinced” evidence that “he had practised (sic)…considerably.” Competent yes, but a “genius”? Wiesel sets out to expel Tom from the world of wonder, and he does this by way of transcription. Wiesel makes his case, describing how, [d]uring the second exhibition, Mr. Oliver asserted that he had employed several eminent musicians of New Orleans as well as of Baltimore to copy Tom’s composi­ tions, and that, after having made the attempt, they acknowledged their inability to do so, pronouncing it impossible to copy his weird music. At the conclusion of the concert we went to Mr. Oliver and told him that it could not be impossible to write Tom’s music, but that it was impossible it could not be written; the art of mu­ sic-writing was in such a state of perfection, and had been for several centuries past, that no new musical forms or figures could be invented which defied perpet­ uating writing. He said, “I will give you twenty dollars if you write me that one piece, the Oliver Galop.” Of course we agreed to it, determined to make a trial…. (H. J. Weisel, Dwight’s Journal Jan. 1863, emphasis not added). Wiesel sets the terms of the battle, insisting that notation will rule in the end, that its law, cultivated and “perfected” over centuries, could tame and make legible the “weird music” of the enslaved. His determination to score Tom’s sound places him at odds with the white abolitionists who, four years later, would declare in their collection of Slave Songs of the United States that “what makes it all the harder to unravel a thread of melody out of this strange network is that, like birds, they seem not infrequently to strike sounds that cannot be precisely represented by the gamut…” (Slave Songs, v-vi). Setting himself apart from the many white listeners who testified to the opacity of black sound, Wiesel invokes the artistic science of “music-writing” as an instrument of order. What un­ folds is an interpersonal struggle between two artists, a tiny maelstrom on the continuum of Blind Tom scenarios. “When asked to repeat the Oliver Galop,” Wiesel begins, (p. 408)

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative so that we, his amanuensis, could write it, he said he did not want his pieces writ­ ten. “Why Tom!” said Mr. Oliver, “you’re going to have your pieces published, they’ll go over all the world with your name on them, everybody will play them and you’ll be a great boy.” “I don’t want my pieces published, and I don’t want anybody else to play them,” Tom said. Finally by threats and offers of candy he was induced to play it as often and in the manner we desired it. After we had com­ pleted our copy we sat down to play it. Tom was perfectly infuriated, tears coursed down his cheeks and he attempted to push me off the piano-stool; the demon was in him then, surely. “I don’t want him to play my pieces,” he said. Threats and can­ dy again appeased his anger and he became as gentle as a lamb (H.J.Weisel, Dwights Journal, Jan. 1863, emphasis added). What a twist on the “terror of enjoyment” of which Saidiya Hartman has told us much. Though coerced to repeatedly and numbingly “step lively” across the piano keys accord­ ing to the whimsy of Wiesel, Oliver, and company, Tom does not here expend performative labor in order to manufacture a scene of abject, feigned pleasure for the delight of on­ lookers. While his subjection is indeed a byproduct of the gross inequity he faces in this disturbing anecdote, his performance--one in which he is forced to generate music for reasons other than his own, one in which he is impelled to render material in a style dic­ tated by strangers, one in which he is instructed to act as an instrument to be played by someone other than himself—yields a kind of terror unique to Blind Tom’s complex biog­ raphy. At stake in the contest between Wiesel, the Morrisonian “Schoolteacher” figure, and Tom, the captive “specimen” of curiosity, is a form of intellectual property that the enslaved recognizes as solely his domain (Morrison). The violence that yields terror and an unusual show of fury on the part of the captive is one derived from artistic theft. Wiesel’s evaluation is measured, but ultimately damning. The “Galop” lacks “coherence.” His “musical improvisations” have “no musical merit whatsoever…. He can not repeat long songs and discourses without the loss of many syllables,” and “[h]is fingering is not ‘that of the schools.” In “all of Tom’s performances” he claims to have witnessed, Wiesel concludes that, “his fantasy did not take him beyond the bounds of relationship of his ton­ ic, to this he clung like a ship-wrecked mariner to a spar,—it was his tower of (p. 409) strength” (Weisel). Wiesel’s pejorative observation aims to expose the core unoriginality of Tom’s craft. But what does it mean to “cling” to your tonic, the tonal center of a tune, when hostile transcribers lurk in your audience? If Tom was aware of and steadfastly resistant to Wiesel and his task, if he was present for Wiesel’s interpretations of his material and made it clear to Oliver that “he didn’t like [Wiesel] at all and wanted to go away out of this ‘ole town,’” who’s to say that he didn’t engage in fugitive tactics to obscure his prop­ erty? Who’s to say that Blind Tom didn’t refuse to dance according to someone else’s command on the (musical) auction block? Who’s to say that he didn’t withhold, obfuscate, render his art strangely reflective of his own singular universe? Who’s to say that even in

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative his perpetual entrapment, Blind Tom hadn’t found a way through his music to sail like those enchanting ships that spelled freedom for Douglass on the Chesapeake Bay?

“Strange, Weird Improvisations of Everyday”: The Radical Acoustics of Captivity Can you be captive and still be free? Can you be “mentally impaired” and also an innova­ tor? These are the volatile questions that lie at the root of most studies of Blind Tom. For the architects of the slave narrative genre, the answer to the former question is, of course, largely a moot one since the genre was itself predicated upon showcasing the movement from bondage to liberation. Tom’s story clearly disrupts the temporal arc of the narrative that “ends” in material freedom and instead calls for us to consider whether it is possible to locate a kind of alterity that serves as its own form of emancipation for a figure like him. Yet the latter question involving Tom’s capacity for “innovation” and creativity further complicates how one defines “freedom” in his epic tale. For clinical scholars such as Oliv­ er Sacks, the answer as to whether or not Blind Tom was a “creative” individual is a re­ sounding “no,” since, as he argues, [c]reativity…entails not only a ‘what,’ a talent, but a “who”—strong personality characteristics, a strong identity, personal sensibility, a personal style, which flow into the talent, interfuse it, give it personal body and form…. Creativity has to do with inner life—with the flow of new ideas and strong feelings. Creativity, in this sense, was probably never possible for Tom (Sacks, liner notes). To Sacks, Tom’s apparent savant autism negates his free will, circumscribes his “inner life” and, seemingly, above all else, cancels out his ability to produce a personal imprint that transcends the auto-compulsive symptoms of his mental impairment. What his cham­ pions hail as virtuosic—a prodigious memory, impeccable instrumentation, eccentric ver­ bosity—are, to Sacks, confirmations of his disability and signs of a (p. 410) condition that “indifferently mi[xes]” the “large and small, the trivial and momentous” with “little dispo­ sition to generalize from these particulars or to integrate them with each other, causally or historically, or with the self” (Sacks, liner notes). But Stephen Best counters this claim by recognizing Tom’s capacity to “imitate.” Though his execution of the secondo in his performances, heralded by Davis and others, may seem to some like mere duplication, Best contends that “[w]hen imitating, Tom became, in the act of repetition, a creative subject however qualified that creativity and marginal that subjectivity might have been” (56–9). I would add that what is missing from Sacks’s useful observations here is an historical contextualization of his career. What do “creativi­ ty” and “mental impairment” look and sound like within the culture of slavery? And what constitutes “a strong identity, personal sensibility” and “personal style” when one is ren­ Page 18 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative dered a commodity? What if these “savant talents” that “have a more autonomous, even automatic quality [rather] than normal ones” are creatively at odds with the social codes of enslavement? What if Blind Tom’s tale of “automatic” art is one that archives “the thing” who is a man “exhausting” the instrument and thereby becoming an instrument, “a kind of meditiative medium, a conduit” and “a means to the long history of being an instrument” (Sacks liner notes; Moten, “On Escape Velocity”). And what if Blind Tom’s “freedom” derives from his uncanny ability to become both art subject and object, an in­ surgent representational event that exceeds the socio-cultural codes of the peculiar insti­ tution? This is uniquely possible by way of the remarkable sonic skills at his disposal, skills that enable him to redefine and simultaneously create a singular(ly) sound archive of slavery (Davis and Baron, 101–103). From his toddler years he was believed to have “absorbed the music of the antebellum world: a vast repository of black work songs, white ballads and minstrel hits or some­ times a seamless amalgam of all three.” As his captors would observe, “[n]othing existed for him beyond his everlasting thirst for sound.” Words, tones, conversations became fod­ der for his repertoire, material for his consumption, the gateway to his emergence as a kind of recorder of “the sounds of the South,” an embodied, performative ethnographic archive of the soundscape of antebellum America (O’Connell, 34–44). But what did Blind Tom hear? Like his contemporary Walt Whitman, he no doubt heard “America Singing,” but the discordance of the nation’s quotidian sounds, the sounds of nature, mechanical and industrialized sounds, and foreign voices that he mixed and re­ layed in his repertoire would have been at odds with Whitman’s model of fashioning him­ self as “a kind of human audio receiver who channeled the voices of the common people and the voices of the earth and the cosmos, receiving their signals and broadcasting them outward as his own” (Kun). Whitman as transistor poet picks up the vocals of mechanics and carpenters, masons and boatmen, shoemakers and woodcutters, and “the delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work/or of the girl sewing or washing,” creating a chorus across these am­ ber waves that might drown out the simmering political dissonance and emerging dis­ unionism of 1860 (Whitman). What he fades out and what Josh Kun’s work beautifully sounds out as a clarion call to that old gray poet are the voices of those other Americas, like the one that Douglass hears with chilling lucidity in his 1845 Narrative (p. 411) of the Life, the one that was, as Kun puts it, “an America of viciousness, of bondage and slavery, of institutionalized, nationalized racial violence wrecked on subjugated black bodies” (Kun). So bring that beat back. The politics of black listenership first articulated in Douglass’s masterpiece come even more fully to the surface in the situation of Blind Tom, a figure who stands simultaneously within and outside of the circle of his fellow captives and his captors, and still more, a figure who is also perched in yet another outer concentric cir­ cle, listening to and recording the intermingling sounds of both universes as they collide with one another on muddied frequencies. Page 19 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative Consider the elements of a tricked out Blind Tom concert playlist: on the one hand, all the hits: America’s mid-19th-century classical-music soundtrack: Beethoven’s Sonata Pathe­ tique and Moonlight, the Rigoletto opera, Mendelssohn’s Wedding Song or Schumann’s Erl King, “a heavily arpeggiated Thalberg fantasia and a rich sentimental dose of Gottschalk” (O’Connell, page), a piano forte solo of Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophet,” alongside Chopin’s funeral march. But cross that line up with some trickster keyboard antics: imita­ tions of the guitar, the harp, and the African banjo and then for a curve ball add some techno-human fireworks, pre-Hendrix “machine gun” style piano riffs: imitations of the sewing machine, the staccato punch of drums and fifes, the thunderous cacophony of warfare—”the discharge of musketry and heavy guns, the trudge of soldiers and [the] gal­ lop of horses”—all along the black(est) of keys. Play all this while human beat boxing the dissonant sounds of music boxes and railroad cars, “the Dutch woman and hand organ,” and try whistling “Dixie” while you’re at it as well and you have more than the sum of any contemporary Girl Talk (MMP). His onomatopoeias, his forceful utterances and exclamations, “displaced sonic difference beyond the scope of white comprehension” while taking “a crucial step in the formation of a sonically informed, oppositional slave creativity” (Heller-Roazen, 13; Radano, 74). Belligerent and bewildering, ambient and aberrant, Blind Tom (re)sounded manmade as well as ecological noises all around him, playing back the dissonances of the nation. His repertoire manifests and transcends the kind of “aural sectional consciousness” de­ scribed by historian Mark Smith in that it both reflected the acoustic distinctiveness of North and South and yet confounded putative regional boundaries by way of sound (Smith, 14). He is the “noisy” slave, the one who sounded out(side) multiple socio-cultural spheres (Smith, 34). He is the heterophonic captive who, like his brethren who sang in response to and in conversation with one another, produced a symphony of sounds that spanned the dimensions of his environment. From the captive world of his childhood, a world of corporeal punishment, “crying and tears,” “the gruesome noises and silences of premod­ ern bondage” (Smith, 156; White and White, 63; “Wonderful ‘Blind Tom’”; MMP, 5; Levine) to the industrial rumble of the steam engine barreling through the plantocracy, his sonic “quality of doubleness” is “simultaneously complicit with and critical of the ide­ ology of those who dominate” him (M. Smith, 231; V. Smith, 20). The work of Blind Tom listening thus enables us to consider the black captive’s agency as a recorder—and not just the object that is recorded by others. His act echoes forth a (p. 412) response to music theorist Peter Szendy’s query: “Can one make a listening lis­ tened to? Can [one] transmit [one’s] listening, unique as it is?” (Szendy, 5–6). Blind Tom flips the hegemonic notational script, as it were, in the culture of bondage. His eccentric soundings force us to re-interrogate the acoustic architecture of slavery and, more specif­ ically, to consider who has the power to listen to sound as well as to record that strange, mercurial universe. A “hot mic” of sorts, he picked up the sounds of Whitman’s (free, white) world of musicality and joyous labor, Douglass’ (black) world of audible, an­ guished, and yet persevering captivity, as well as the turbulent sounds of the natural Page 20 of 24

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative world unleashed, the raucous sounds of military turmoil, the excess(ive) sounds of nascent modernity, becoming, in the process, an instrument of modernity himself. His pre-phonographic performances augmented the “new presence of ‘Negro’ public sound” and “not only unsteadied definitions of a national music but also amplified the fractured identity of the nation as a whole” (Radano, 177; Thompson). Still more, Blind Tom’s radi­ cal acoustics would create the template for a capacious sphere of selfhood that stretches between and beyond freedom and enslavement and into the world of black radical, avantgarde emancipation.

Acknowledgment “Last Night of Tom,” playbill for Masonic Hall, March 17, 1866. Harvard Theatre Collec­ tion, ‘US theatres’ playbill collection, call number TCS 68. My thanks to Caitlin Marshall for bringing this item to my attention. “Specimens of Blind Tom’s Vocal Compositions,” April 10, 1867. Many thanks to Stephanie Jensen-Moulton for sharing this archival document with me.

References Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Andrews, William. To Tell A Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiogra­ phy, 1760-1865. University of Illinois Press, 1988. Baraka, Amiri. Liner notes to John Davis. John Davis Plays Blind Tom: The Eighth Wonder. Newport Classic, LTD., 1999. Best, Stephen M. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. “‘Blind Tom’ Again,” Dwight’s Journal of Music. November 22, 1862. “Blind Tom,” Dwight’s Journal of Music. January 24, 1863. “Blind Tom, the Musical Prodigy.” Illustration. Prints and Photographs Division, Schom­ burg Library, NYPL. “Blind Tom’s Concerts at Mechanics’ Hall, Wednesday Evening, September 23, 1868… ” American Broadsides and Ephemera; First Series, no. 20664. http://catalog.nypl.org/ record=b16720176~S1. (p. 413) “The Blind Negro Pianist.” Dwight’s Journal of Music, April 14, 1860. “The Blind Negro Boy Pianist.” Dwight’s Journal of Music, February 11, 1860.

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative Biographical Sketch of Millie Christine, the Carolina Twin, Surnamed the Two-Headed Nightingale and the Eighth Wonder of the World. C. 1889. Cather, Willa. Nebraska State Journal, May 18, 1894 in ed. William M. Curtain, The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902. Lincoln, Nebraska: Uni­ versity of Nebraska Press. Davis, John and M. Grace Baron, “Blind Tom: A Celebrated Slave Pianist Coping with the Stress of Autism,” eds. M. Grace Baron, June Groden, Gerald Groden and Lewis P. Lipsitt, Stress and Coping in Autism. New York: Oxford UP, 2006: 96–125. Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Blind Tom, Atlantic Monthly, November 1862,” ed. Jean Pfaelz­ er, A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 1995. Reprint in Dwight’s Journal of Music, November 8, 1862. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. New York: Penguin, 1982. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Jensen-Moulton, Stephanie. “Finding Autism in the Compositions of a 19th-Century Prodi­ gy: Reconsidering “Blind Tom Wiggins” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Nell Lerner and Joseph N. Straus. New York: Routledge, 2006: 199–216. ——.”‘Specimens’ and ‘Peculiar Idiosyncrasies’: Songs of ‘Blind Tom’ Wiggins,” American Music Review XL, no. 2, Spring 2011. Found at http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/ isam/publications/AMR/2011_Spring/article2.html Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. The Marvelous Musical Prodigy, Blind Tom, the Negro Boy Pianist, Whose performances at the Great St. James and Eygptian Halls, London and Salle Hertz, Paris, Have Created Such a Profound Sensation. Anecdotes, Songs, Sketches of the Life, Testimonials of Musi­ cians and Savans and Opinions of the American and English Press of ‘Blind Tom. Mildred Stock Collection, Rare Book Division, Schomburg Library, NYPL, folder 13. Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture, Black Consciousness: African American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1987.

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative Moten, Fred. “On Escape Velocity: The Informal and the Exhausted (With Conditional Branching,” unpublished paper. ——. to consent to not being a single being. Durham, NC: Duke University, forthcoming. “Musical Genius—Blind Tom,” The Public Ledger, September 27, 1865, Songs, Sketch of the Life of Blind Tom, The Marvelous Musical Prodigy, The Negro Boy Pianist Whose Re­ cent Performances as the Great St. James’ and Egyptian Halls, London, and Salle Hertz, Paris, Have Created Such a Profound Sensation, Anecdotes, Songs, Sketches of the Life, Testimonials of Musicians and Savans and Opinions of the American and English Press of Blind Tom. New York: French & Wheat, Book and Job Printers, n.d., Cornell University Press reprint. O’Connell, Deidre. The Ballad of Blind Tom: Slave Pianist, America’s Lost Musical Genius. New York: Overlook Press, 2009. (p. 414) Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Liter­ ature,” in The Slave’s Narrative, Eds. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York: Oxford U Press, 1985. Radano, Ronald. Lying Up A Nation: Race and Black Music Chicago: U Chicago Press, 2003), Reiss, Benjamin. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death and Memory in Barnum’s America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2001. Riis, Thomas L. “The Legacy of a Prodigy Lost in Mystery,” The New York Times. March 5, 2000. Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Music and the Brain. New York: Vintage, 2007. ——. liner notes for John Davis Plays Blind Tom, the Eighth Wonder. Newport Classic, LTD, 1999. Slave Songs of the United States compiled by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1867. Smith, Mark. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. “St. Louis, May, 1861,” Dwight’s Journal of Music. May 18, 1861. 55–550. Southall, Geneva Handy. Blind Tom, the Black Pianist-Composer, Continually Enslaved. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1999.

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“Puzzling the Intervals”: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Nar­ rative ——. Blind Tom: The Post-Civil War Enslavement of a Black Musical Genius (Minneapolis, MN: Challenge Books, 1979). ——. The Continuing Enslavement of Blind Tom, the Black Pianist-Composer (1865-1887). Minneapolis, MN: Challenge Books, 1983. Stepto, Robert. “I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives” in eds. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Slave’s Narrative, 225–241. Szendy, Peter. Listen: A History of Our Ears. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Ameri­ cas. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Trotter, James Monroe. Music and Some Highly Musical People. Boston: Lee and Shep­ hard, 1881. Weheliye, Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, Duke UP, 2005. Weisel, H.J. “Blind Tom. CUMBERLAND, MD. Dec. 18.” Dwight’s Journal of Music. Janu­ ary 24, 1863. 340–342. White and Graham White, Shane. The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, ed. David S. Reynolds. New York: Ox­ ford UP, 2005. “Wonderful ‘Blind Tom.’” The Washington Post, Nov. 28, 1886. My thanks to Deidre O’Connell for bringing this clipping to my attention and for her thoughtful observations with regards to the notion of Tom’s “additions.”

Daphne A. Brooks

Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life

The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Post­ memory Narratives of Postemancipation Life   Joycelyn Moody The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.016

Abstract and Keywords This essay examines Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and Life of William J. Brown, narratives of first-generation free-born black and indigenous persons in postemancipation Rhode Is­ land. Eldridge and Brown separately assert intricate, representational truths about their (fore-) parents’ enslavement and their own ostensible free status. Each conveys a configu­ ration of historical truth about institutional slavery, namely that the challenge of repre­ senting slavery—both corporeal bondage and the institutionalized abridgement of black liberties after its illegalization—required conveying slavery as existing within and emerg­ ing from a white culture of incoherence, infamously embodied in the Brown Brothers of Providence: John Brown leading whites in the enslavement of people of color, and Moses and his Quaker cohort rejecting slavery on religious grounds. The bifurcated political con­ texts that shaped the ideologies of Eldridge’s and Brown’s respective white readerships further determined the “truthfulness” of these free-born authors’ shrewd depictions of the black population in early Rhode Island. Keywords: memoirs, Elleanor Eldridge, William J. Brown, postemancipation, postmemory narratives, Brown Broth­ ers, Providence, Rhode Island, white readers, mixed-race people, Native Americans

WHEN studied alongside black life narratives gathered under headings such as slavery, bondage, and fugitivity, narratives of “freedom” by antebellum black authors expose the elusiveness of an always tenuous condition of liberty. To illuminate contexts of black life, especially after emancipation and, furthermore, especially as depicted in narratives pro­ duced by the formerly enslaved, this essay examines life writings by two nominally free northern black persons in Providence, Rhode Island: Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (1838) and Life of William J. Brown (1883). Considering these nineteenth-century narratives (as representatives of other autobiographies by “free” narrators) while thinking through slave narratives enables an appreciation of modes of negotiation deployed by African Americans writing their family’s first experiences with an ostensible liberty. Eldridge (b. March 26, 1785—d. 1862) and Brown (b. November 10, 1814—d. February 19, 1885) il­ lustrate Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, “the relationship of the second genera­ tion to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were Page 1 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Generation 103). Their accounts of the postemancipation state reveal the un­ stable, fragile terms of freedom in a social landscape where bondage and liberty refer to matters tidily separated into discrete boxes. Moreover, virtually all published slave narra­ tives—before and after the Thirteenth Amendment—were written or narrated by persons at least nominally free, and they reflect on slavery not as a narrowly regional or local ex­ perience but as a part of the philosophical, economic, political, and social fabric of the United States. Reading the postmemory narratives of Elleanor Eldridge and William J. Brown—each writing as the first generation of free black offspring in their respective Rhode Island families—enables exploration of the “truth” of slave narratives, one that in­ cludes an examination of ideologies and cultural (p. 416) forces operative in postemanci­ pation philosophical landscapes where concepts of truth remain defined and controlled. Because Elleanor Eldridge was never legally enslaved, she and her amanuensis, Frances Harriet Whipple, did not have to negotiate a former condition of servitude to coauthor Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge. Rather than palliate their experience for white readers, as later slave narrators were compelled to do, they had instead to navigate the distance be­ tween Eldridge’s postmemory of a “slave past”—as a descendant of enslaved Africans and proud Narragansetts—and her embattled present—as an affluent noncitizen victimized because of her subjugated social identities. Where later self-emancipated black authors exert narrative authority as figures “further estranged from the white reader by a slave past” (Andrews, Novelization 23), Eldridge and Whipple manipulate to rhetorical advan­ tage the slave past of Eldridge’s African ancestors. Before Frederick Douglass, Harriet Ja­ cobs, and other black antebellum writers, Eldridge (and Whipple) perceived that “they would have to win the literary authority they desired for themselves and their stories” (Andrews, Novelization 23, italics added). Formerly enslaved authors who depict­ ed illegal escape from a cruel South, William L. Andrews argues, had “to prove worthy of the trust and deference that whites almost automatically awarded to one of their own race who recounted an escape from cruel Indian captivity” (Novelization 23). In poste­ mancipation Rhode Island, Whipple and Eldridge pursued the same level of respect white readers granted to white male authors and to property-owning white men, especially those transgressed against by the legal system. Before Douglass, Wells Brown, and Harri­ et Wilson, Whipple and Eldridge perceived that “certain kinds of facts plotted in certain kinds of story structures moved white readers to conviction and to support of the antislav­ ery cause” (Andrews, Novelization 23–24). Moreover, Eldridge’s oral storytelling skills en­ abled her to empower Whipple to inscribe a compelling story of the Middle Passage. In the 1850s, some black authors broke free of the fetters Eldridge had overcome, once they realized “that without a new and expanded awareness of black voice and the possibilities of black storytelling, the traditional medium of black narrative would continue to restrict, if not distort, its message” (Andrews, Novelization 24). Arguably, however, their determi­ nation to “make an autobiography read like a novel” was prefaced in the 1830s by a littleknown mixed-race woman’s fugitive truths of representing slavery through intricate acts of interlocution.

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life Writing at the end of Reconstruction, Brown’s own complexly constructed story intimates that in 1883 fugitive truths remained the only available to black people even after “free­ dom.” His Life contends that the extraordinary literary strides black print culture made during the Civil War and afterward could counter, but not completely dismantle, the com­ promised state of freedom that abolition putatively wrought. This essay argues that the respective narratives of Eldridge and Brown represent north­ ern black freedom in early nineteenth-century Rhode Island as a condition painfully pro­ scribed. The state’s white supremacist government, each demonstrates, so reduced the capacity of black people to live with dignity that the telling of “free” black life can scarce­ ly be achieved. Each narrator descended from an emancipated African father who had been enslaved in eighteenth-century Rhode Island. The first edition of (p. 417) Eldridge’s dictated antebellum biography and Brown’s postbellum autobiography reveal these life writers’ struggles to construct “free” representations of a free identity. The Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (1838) was written by Frances Whipple, and Brown wrote Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I. (1883); both texts’ respective audiences were shaped by the elitist racism of early U.S. gender, cultural, and historical forces. In this rhetorical context, Eldridge and Brown strategically engaged an intricate play of representational truths about their (fore-) parents’ enslavement and their own ostensible freedom in poste­ mancipation Providence. These first-generation free blacks conveyed a particular configu­ ration of historical truth about institutional slavery: representing slavery was challenging because slavery—both corporeal bondage and the institutionalized abridgement of black liberties after its illegalization—existed within and emerged from a culture of ambiva­ lence and incoherence within white society. Some whites vigorously maintained the en­ slavement of people of color in their midst while others ardently rejected African and in­ digenous slavery as contrary to their religious principles or to Anglo-Americans’ own fight for independence from England. The political values that shaped the ideologies of the life writers’ white readership also affected the “truthfulness” of the rhetorical depictions by the state’s first generation of free(d) blacks. Though whites differed on the question of slavery, Rhode Island’s Africans—hardly mono­ lithic—were far more unified, as virtually every organization of, for, and/or by blacks pur­ sued its abolition (Horton and Horton, In Hope ix). Eldridge and Brown were born some 30 years apart; that age gap and their different genders illuminate key features of free(d) blacks of their eras. In the 1820s and 30s, Eldridge bought, renovated, and rented out re­ al estate property in Providence, and during the latter decade, white men plotted to rob her of it. By 1840, she had regained her property through a series of lawsuits in which she was a named defendant or plaintiff. Also by 1840, Brown had matured into young adulthood as a community leader. In youth, his Life attests, he had been educated in Providence’s private schools for black people, and with his natural mathematical talents, he developed impressive financial savvy but lacked business opportunities. Counter to Ira Berlin’s claim that “The sudden and spectacular expansion of the free black population initiated a massive restructuring of black life” (Making 90, emphasis added), the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and the Life of William J. Brown document that black people “took new names, established new residences, reconstructed their families, found jobs, pur­ Page 3 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life chased property, and organized churches,” as Berlin enumerates, but the restructuring of free(d) black life was at best protracted and incomplete. The feud between John Brown and Moses Brown of Providence encapsulates white Rhode Islanders’ bifurcated dispositions. Social historians have documented the activities of these innovative capitalists and their 60-plus sea vessels transporting rum, slaves, and other cargo between 1748 and 1760 (e.g., see Rappleye). Brown Brothers, as their com­ pany was known, disregarded the state’s 1750 illegalization of the Atlantic slave trade. By the end of the century, however, John Brown and Moses Brown were on opposite sides of the slavery debate; Moses organized the Providence Society of Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, which sued John in 1794 for illegal slave trading (see Rappleye 21; Melish, “Re­ covering” 106). On the one hand, Rhode Islanders virulently upheld (p. 418) slavery; al­ though Rhode Island slave traders invested more in rum importation than in slaves, their vessels continued to transport Africans even after the state outlawed slave importation in 1750 (Coughtry 6–7). From the very settling of the state in the seventeenth century, Euro­ peans had begun passing a variety of ordinances to maintain slavery. One early seven­ teenth-century ordinance prohibited an enslaved person from being left alone in a room with a free person. Fewer than 10 years before Rhode Island instituted gradual emancipa­ tion, “at least 14 percent of Rhode Island households still held slaves” (Melish, Disowning 56). And after the American Revolution, merchants continued to fight for slavery in local, state, and federal courts (Coughtry 18). On the other hand, Rhode Island instituted a se­ ries of acts to abolish slavery. Initially, some Africans enslaved in Rhode Island were bound for limited terms of service, not for life. Once it outlawed the slave trade in 1750, the state further legislated gradual emancipation in February 1784. Moses Brown, local African activists, and white religious advocates pursued further reform through legisla­ tion. Moreover, during the American Revolution, their efforts to protect slaves’ rights, es­ pecially to preserve enslaved families as units, drove the General Assembly of Rhode Is­ land in 1779 to prohibit the sale of enslaved persons beyond state boundaries without their consent.

Nominally Black, Nominally Free After Rhode Island emancipated enslaved peoples in 1784, the numbers of free(d) blacks in the state fluctuated, but they always comprised a minority. Although Rhode Island had earlier enslaved the largest number of Africans in New England—they comprised onetenth of the state’s population in 1750—by 1840, census data for Providence, Rhode Is­ land, would list only one free person of color for every 35 whites in a total population of 58,073. Of this number, 56,479 were free whites; 1,593 free people of color; and one an enslaved person. A decade before, an additional six persons had been enslaved in 1830, when the Providence census counted 45,454 free whites and 1,557 free people of color as well. (See Cottrol; Coughtry; Horton and Horton, Slavery; and Melish.) However, not everyone labeled black in 1840 Rhode Island in fact descended from African ancestors. Rhode Island legislators indiscriminately labeled many different peoples as col­ Page 4 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life ored and Negro, irrespective of national origin or family heritage, and effectively deracial­ ized people of color to construct a black-white binary. White supremacist mythologies eventually vanquished actual ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism in pre-Civil War soci­ ety along the eastern seaboard (Forbes 262–63). Earlier, in 1712, the most common terms for enslaved people were negroes or Indian, as some Native Americans were enslaved or bound to servitude in colonial Rhode Island alongside Africans. Their enslavement partly ensued from tribal losses in regional land wars, including the Pequot War and King Philip’s War (cf. Melish, “Recovering” 127). Like the involuntary servitude of most of the state’s Africans, the bondage of Rhode Island’s indigenous peoples reflects the ambiva­ lence of the white population. Paul R. Campbell (p. 419) and G. W. LaFantasie assert: “Indi­ an slavery had been banned by an act of the General Assembly in March 1676. But as with most Rhode Island laws, the act had been difficult, if not impossible, to en­ force” (69). Into the eighteenth century, African and indigenous peoples’ proximity and shared bondage produced an increasing number of offspring of mixed ancestry. Signifi­ cantly, then, although the common characterizations colored and black illustrated white disregard for critical cultural differences, they also aptly indicated the common oppres­ sion of people so labeled, regardless of their former condition of servitude or indenture. Eldridge and Brown respectively describe free(d) black life as occupying an incoherent, liminal space between bondage and independence, ensnared but, in David Cohen and Jack Greene’s titular phrase, “neither slave nor free.” Before emancipation in the U.S. North, people of African descent tended to unite around a “unified social identity” as ar­ dent champions of the rights of their enslaved kin and neighbors (Rael 14). Unlike free people of color in hierarchical and stratified slavery sites such as New Orleans and the Caribbean, who risked a return to bondage if they fought slavery, free people of color in the U.S. North could agitate for sociopolitical rights before and after gradual emancipa­ tion without fearing the return of formerly enslaved blacks to legal bondage (Rael 21). The life writings by Eldridge and Brown depict their respective individual struggles against Rhode Island’s discordant white population. Brown’s Life also enumerates united efforts he made with other free(d) black people in the generations between the publica­ tion of Eldridge’s biographies and of his own autobiography. The Memoirs portrays El­ dridge as an exemplary individual victim rather than representative of a collective of op­ pressed peoples. At the same time, however, it condemns white patriarchal dominance over women and over persons of African and/or indigenous heritage. In 1883, Brown’s Life illustrates that the narrator, born free, and his father, born into slavery, faced similar problems of racialized disenfranchisement. Clearly, the political work of black narratives in the state after 1784 included challenging persistent racialized discrimination and rejecting the stigmas of slavery. Postemancipa­ tion freedom from slavery was merely a nominal condition in Providence’s institutions, from segregated civic celebrations to predominantly white churches. For example, al­ though gradual emancipation acts required that former masters educate formerly en­ slaved people and the post nati children who would continue in bondage after 1784, not all black children received formal education. Even those whites who had championed the end of slavery did not frequent black spaces, tacitly exhibiting disinterest in the cultiva­ Page 5 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life tion of a racially integrated society. The anonymous authors of A Short History of the African Union Meeting and School-House, Erected in Providence (1821), for another ex­ ample, complained that, although Quakers had paid for the school building, “The Society of Friends have held only one meeting in the house. This is deeply regretted. It is sincere­ ly wished, that they will often make it convenient to favour the people of colour with their advice and instruction” (5). White “friends” of people of color generally, then, failed to foster cross-racial alliances in public spaces. Eldridge’s early republic court battles illus­ trate the legal, financial, and economic assault—and resulting mental, emotional, and psy­ chological anguish—that people of color experienced by white (p. 420) hands. After Recon­ struction, Brown would recall numerous injurious acts of cruel aggression against people of color before the Civil War.

Elleanor Eldridge Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (1838) was written to aid the freeborn African-indigenous Eldridge in regaining her real estate property, her respected name, and the right to the pursuit of wealth. Eldridge’s amanuensis, Frances Whipple, was a developing writer with strong ideological convictions, albeit also a woman naïve and condescending about racial inequality. When she teamed up with Eldridge, Whipple had already published several an­ tislavery titles, and in the Memoirs she generally rises to the narrative challenges laden in Eldridge’s race, gender, class, and caste. Eldridge’s chief authorial work, conversely, was harder, for it consisted of shaping Whipple into an effective amanuensis. Immersed in lawsuits to regain her property, Eldridge would likely have prioritized constructing the Memoirs as a money-maker. Under Whipple’s pen, however, the text’s greater goal be­ comes to model black (female) diligence and enterprise for Rhode Island’s people of col­ or. Whipple writes in the preface to the 1841 (second) edition: This little book is published for the express purpose of giving a helping hand to suffering and persecuted merit. And while its direct object is to render some little assistance to one who has been the subject of peculiar adversity and wrong, it may subserve a very important purpose, in bringing forward, and setting before the colored population, an example of industry and untiring perseverance, every way worthy their regard and earnest attention. (5). The tension between Eldridge’s personal agenda of regaining her property and her amanuensis’s of modeling exemplary “colored” respectability suggests the challenge El­ dridge encountered in representing the truth of her experience as a woman of color in Providence. Her nominal freedom is apparent in the very conditions under which she pro­ duced her life story. Nonetheless, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge conveys astute insights into the capacity and power of novelized African ardor and achievement. In the years immediately following the 1841 edition, formerly enslaved authors would revise U.S. black print cultures with great rhetorical sophistication. Collaborating before the emergence of now classic accounts of slavery, Eldridge and Whipple helped set the narrative terms for such antebellum authors Page 6 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. Ardent students of the literary tradition to which Eldridge and Whipple had contributed, the later authors knew, as William L. Andrews argues, that to be taken seriously, they had to write in such a way that “the authority they aspired to was predicated on the authenticity that they could project into and through a text” (“Novelization” 23). Through Whipple, Eldridge had faced down this authorial prerequisite in the original 1838 edition of Memoirs, for her mediated authority emerges partly from the authenticity (p. 421) she and her amanuensis project onto and through a most rare literary subject: an African-Narragansett woman of beset childhood, entrepreneurial adulthood, and now wrongful plight. Moreover, Eldridge had maneuvered both authority and authenticity at a complex moment: born one year and one month into Rhode Island’s gradual emancipation, she had come of age in a state of confusion and ambivalence, of competing and contradictory legal ordinances.

Eldridge’s Ancestors Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge novelizes the transatlantic journey of Eldridge’s “honest” African ancestors in terms at once sentimental and authoritative. It features a scene of African abduction to refute Jeffersonian claims that Africans were naturally created for la­ bor, servitude, and Anglo-American protection. The Memoirs depicts Eldridge’s grandfa­ ther Dick bargaining his “staple commodity” and other textiles among European traders when he and his spouse suddenly realize that the traders’ ship has begun to sail away with them and their children aboard (Memoirs 1841, 14–15). The Memoirs portrays slav­ ery as horrific because it lures, or snatches, Africans involuntarily from their beloved homelands: Dick (as he is apparently renamed by the traders) watches with “streaming eyes” as the coastline of “his own beautiful Congo” disappears (16). Slavery breaks up families and generally subjects “simple-hearted” peoples to unspeakable cruelties. Among its most brutal atrocities, slavery shatters the emotional and psychological well-being of those ensnared: Elleanor’s grandmother must rescue Dick from a suicide attempt. Like other early nineteenth-century black narrators (and their amanuenses) who self-con­ sciously constructed narratives that “would…sound factual,” Eldridge and Whipple au­ thenticate their abduction episode with natural discourse, “traceable historical referents” (Andrews, Novelization 23, 26). Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge includes a series of footnotes glossing the foliage and flora, the “mangrove and bondo,” Dick grieved as “his own beloved Zaire” faded: “We cannot conclude this account of the principal veg­ etable productions of Lower Guinea, without mentioning that colossus of the earth, the enormous baobab, or Adansonia digitata, which is here called aliconda bonda and mapou. It abounds throughout the whole kingdom of Congo; and is so large that the arms of twenty men cannot embrace it.” To authenticate these facts further, they cite “Mal­ tenbruc [sic], on the authority of Tuchelli” (Memoirs, 1841, 16). Readers who doubt that slavery meant the removal of Africans from lush and magnificent lands, in other words, would have to presume to know, if not as much as these scientists (and Whipple and El­ dridge), then a competing set of biologists and botanists to refute them.

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life Furthermore, the Memoirs’s novelized African abduction argues for its co-authors’ superi­ or knowledge of Africa and slavery through a combination of oral family history and post­ memory narration. Eldridge knows her ancestors’ experience “firsthand”; thereby, the ac­ count is true, credible. Through her interlocution Whipple, too, knows (p. 422) the Middle Passage “firsthand.” Similar slave narratives were familiar to U.S. readers by 1838, acces­ sible in the Liberator, for example, for seven years by the time the Memoirs was pub­ lished. The rhetorical inroads Eldridge makes, then, emerge in this abduction story’s ad­ umbration of Eldridge’s own racialized oppression. Her inheritance is her grandparents’ story. Their authenticity, tragedy, and sympathy become hers. The Memoirs further connects Eldridge’s raced and gendered victimization in the 1830s to her forefathers’ degradation as it situates the three African sons in the history of a racist colonial American military. Whipple writes: “At the commencement of the American Revolution, Robin Eldridge, with his two brothers, presented themselves as candidates for liberty. They were promised their freedom, with the additional premium of 200 acres of land in the Mohawk country, apiece” (1841, p. 19). Serving “as if the collar had never bowed down their free heads, nor the chain oppressed their strong limbs” (ibid.), Eldridge’s father and uncles are ultimately defrauded along with the other 100 or so en­ slaved black and/ or indigenous men, free(d) blacks, and “mulattos” who formed Rhode Island’s two “colored” battalions. As Rhode Island’s population of able-bodied white troops dwindled, Anglo-American men had debated the soldierly fitness and fortitude of “Indians, mulattoes and negroes,” finally enacting a February 1778 law to allow men of color to enlist and “receive all the bounties, wages and encouragements allowed by the Continental Congress to any soldier inlisting [sic] into their service” (Rider, Tract No. 10, pp. 28, 33, 11). Whipple writes: At the close of the war they were pronounced Free; but their services were paid in the old Continental money, the depreciation, and final ruin of which, left them no wealth but the one priceless gem, Liberty….Having no funds, they could not go take possession of their lands on the Mohawk. And to this day, their children have never been able to recover them; though, by an act of Congress, it was provided, that all soldiers’ children who were left incapable of providing for themselves, should “inherit the promises” due to their fathers. (1841, p. 21) So Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge illuminates the persistence of racialized degradation from Eldridge’s ancestors’ abduction in precolonial Africa to the theft of her real estate property in early nineteenth-century Rhode Island. In 1831 as in 1631, black and abject were so conjoined in the white imagination that “free black” still constitutes an oxymoron in Eldridge’s day. The emphasis in the Memoirs on “Mohawk country” proves ironic in that, after the war, Robin Eldridge married Hannah Prophet, a daughter of a family “which was probably a portion of the Narragansett tribe” (Memoirs 1841, p. 22). Robin eventually purchased a small lot in Warwick, Rhode Island, where he and Hannah raised nine children until Hannah’s death in 1794. Page 8 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life Before her father’s death in 1803, Elleanor was bound out in Warwick Neck, Rhode Is­ land, from 1800 until 1809. Both she and William J. Brown lived as child servants with white families. The 1820 Rhode Island census “shows 20 percent of black children under fourteen living in white-headed households. Of the forty-two white households that had black children listed with them, twenty-two, or 52 percent, showed black children alone (p. 423) with no black adults, indicating that these households did not have whole black families, just children” (Cottrol 50–51). Put another way, for the first generation of black people born into gradual emancipation in Rhode Island, freedom could look a lot like bondage. In addition, Ruth Wallis Herndon observes that “race and gender mattered” in binding out arrangements involving children in early nineteenth-century New England: “Boys were bound out more often than girls, for longer periods of time, and for greater rewards in the form of literacy education. Children of color were bound out in dispropor­ tionately large numbers, for longer periods of time, and for fewer rewards” (Herndon 40). Although Brown lived longer with his natal family than with his white employers before his mother’s death in December 1831, he received extensive formal education (Eldridge had little or none) both because he was male and because he lived in the city of Provi­ dence, which educated black youth through the Providence Female Tract Society in 1815 (Schantz 99), in blacks’ private homes (Brown 22), and in the African Union Meeting and School-House, founded on March 9, 1819, by black religious leaders and local Quakers (A Short History 4). Although the fates of adults who had been bound out as children “were as varied and individual as the indentures themselves” (Herndon 50), census reports would list Eldridge as holding the highest valued real estate of any “colored” woman in Providence as late as 1860 (Cottrol 124–25), and for his part, Brown followed his father and grandfather in investing in real estate; he left a house and land to his wife when he died (Cottrol 123).

Eldridge’s “Freedom” As a woman of both African and indigenous ancestry, Eldridge descended from two peo­ ples’ institutionally defrauded of land. At a sardonic intersection of white power and blood defeat, her enslaved African foreparents had been forced onto lands lost by her in­ digenous ancestors by British war and treaty. Across the nineteenth-century United States, the possession of land conveyed social, political, and economic power to Narra­ gansetts and Africans and their descendants. As Narragansett Samuel Rodman stated in 1867, “And, notwithstanding the deprivations under which we labor, we are attached to our homes. It is the birth-place of our mothers. It is the last gift of our fathers; and there rest the bones of our ancestors” (qtd. in Campbell and LaFantasie 78; see also Berlin, Making 27). As an adult entrepreneur, in 1822 Eldridge applied profits from her domestic arts business, and bought her own home in Providence and eventually purchased addi­ tional real estate property on which she erected rental houses to provide homes for resi­ dents (of color). Then the land and houses were seized, and foreclosure on her property mortgage attempted. Eldridge “consulted Mr. Greene, the State’s Attorney” (Elleanor’s Second Book 28). As defendant or plaintiff across several cases—Carter v. Eldridge (May 1835), Eldridge v. Balch (November 1836), Eldridge v. Balch (January 1837), and Eldridge Page 9 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life v. Balch (May 1839)—she followed a line of women and people of color either filing suit for “debt and damages” or defending themselves against such charges. (For details on Eldridge’s cases, see Lancaster, passim; Brody and Holland 51–56.) Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge tacitly identifies the traumatic dispossession of her land, destruction of her home, and eviction of her tenants, and the ensuing lawsuits as the defining experiences of Eldridge’s life by 1838. They constituted her primary reason for collaborating with Whipple. Eldridge’s major goal for the narrative, then, was un­ doubtedly to inspire every reader to “recommend it to the notice of the humane, and en­ deavor to promote its sale; not for its own sake, but for the sake of her, who depends up­ on its success, for deliverance from the difficulties in which she is involved” (Memoirs 1838, p. 93). It is significant, then, that Whipple inscribes across the Memoirs an episode that competes for readers’ attention: a romance ending with the death of an early lover of Eldridge’s and including love letters from the deceased. This ultimately inane struggle for the biography’s chief drama demonstrates the constraints on Eldridge’s freedom by high­ lighting both the limits of her education, her affluence notwithstanding, and the limits of her ability to shape Whipple into an amanuensis able, if willing, to convey the details of her experience as Eldridge herself desired. (p. 424)

William J. Brown Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I., With Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island, is in several ways the antithesis of Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge. While it shares the Memoirs’s grave agenda to expose the effects of white patriarchal supremacy, Brown’s Life is ironical, playful, sarcastic, sardonic, self-mocking, and often understated. It resists conventional autobiographical structure; it does not follow a strict chronology and rarely specifies dates. Brown thereby suggests that he cannot—need not—differenti­ ate between the antebellum era and the postbellum, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fif­ teenth Amendments notwithstanding, for at no time in his life has he lived more freely than at another time. Indeed, Brown’s rhetorical freedom to construct an artful account of his life contradicts the limits of liberty in virtually every other aspect of his life. Through his Life, he signifies on the failures of the Reconstruction partly by focusing his narrative almost exclusively on his experiences before the Civil War. Writing circa 1880, he depicts white supremacist control in the antebellum North more than he describes black freedom after the War. Brown reveals in the post-Reconstruction period that al­ though white rule over black citizenship may no longer be the letter of the law, it is still the law of the land. Life of William J. Brown documents free(d) black people’s persistent experiences of racism after gradual emancipation in Rhode Island. Yet, whereas Memoirs of Elleanor El­ dridge calls Providence’s free(d) people of color to capitalist self-determination, Brown’s Life abrogates didacticism to remind freedpeople of their lack of genuine liberty. Brown vigorously writes himself and Providence’s free(d) black community into regional history at a time when white neglect threatened the loss or erasure of the record of difference Page 10 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life black people had made to Rhode Island history. He chronicles with dogged attention the social, economic, and political spaces he occupied, the streets he walked and worked. The Life records Brown’s unequivocal presence. To counter city codes that (p. 425) would deny his very presence, Brown inscribes his local environment and quotidian movements in Providence so precisely that readers can scarcely imagine him elsewhere. Moreover, Brown turns the tables on white Providence by detailing the lay of the land with only min­ imal allusion to its central educational edifice: in Brown’s Life, Brown University (founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island) is not, it is not there. As he was himself steadily ignored, Brown names streets, landmarks, and milestone events in the literal shadow of Brown University but only once refers to “the college,” writing: I was out of work and knew I must find something to do to get us [my family] some food. I took some soap and a bucket of clothes, and with my sleeves rolled up went toward the college, inquiring for work as I went along, finding none. At the college I rapped on a student’s door and asked for work, also at a door where a young man wanted his bedstead cleaned and floor washed, which I did; he then wanted some painting done, that I also did; earning four dollars and a half for the job. (64) Incisively, that reference condemns town and gown, for en route to and at “the college” he sought work far beneath his abilities from elite white students whom he could equal or excel in diligence and aptitude.

Brown’s Ancestors Brown opens his Life by situating himself squarely in Providence: “I was born in the town of Providence, state of Rhode Island, November 10, 1814. The house in which I was born was situated on a street running from Power to William Street, the house standing on the southwest corner of a lot belonging to Dr. Pardon Bowen, his mansion being located on the northeast corner of the lot, facing the south side of Power Street” (1). He proclaims both his literacy and his freeborn caste through this invocation of his birth date and birth place while demonstrating the “power” differential that rendered his family city residents but not also citizens. Then Brown distinguishes himself from formerly enslaved black au­ thors who cannot specify their patrimony: “My father’s name was Noah Brown; his father was Cudge Brown and his mother Phillis Brown” (ibid.). Whereas his opening sentences radically depart from many nineteenth-century slave narratives through his ability to identify the white families who presumed to own his forefathers, Brown joins the slave narrative tradition with his unabashed acknowledgment that his progenitors were enslaved. His postbellum account of his paternal ancestors’ transatlantic journey con­ trasts sharply with the novelized reconstruction in Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge: “Grand­ father Brown was born in Africa, and belonged to a firm (named Brown Brothers) consist­ ing of four, named respectively, Joseph, John, Nicholas, and Moses Brown. They held slaves together, each brother selecting out such as they wished for house service; the rest of the slaves to perform out-door labor” (ibid.). From the beginning of the Life, Brown thus insinuates the division between white slavers (p. 426) and the virile Africans in which Page 11 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life they traded. Furthermore, he closes the gap between northern and southern slaves’ expe­ riences in colonial America through the trope of missing documents and unrecorded and thus unknown data: “I am not positive, but believe my grandfather was brought from Africa in the firm’s vessel. He had two or three brothers. One was named Thomas, and the other Sharp or Sharper Brown, and they worked for Moses Brown. My grandfather was occupied as a teamster, doing the team work for two farms….” (ibid.). Brown under­ scores the ambiguity and uncertainty of these details; his ironic tone registers ire, not pathos, at the Brown brothers’ neglect of the names and milestones of those they en­ slaved. William J. Brown honors his grandfather’s performance of empowered, respectable black masculinity by chronicling his paternal devotion. He states that Cudge was freed on No­ vember 10, 1773, when Quaker doctrine inspired Moses Brown (gradually) to manumit his slaves. The Life documents Cudge and Phillis Brown as having had at least four chil­ dren, all born between 1769 and 1788. The Life further notes that Cudge worked two of Moses Brown’s farms; when first married in 1768, Cudge and Phillis lived in a house “to­ wards the north end of Olney Street, owned by Mr. Brown, where he kept his teams” (2). Brown thus specifies the figurative borderland between livestock and whites that his pa­ ternal kin inhabited as workers. Brown lauds his grandfather’s enterprising spirit and condemns the theft of his land by the very man whose religious fervor yielded Cudge’s manumission. Specifically, once working for himself, Cudge “saved his earnings and pur­ chased a lot of Mr. Brown situated on Olney Street…He bought over one hundred feet in width of Mr. Brown, and thirty feet of Mr. Carlisle, adjoining the lot he purchased of Mr. Brown, and over two hundred feet in depth” (Brown 9). Despite numerous attempts—in turn by Cudge and Phillis, their daughter Rhoda and son Noah (William’s father)—to se­ cure a deed for the land Cudge purchased directly from Moses Brown, the latter refused to provide a deed; eventually, Cudge, Phillis, and Rhoda died, still steadily requesting a deed (13–14). The Life asserts that Noah lived on the land and farmed it with his own fam­ ily until 1802, when a white neighbor named Angell bought it illegally from Moses Brown. Then Life of William J. Brown shifts to direct discourse to represent the Quaker’s rational­ ization for the sale: “‘I recollect it [Noah’s request for a deed] but did not think about it when I sold the lot; now as your father lived in my house for a good many years, I guess we are about square; but there is a strip of land, ten feet wide, I will give that to you’” (16). Immediately, Noah bought a “strip” of Angell’s property, as did two other rela­ tives. Brown somberly calculates the reduction: “This was the land which my grandfather once owned, somewhere about 150 feet in width, when he attempted to build his house, now narrowed down to forty feet in width and is that now occupied by brother George and myself” (16). With this incident, Brown documents his own family’s dignity in the face of postemancipation prejudice as well as the dishonor of whites, even those who claimed to abhor injustice. Life of William J. Brown further illustrates intrinsic African merit for citizenship rights through images of paternal devotion. Noah Brown (b. Sept 20, 1781—d. Feb 19, 1885) was three years old when Rhode Island instituted gradual emancipation in 1784. Married to Alice Prophet Green, a widow of Narragansett heritage, Noah fathered at least four Page 12 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life sons (p. 427) and one daughter, all born between 1810 and 1820. William J. Brown under­ scores the vulnerability and instability of postemancipation urban life for free(d) blacks when he reports the forced displacement of Noah, Alice, William himself, and his siblings so that their landlord could cultivate a strawberry patch on the plot where their home stood (6). The detail exposes the urban removal of blacks at the whim of whites. No won­ der the narrator observes, “My father was very particular about people keeping their word” (Brown 60). In addition, Brown’s parents, as he portrays them, studiously guarded their name and reputation for respectability among locals, choosing to rent among the “upper crust of the colored population” and enforcing impeccable social graces among their children (18, 49).

Brown’s “Freedom” Brown figures Christian churches as sites of race segregation or race pride in posteman­ cipation Providence. After his own protracted conversion experience (71–88), Brown writes, he was saved from sin in April 1835: “I was on Prospect Street between Lloyd and Jenckes Streets, when [the Savior] spoke peace to my soul and my burden left me” (83). By 1855, he would be ordained as a lay Baptist preacher. For the most part, however, the Life invokes Christianity to foreground racialized hostility and discrimination. Although “as late as 1832 …some thirty black members continued to worship with whites at the First Baptist Church” (Schantz 100), Brown tacitly highlights Jim Crow’s precursors, re­ calling that in the 1830s, some blacks “said they were opposed to going to churches and sitting in pigeon holes, as all the churches at that time had some obscure place for the colored people to sit in” (qtd. in Schantz 100). On December 8, 1840, Brown was among the congregants of color who established a Free Will Baptist Church in Providence. He re­ ports that in 1840 Methodist black people also built a church “on Gaspee Street, where many poor people lived and some of bad reputation; those opposed to that location bought and built them a house [of worship] on Meeting Street. The Episcopal people leased a lot on the north end of Union Street…making three colored churches in our city” (88). The most significant black church established in Providence, Brown implies, was the African Union Meeting and School-House; it so provoked city whites that they as­ saulted blacks in response to it. Life of William J. Brown describes two infamous race riots in Providence in 1824 and 1831 to illuminate whites’ extreme physical and psychological terrorism against free(d) blacks. Brown notes the “bitter feeling” against people of color: “The colored people themselves were ignorant of the cause, unless it could be attributed to our condition, not having the means to raise themselves in the scale of wealth and affluence, consequently those who were evil disposed would offer abuse whenever they saw fit, and there was no chance for resentment or redress. Mobs were also the order of the day, and the poor colored people were the sufferers” (50). An 1824 riot in the Addison Hollow (or “Hardscrabble”) neigh­ borhood, located “some distance from town” (Brown 50), (p. 428) involved blacks and, more so, “a white mob” unrestrained by town watchman Samuel V. Allen (Gilkeson 20). Such hate acts were common in early nineteenth-century northern cities like Providence, Page 13 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life Hartford, New Haven, and Boston, their essential purpose and effect being to terrorize people of color and reinforce racial barriers (see Mandell, Tribe 46, 198; Gilkeson 19). Ac­ cording to the Hard-Scrabble Calendar, Report of the Trials of Oliver Cummins, Nathaniel G. Metcalf, Gilbert Humes and Arthur Farrier; who were indicted with six others for a Ri­ ot, and for aiding in pulling down a Dwelling-House, on the 18th of October, at HardScrabble (1824), 40–50 blacks witnessed the riot (7, 8, 10, 13). One man testified that he “saw 20 or 30 persons engaged in the riot,” and another testified: “There were about a thousand spectators present” (Hard-Scrabble 11). Allen, the town’s watchman, testified that when he returned to the neighborhood the next morning, “It was a complete ruin, the houses demolished, the inhabitants without shelter and every thing [sic] in ruins” (Hard-Scrabble 12). Brown cites a coda to Hardscrabble: “Not long after this there was another mob, commenced at the west end of Olney Street. Here were a number of houses built and owned by white men, and rented to any one, white or colored, who want­ ed to hire one or more rooms, rent payable weekly” (51). This additional violence was os­ tensibly executed to rid the area of sailors, saloons, and hard living. Race riots in the “Snowtown” neighborhood in Providence on September 21–24, 1831, al­ so devastated a poor black neighborhood. Though led initially by a gang of white sailors, these riots, too, seemed intended to traumatize a population for its race and class makeup, destitution and disenfranchisement making it vulnerable to incivility and attack. Hun­ dreds of people were involved over the four days, and several people—black and white— died. The governor, the local sheriff and other city officials, and ultimately infantry sol­ diers were called to quell the violence. Afterward, a committee was appointed to investi­ gate the incidents; the lead paragraphs of its History assert the members’ task (and be­ tray its biases) as to “ascertain and publish the facts in relation to the recent riot in that part of the town called Snow Town, a number of houses tenanted chiefly by idle blacks, of the lowest stamp” (7). Occurring perhaps not coincidently just weeks after Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, the city’s persistent riots illustrate its racialized hatred. Brown depicts the constant quotidian terror to which Rhode Island’s free(d) black people were subjected across the nineteenth century, such that smaller-scaled white violence against black people—from corporeal abuse on public streets to humiliating menial jobs, then deprivation of earned wages—forms a leitmotif in his Life. Brown cannot afford to dwell on white anxiety, however, if he would effectively address the rhetorical challenge before virtually all black authors of the postbellum era: to preserve black strides into citi­ zenship. Marking Reconstruction’s end, the basic rights blacks had acquired through the Civil War Amendments were already under siege. Brown responds with irony, humor, and understatement. His customary tricksterliness and adroit negotiation of risk and revela­ tion run through his depiction of violence he executed as an indentured adolescent—mod­ eled on interracial abuse he witnessed on the streets and domestic childrearing he suf­ fered in Noah Brown’s version of black middle-class respectability. Specifically, “Billy’s” duties ran the gamut from washing dishes to general cleaning. When it fell to child care, he drew the line, certain “that [he] was not going to rock (p. 429) anybody’s baby” (36). So, “While Mrs. Childs was getting him to sleep, I slipped down the back stairs, cut me a stick about fifteen inches long, and shaved down all the knots, so as to make it perfectly Page 14 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life smooth,” to “tingle” the baby’s hide as the narrator’s father does his sons’ (Brown 36). Brown unabashedly describes his “scolding,” “dressing down,” and “put[ting] it on to [the baby]” until “[o]n the third day I was called on duty again. When he awoke I shook my stick and spoke to him. He began to snuffle, so I gave him two or three cuts on the quilt, he opened his eyes, looked at me, as much as to say, do you mean it? and soon became calm” (Brown 36–37). Brown punctuates the triumph with Mrs. Childs’s ironic exclama­ tion, “‘Why Bill, you have got this baby so that he likes to lay in the cradle. I guess he loves you.’…I had no occasion to use the stick any more…I would shake my finger at him and that would be sufficient” (37). The episode comments on the politics of indentured servitude for early nineteenth-century black youth. And if it also implicitly disesteems child care as women’s work, Brown can be read as well as paying homage to a particular scene in Behind the Scenes: Four Years in the White House and Thirty Years a Slave, a postbellum slave narrative by Elizabeth Keckley. Published in 1868, only six years before Brown penned the introduction to his Life, Keckley’s autobiography tells her transition from being chattel capital to being capitalist owner of a successful sewing enterprise— and Brown desperately craved entrepreneurial opportunity. Keckley plays the trickster, too, in reconstructing a beating she received at age four as “little maid” to her master’s infant daughter: charged like Bill with minding the baby in its cradle, she “began to rock the cradle most industriously, when lo! out pitched little pet on the floor…and not know­ ing what to do, I seized the fire-shovel…and was trying to shovel up my tender charge, when my mistress called to me to let the child alone, and then ordered that I be taken out and lashed for my carelessness” (11). Where Keckley’s anecdote signifies on the abuse of enslaved children in the South, Brown’s redresses the comparable abuse of the North’s postemancipation black child servants through his account of gendered triumph over his white mother-employer and her infant son. Far more, however, the Life grieves both interracial and intraracial adult violence, and frequently, the autobiography celebrates acts of united black resistance. When Brown was eight, the Life reports, his rowdy elder brother Joseph, “got into a fight with a col­ ored boy belonging to Mrs. Ayers, from the South” (23). The fight becomes remarkable in Brown’s Life less for the aside that Rhode Island was yet a site of (southern) slavery in 1820 than for the “dozen or more boys, mostly white, [who] encouraged them to fight,” which “to the great joy of the crowd,” they did (23). A few years later, Brown’s narrator witnesses an enraged white Irishman bugler attack the leader of a “colored” Philadelphia military band during a parade in Providence (31). As a recent convert to Christianity, Brown reports, he experienced “an instance of terrible abuse” as he escorted two women one Sunday afternoon: “Two young men followed us, using improper language and were very insulting” (72). They were saved by the incidental appearance of “a colored man [who] came through Brown Street”; he challenged the whites and sent them hurrying away (72). Another time, Brown reports, he and a black male friend walked ahead of “two colored ladies…close behind us followed by two white men, who ordered them off the sidewalk, or they could kick them off” (73). A melee developed, and Brown asserts that he and his (p. 430) companion were saved from mob violence by “the timely appearance” of a white man who intervened (74). This gentleman figures as white Rhode Island’s ambiva­ Page 15 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life lence about black presence in the state as well as about its own ideological, socioeconom­ ic, and moral heterogeneity. In any case, through numerous episodes Brown chronicles the random violence that formed a staple of free(d) black life in Providence and the black resistance to violent mistreatment, often in spontaneous acts of racial solidarity and other times through activities of mutual aid and benevolence societies Brown helped to orga­ nize. Providence’s race prejudice prohibited Brown from securing lucrative employment; he in­ scribes himself as a representative free(d) black person denied not only “a chance to work” but more, “the [white] people were determined not to instruct colored people in any art” (59). As an adult, Brown worked briefly as a sailor, for a seamen’s clothing shop; he pursued jobs from white artisans but was consistently denied. Naturally talented with numbers, he studied book-keeping, and managed in 1842 to attain a position as assistant to an attorney. (This training made him painfully aware of the many instances in which white employers tried—and mostly succeeded, with impunity—to cheat him of his wages.) As an unpaid apprentice to Enos Freeman a “colored” shoe repairman, Brown acquired sufficient expertise skills that, after Freeman’s death, Brown went into the shoe business near the city center. Though representing his financial life as ever dire, the 1860 Rhode Island census identifies Brown as “a small businessman” (Cottrol 127). That year, the cen­ sus listed only 17 black professionals and artisans across the state.

Conclusion Through their negotiations of truth and slavery, the life writings central to this essay evoke a fugitive identity. This phrase suggests concealed identities; traces, shadows of persons; fluid forms: a self-construct neither stable nor fixed. Fugitive identity intimates multiple identity constructions and argues that an individual narrative persona articu­ lates more than a single “I.” Ironically, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and Life of William J. Brown insinuate a fugitive identity by underscoring the common oppressions that the nar­ rative subjects’ foreparents and Eldridge and Brown themselves confronted; the narra­ tors rarely differentiate between free(d) persons of African descent and enslaved people of color. Both describe the narrators’ own plights and that of their enslaved parents’ and ancestors’ as so similar as to negate the possibility of free black life, gradual emancipa­ tion notwithstanding. Their critique of white supremacist patriarchy and enduring slavo­ cratic values after Rhode Island emancipation reveals that black power to publish a life story was insufficient to end racist suffering. To be positioned to tell of bondage was not thereby to be positioned to end or escape it. In that fugitive identity bespeaks a rogue subjectivity, loosed, at once escaped and escaping, sly and sliding, it both names and misidentifies the narrators of Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and Life of William J. Brown for while, on the one hand, neither subject was ever enslaved, on the other hand, each knew at best nominal—and neither material nor ontological—freedom. Given that the (p. 431) 1784 gradual emancipation acts did not free all persons enslaved in Rhode Island, and that white supremacy blocked the access of virtually all people of color to social, eco­ nomic, political, and personal gains, the condition of people of color proved something on­ Page 16 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life ly akin to freedom but not freedom itself. The life narratives of Eldridge and Brown both condemn and subvert the constraints on free(d) black life, conditions that did not yield, indeed barely approached, citizenship. The analyses of Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and Life of William J. Brown presented here demonstrate a compelling need for further studies of many other people of color cast(e) into nominal freedom in the United States across the full span of the nineteenth century. Though the life writings produced by Eldridge and Brown constitute remarkable literary achievements, they represent a significant number of other such (understudied) narra­ tives by postemancipation northern authors of African descent from David Walker and Jarena Lee to Julia Foote and William Still and the “fugitives” he interviewed. Setting apart studies of slave narratives into a separate field of inquiry does not merely tell a par­ tial story of bondage and its ontological counterpart. Prioritizing the theoretically gen­ uine article of the “classic” slave narrative over accounts of U.S. black life from the per­ spectives and pens of nominally free black people blunts comprehension of both the dev­ astation white supremacy has wreaked and the powerful resistance black people mounted against slavery and its evil articulations and legacies. The force of the system of slavery was to corrupt all (white) principle and language, and all black life writings are forced to negotiate with that corrupt philosophical and rhetorical terrain—in effect, to make truth possible.

References Andrews, William L. “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.” PM­ LA 105.1 (1990): 23–34. Berlin, Ira. The making of African America: the four great migrations. New York, Viking. 2010. Brody, Jennifer D., and Sharon P. Holland. “An/Other Case of New England Underwriting: Negotiating Race and Property in Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge.” Crossing Waters, Cross­ ing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds. Durham, NC, Duke UP, 2006. 31–56. Brown, William J. The life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I.: with personal recollec­ tions of incidents in Rhode Island. 1883. Ed. Joanne Pope Melish Durham NH: University Press of New England. 2006. Campbell, Paul R., and G. W. LaFantasie. “Scattered to the Winds of Heaven.” Rhode Is­ land History 37 (1978): 67–83. Print. Cohen, David W. and Jack P. Greene. Neither slave nor free; the freedman of African de­ scent in the slave societies of the New World. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life Cottrol, Robert J. The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era. Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Coughtry, J. The notorious triangle: Rhode Island and the African slave trade, 1700–1807. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1981. (p. 432) Forbes, J. D. Africans and Native Americans: the language of race and the evolution of Red-Black peoples. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1993. Gilkeson, John S. Middle-Class Providence, 1820–1940. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 1986. Green, Frances H. [Whipple] Elleanor’s Second Book. Providence: B. T. Albro, Printer, 1839. Green, Frances H. [Whipple]. Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge. Providence: B.T. Albro, print­ er, 1841. Hard-Scrabble Calendar. Report of the Trials of Oliver Cummins, Nathaniel G. Metcalf, Gilbert Humes and Arthur Farrier; who were indicted with six others for a Riot, and for aiding in pulling down a Dwelling-House, on the 18th of October, at Hard-Scrabble. Provi­ dence: printed for the purchaser, 1824. Herndon, Ruth Wallis. “‘Proper’ Magistrates and Masters: Binding out Poor Children in Southern New England, 1720–1820.” Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America. Ed. Herndon, Ruth Wallis, and John E. Murray. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. 39–51. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29 1 (2008): 103–28. History of the Providence Riots, from Sept. 21 to Sept. 24, 1831. Providence: H. H. Brown, 15 Market-Square, 1831. Horton, James O. and Lois E. Horton. In hope of liberty: culture, community, and protest among northern free Blacks, 1700–1860. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. Horton, James O. and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the making of America. Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press. 2005. Keckley, Elizabeth, and Frances Smith Foster. Behind the Scenes: Formerly a Slave, but More Recently Modiste, and a Friend to Mrs. Lincoln, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Lancaster, Jane. “A Web of Iniquity: Race, Gender, Foreclosure, and Respectability in An­ tebellum Rhode Island.” Rhode Island History 69.2 (2011): 72–92. Mandell, Daniel R. Tribe, race, history: Native Americans in southern New England, 1780–1880. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Page 18 of 19

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The Truth of Slave Narratives: Slavery’s Traces in Postmemory Narratives of Postemancipation Life Melish, Joanne P. Disowning slavery: gradual emancipation and “race” in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998. Melish, Joanne P.. “Recovering (from) Slavery: Four Struggles to Tell the Truth.” Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. James O. Horton, and Lois E. Horton. New York, New Press, 2006 103–133. Miles, T. and S. P. Holland. Crossing waters, crossing worlds: the African diaspora in Indi­ an country. Durham, Duke University Press, 2006. Rael, P. Black identity and Black protest in the antebellum North. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Rappleye, Charles. Sons of Providence: the Brown brothers, the slave trade, and the American Revolution. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006. Rider, Sidney S. Rhode Island Historical Tracts. No. 10: An Historical Inquiry Concerning the Attempt to Raise a Regiment of Slaves by Rhode Island During the War of the Revolu­ tion. Providence, S. S. Rider, 1880. Schantz, Mark S. Piety in Providence: class dimensions of religious experience in antebel­ lum Rhode Island. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000. A Short History of the African Union Meeting and School-House, Erected in Providence (R.I.) in the Years 1819, ‘20, ‘21; With Rules for Its Future Government. Imprint: Provi­ dence: Printed by Brown & Danforth. 1821.

Joycelyn Moody

Joycelyn Moody, University of Texas at San Antonio

Page 19 of 19

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Index

Index   The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative Edited by John Ernest Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014

Index “f” indicates material in figures and “n” indicates material in endnotes.

(p. 433)

AANB, 43 Aaron, 160, 201f, 202 AASS. See American Anti-Slavery Society Abbott, Sukie, 292 Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I., xi, 14, 235–247 Abolition de I’esclavage (Schoelcher), 347 abolitionism as agricultural reform movement, 319–320 Davis’ (David Brion) study of, 64 Emerson and, 385 histories of, 64 labor and, 188 prejudice against interracial relations in, 374 print culture and, 65, 69, 166 psychological assessment of slavery and, 63 Quarles’ study of, 64 Romanticism and, 170, 375–380 white narratives (see white abolitionist narratives) Williams’ (George Washington) study of, 64 Abolitionist’s Library, The, 157 abortion, 104 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 184 Abu Ghraib, 194 acceptance of slave narratives, 4–5 accuracy of slave narratives, 46, 90, 112–113, 299 Adams, Ellen Jackson, 305 Adams, Ezra, 290 Adams, John Quincy, 226, 228 Adams, Nehemiah, 59, 337, 355 Adansonia digitata, 421 Address of Abraham Johnstone (Johnstone), 68, 81 Page 1 of 71

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Index “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (Emerson), 385 Address to All the Colored Citizens of the United States (Meachum), 44 Adger, Robert, 39 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 188 advertisements, 155, 203 affiliations and slave narratives, 14 African, 378 African American Biographical Database, 43 African American mutual benefit societies, 179 African American National Biography (AANB), 43 African American Newspapers and Periodicals (Danky), 40 African Colonization Society, 354 “African Slavery in America” (Paine), 376 African Union Meeting and School-House, 419, 423, 427 Afro-American Periodical Press, The (Bullock), 40 agrarianism, 316, 319–320 agriculture, 138, 318–320 Alabama Aunt Sally on, 339 Burton on, 306 The Forks of Cypress Plantation Slave Quarter, photograph of, 137f FWP interviews in, 103, 291, 293, 330 Nixon interviews in, 95, 99n plantation architecture in, 141 slave movement to, 288 slave quarters in, 137f Washington on education in, 192 Albert, Octavia, 225, 292, 293 alcohol, 97–98, 355 Aleckson, Sam, 331 (p. 434) Alexander, Lucretia, 292 Aljoe, Nicole N., xi, 15, 362–368 Allen, Richard, 44, 74 Allen, Roxanna, 119 Allen, Samuel V., 428 Allen, William G., 373–374 Alphabetical Digest of the Public Statute Law of South Carolina (Brevard), 79 al-Sadiqa, Abu Bakr, 362, 363, 364, 367–368 Alsberg, Henry, 104 amanuensis, 6, 298–299 Amelioration Act, 372 American Antiquarian Society, 45 American Anti-Slavery Almanac, The, 158, 160 American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) almanac of, 158, 160 annual reports of, 158 Brown (William Wells) and, 152 collapse of, 157 Page 2 of 71

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Index Declaration of Sentiments, 79 distribution network of, 153, 156–159 Douglass’ narrative and, 159 formation of, 385 model for formation of, 156 publications of, 77, 152 Ward and, 336, 355 Williams’ narrative and, 23, 77, 152, 157–159 American Colonization Society, 3 American Crisis, The (Paine), 376 American Farmer, 140 American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, 110 American Fugitive in Europe (Brown, William Wells), 340, 375 American Historical Review, 92 American Literature, 339 American Negro Slavery (Phillips), 4–5, 59 American Prejudice Against Color, The (Allen), 374 American Renaissance, 186, 266 American Revolution Colored Patriots, 39, 42 economy after, 263 Eldridges in, 422 English colonial slavery and, 373 George (David) in, 352 number of slaves in American colonies, 294 Rhode Island slaves and, 418 slaves in military during, 287, 294 American Slave, The (Rawick), 30–31, 39, 89–90, 105, 107–108, 143 American Slave Code in Theory and Practice, The (Goodell), 79 American Slavery, American Freedom (Morgan), 80, 185 American Slavery as It Is (Weld), 44, 79, 158 Amherstburg, 355–357 Amistad (film), 31, 197 Amistad (ship), 80, 197, 213–216, 289 Analytical Review, 376, 380 Anderson, John, 68–69, 201 Anderson, Pernella, 109 Anderson, Thomas, 151 Andrews, William L. background of, xi on collaborative narratives, 303 Curse of Caste and, 45 on Grandy, 340 Mason and, 45 on messages in narratives, 14 North American Slave Narratives, 41, 156 North Carolina Slave Narratives, 7, 41, 71–74, 330, 332 “Novelization,” 416, 420–421 Page 3 of 71

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Index research by, 150 “Slave Narratives,” 219–229 To Tell a Free Story, 36, 68, 119–120, 374, 386, 403 Angélique, 351 Anglo-African Magazine, 4 animism, 316–317 Antigua, 284, 347–348, 349 antipartyism, 173 anti-sentimentalism, 186 Anti-Slavery Examiner, The, 157 anti-slavery library system, 158 Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, 363 Anti-Slavery Record, The, 160 Appeal (Walker), 179, 354 Applewood Books, 330 Apprenticed Laborer in Jamaica, An (Williams), 345, 349, 362–363 apprenticeship, 127, 349, 357–358 Archibald Monteath (Warner-Lewis), 345, 350 Archie (Cocke’s freed slave), 141 (p. 435) Archie Moore, the White Slave (Hildreth), 196 archival function of slave narratives, 38, 43–45 Aristodemou, Maria, 381 Arkansas Bearing Witness on, 108 FWP interviews in, 90, 103, 107–109, 290, 293 slave movement to, 288 slave quarters in, 143 Armisted, Wilson, 198 Arno Press, 39 Ar’n’t I a Woman? (White), 95–96 “Art and Science of Reading WPA Slave Narratives, The” (Escott), 28, 109, 112, 114 Art of the Slave Narrative, The (Sekora & Turner), 149 Asa-Asa, Louis, 348, 350, 363 Ashton, Susanna, 41, 76, 330, 331 Ashy, 367 Association for the Study of Negro Life and History founding of, 60 Journal of Negro History, 27, 42, 60, 91 Atlantic Monthly, 397–398 audience for Douglass’ works, 67, 170–181 for gallows literature, 74 language adaption for, 65 memory and, 38 Olney on, 6 private family, 26 “Reading Communities” on, 13 witnessing by, 235–237, 241, 243–247 Page 4 of 71

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Index for women’s works, 223 Aunt Sally, 339 authenticity, 6, 59, 151, 167, 261, 364–365. See also veracity authorship, 37–38, 151, 198–199, 298–310, 363, 400 autism, 394, 409 Autobiogafía de un esclavo (Manzano), 345, 346–347 autobiographies Andrews on, 120 challenges in assessing, 6 individuality in, 364 legal status and, 71 Mascuch on, 71 memoirs and, 223 novelization of, 416 Olney on narratives vs., 6, 23, 71 pension records and, 120, 123–124 pre- vs. post-Civil War, 220–222 published by anti-slavery societies, 153 vs. Romantic works, 386 social class and, 225 structure of, 224, 424 Autobiography, Bond and Free, An (Campbell), 201, 330 Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (Ward), 201, 336–337, 339, 353, 355, 373–375 Autobiography of James L. Smith (Smith), 227, 333, 338 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The (Gaines), 193–194 Autobiography of Omar ibn Said (Said), 333, 341 Autobiography of Rev. Josiah Henson, An (Henson), 9, 219–220 Autobiography of The Reverend Josiah Henson, An, 8–9 Avery, Celeste, 291 Ayers, Mrs., 429 “Background of the Slave Narrative Collection, The” (Yetman), 102–103, 291, 292 Back of the Big House (Vlach), 136 Bacon’s Rebellion, 294 Bahamas, 347 Bailey, David T., 62–63 Baker, Houston A., 73, 272, 274, 339 Baker, T. Lindsay and Julie, 99n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 365 Ball, Charles Fifty Years in Chains, 23, 156, 289–292 Fischer and, 151, 322 on hiding after escape, 326 on master’s labor, 319 on memories, 23 occupation of, 54 Phillips on narratives of, 59 slave coffle description by, 59 Slavery in the US (see Slavery in the United States) (p. 436) Page 5 of 71

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Index Ball, Edward, 310 Ball, Joseph, 142 Baltimore Sun, The, 402 Bancroft, Frederic, 60 Banks, Julia, 139 baptisms, 293 Baptist Annual Register, 352 Baptist churches, 427 Baquaqua, Mahommah Gardo, 345, 350–351 Baraka, Amiri, 396 Barbados, 200, 268, 280, 281, 362, 367 Barbaric Traffic (Gould), 72, 73 Barbauld, Anna, 376, 377 Barber, Charley, 287 Barber, John, 197, 213–216, 289 Barden, Thomas E. See Weevils in the Wheat Barnet, Miguel, 345, 347, 363 Barr, Caroline, 192 Bates, Edward, 49 Bauer, Raymond & Alice, 60–61 Baxter, Gabrilla, 130 Baxter, Thomas, 130, 132 Baym, Nina, 250 Beard, John Relly, 212 Bearing Witness (Lankford), 108 “Becoming a Citizen” (Franke), 271 Becoming Free in the Cotton South (O’Donovan), 130 Before the War and after the Union (Aleckson), 331 Behind the Scenes (Keckley) on abuse, 292 audience for, 219 Brown (William J.) and, 429 emancipation documents in, 44 Fulton on, 252–256, 258 literary criticism of, 40 locations of, 7, 226, 253–256, 258, 335 on middle class, 226 philosophical approach of, 221–222 on son’s death in Civil War, 256 The Story of Mattie J. Jackson and, 258 structure of, 224 Behn, Aphra, 200 Belinda (Edgeworth), 384 Bell, Philip, 40 Beloved (Morrison), 31, 191, 193–194, 408 Benezet, Quaker Anthony, 340 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, 366 Ben Venue plantation, 142 Page 6 of 71

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Index Bercovitch, Sacvan, 184 Bergad, Laird, 344 Berlin, Ira, 31, 91, 92, 98, 271, 417 Bermuda, 284, 345, 349 Berthold, Michael C., 186, 187 Best, Stephen, 393, 400, 410 Bethune, James Neil, 393, 395 Bibb, Henry Narrative of the Life and Adventures# (see Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, The) occupation of, 54 portrait of, 203 on proslavery sermons, 56 Shadd and, 353–354 on Wilkins, 357 Bibb, Mary, 353 Biografía de un cimarrón (Barnet), 345, 347 biographical data on authors, 42–49 Biography of Rev. David Smith (Smith), 222 Birney, James G., 22–23, 77 Birth of a Nation, The (Griffiths), 191 Black, Leonard, 153 Black Abolitionist Papers, 39 Black Abolitionist Papers, The (Ripley), 355–357 Black Abolitionists (Quarles), 64 Black Atlantic (Gilroy), 341 Black Biographical Dictionaries (Burkett & Gates), 43 Black Codes, 127, 353 Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Levine), 5 Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, The (Gutman), 5, 92 Black Feminist Thought (Collins), 248–250, 254 “Black Founders” (Newman & Finkenbine), 74 Black Genealogy (Blockson), 45 Black literature, nineteenth century, 165–181, 219–220, 268, 279, 301 Black Literature collection, 40 Black Man, The (Brown, William Wells), 42, 198 Black Masculinity (Staples), 265–266 “Black Message/White Envelope” (Sekora), 37–38, 68, 71, 151, 299 (p. 437) Black Periodical Literature Project (BPLP), 40, 41 Black Portsmouth (Sammons & Cunningham), 45 Black Power movement, 192 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 191, 263–264 Blacks in Canada, The (Winks), 351, 353, 354, 357 Black suffrage, 104, 121. See also voting Black Then (Mackey), 351, 353, 354 Black Trials (Weiner), 80–81 Black Women in America (Hine), 42–43 Blair, Norvell, 44, 226 Page 7 of 71

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Index Blake, Margaret Jane, 225 Blake, William, 373, 375, 376 Blassingame, John W. BPLP, 40, 41 on circulation, 154 Elkins and, 62 Frederick Douglass Papers, 42, 49 on FWP interviews, 91, 102, 109, 113 Jacobs’ Incidents and, 37 on publication of narratives, 153 on reference sources, 42 The Slave Community, 5, 31, 62, 91, 193 on slave narratives, 6 Slave Testimony, 153, 293 “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves,” 62 on women’s narratives, 102 Bleak House (Dickens), 180 Blight, David W., 25, 26, 171 Blind African Slave, The (Brinch), 219, 339, 341 Blind Memory (Wood), 160 Blockson, Charles, 39, 45 Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Baker), 73, 272, 274 Bluesprint (Compton), 357 Bluett, Thomas, 279–280 Blum, Elizabeth, 317 Boles, Elvira, 139 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 212 Bond, Cynthia, 40, 249 Bond, William E., 129 Bon Sàam, Moses, 366, 367 Bontemps, Arna, 7, 41, 333–335, 340 Book for the People! (Blair), 44, 226 “Book History and African American Studies” (Cossu-Beaumont & Parfait), 152, 154, 156 Book of the Bible against Slavery, The (Robertson), 352 Boost, W. L., 292 Born in Bondage (Schwartz), 95 “Born in Slavery” (LOC), 105, 107–108, 111 Boston Burton in, 306 Crafts in, 301 Edes and the Tea Party, 381 Eliot and, 8 hate acts in, 428 Jacobs’ Incidents and, 38, 153, 156, 338 Lane in, 332 publication in, 220, 340–341 Stearns in, 260 Twelfth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar in, 157 Page 8 of 71

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Index Wheatley in, 204, 383 Boston Gazette, The, 381 Botkin, Benjamin A., 99n, 104, 108 Bowen, Pardon, 425 BPLP, 40, 41 Brace, Jeffrey, 219. See also Brinch, Boyrereau Bradford, Sarah, 8, 208–211, 225 Branch, Cyrus, 341 Branch, Jacob, 291 branding, 277 Brant, Joseph, 351 Brazil, 344, 345, 350–351 “Brazilian Slaves Represented in Their Own Words” (Krueger), 350 Bremo plantation, 140–141 Brent, Linda, 250, 391–392. See also Jacobs, Harriet Brevard, Joseph, 79 Brinch, Boyrereau, 219, 339, 341 Brinkley, Robert, 236 Briston, Josephine, 291 British American Institute, 354 British Columbia, 357 broadsides, 3, 4, 41, 213 Broken Shackles (Henson), 356 Brooks, Charlotte, 292 Brooks, Daphne A., xi, 16, 391–412 Brooks, Joanna, 153 Brown, Cudge, 425–426 (p. 438) Brown, George (Jackson’s husband), 305 Brown, George (William J.’s brother), 426 Brown, Henry “Box” anti-slavery lecture tour of, 203, 261 commodity status of, 81, 203 Ernest on narrative of, 151 family of, 261 “First English Edition” of narrative, 7 formats for narrative distribution, 160 legal citations of, 81 The Liberty Almanac and, 159 marketing by, 153 Narrative of Henry Box Brown (see Narrative of Henry Box Brown) Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (see Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown) Phillips on narratives of, 59 portrait of, 203 Brown, Jack, 123, 132 Brown, James Seay, 330 Brown, John (Moses’ brother), 417, 425 Brown, John (Slave Life in Georgia), 24, 201, 319Brown, John (white abolitionist), 38, 80, 210Brown, Joseph, 425, 429 Page 9 of 71

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Index Brown, Kimberly Juanita, 242 Brown, Moses, 417–418, 425–426 Brown, Nicholas, 425 Brown, Noah, 425–428 Brown, Paola, 354 Brown, Phillis, 425–426 Brown, Rhoda, 426 Brown, Samuel, 123 Brown, Sharper, 426 Brown, Sterling, 104, 107, 109 Brown, Thomas, 426 Brown, William J., 16, 415–417, 419–420, 423, 424–430 Brown, William Wells AASS press and, 152 as abolitionist, 64 American Fugitive in Europe, 340, 375 anti-slavery lecture tours of, 157 biographical data on, 49 The Black Man, 42, 198 in Canada, 355 copyright to works of, 154 Crafts and, 302 Douglass, letter to, 375 on effects of slavery, 10 on England, 374 on family, 318 Female Anti-Slavery Society speech, 1–2, 10 freedom, desire for, 57 on knowledge of slavery, 1 legal citations of, 79, 81 locations of narratives of, 335, 341 manhood and, 265, 374 on middle class, 226, 227 My Southern Home, 219, 227 narrative of (see Narrative of William Wells Brown) printing of narratives, 152 on property, 318 on representations of slavery, 1, 4 Three Years in Europe, 374 Troy and, 356 Brown University, 425 Brown v. Board of Education, 61, 374 Bruce, Blanche, 220 Bruce, Dickson D., Jr., xi, 12, 54–65, 74 Bruce, Henry Clay, 220–221 Bryant, William Cullen, 384 Buell, Lawrence, 315, 324 Bugg, John, 38 Page 10 of 71

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Index Bullock, Penelope, 40 Burke, Edmund, 378 Burkett, Randall and Nancy Hall, 43 Burnard, Trevor, 350, 364 Burton, Annie Louise, 298, 305–308 Burton, Lawrence, 307 Butcher, Nathan, 130–131 Butler, Benjamin F., 190 Butler, Octavia, 193–194 Buxton settlement, 355, 356 Byrd, Susie R.C., 109 By the Work (Vlach), 138–140 (p. 439) Calder, Loth, 142 California, 40, 226 Cambridge Companion to the Slave Narrative, The (Fisch), 149 Cameron, Nelson, 143 Camp, Stephanie M.E., 92, 94–95 Campbell, Israel, 201, 330 Campbell, Paul R., 418–419 Camper, Lavater & Petrus, 214 Canada abolition of slavery in, 351 Amherstburg, 355–357 Anderson’s extradition from, 69 Baquaqua in, 345, 351 Black loyalists in after American Revolution, 287 British Columbia, 357 Brown (William Wells) in, 325, 355 Buxton settlement, 355, 356 Campbell in, 330 Chatham, 355 Clarke in, 318 Dawn settlement, 8, 354, 355 Drew on Black settlements in, 355 economy of, 351 Hamilton, 356 London, 355 Montreal, 351, 353, 356–357 Moodie in, 347 Nova Scotia, 331, 352, 357 Peace of Paris and, 352 St. Catharines, 355–356 Sandwich, 353, 355 slave narratives of, 15, 337–338, 351–357 slavery law in, 345, 351 Toronto, 354, 355 Ward in, 336 Wilberforce Colony, 329, 353 Page 11 of 71

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Index Windsor, 355, 356 Canadian Anti-Slavery Society, 355 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 364 capitalism Cherniavsky on incorporation and, 264 manhood and history of U.S., 14, 263, 266 Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge on, 424 slavery and, 266 Carbado, Devon W., 80–81 Carby, Hazel, 249 Caribbean Aljoe on slave narratives from, 15, 362–368 Amelioration Act in, 372 apprenticeship system in, 349 Emancipation in, 349 free Blacks in, 419 past vs. present literary culture in, 368 Siemerling on slave narratives from, 15, 344, 346–350 society and literature of, 366 Carleton’s “Book of Negroes,” 357 Carlyle, Thomas, 385 Carnegie, Andrew, 306 Carr, Peter and Samuel, 91 Carretta, Vincent, 23, 45, 316, 338–339 Carroll, Henry, 128 carte de visite, 202, 205 Carter, Jennie, 40 Carter v. Eldridge, 423 cartoons, 3 Cartwright, Charles, 125 Cather, Willa, 391, 397, 398–399 Caution and Warning, A (Benezet), 340 census of Blacks in Canada, 356 of Blacks in Rhode Island, 418, 422, 430 on Brown (William J.), 430 on Eldridge, 422, 423 slaves in, 47, 48, 133 Chamberlain, Mary, 115 Chamber’s Miscellany, 160 Chamerovzow, Louis Alex, 319 Chaotic Justice (Ernest), 45, 151, 301 Charlton, Dimmock, 372 Chatham, 355 Chatterton, Thomas, 375, 377 Cherniavsky, Eva, 264, 271 Cherokees, 352 Child, Lydia Maria, 37, 151–154, 180, 250, 366 Page 12 of 71

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Index children bound out, literacy and, 423 Brown (William J.) on child care, 428–429 devotion to, 55 duties of, 111 FWP interviews on, 104, 114, 291 naming ceremonies for, 280 (p. 440) Children of God’s Fire (Conrad), 350 Childs, Mrs., 428–429 Chinese indentured laborers, 346 Chinn, Joseph, 142 Christianity agrarianism and, 320 Ashy on Fantee spirituality vs., 367 Brown (William J.) and, 427, 429 Buffalo convention on, 176–177 cruelty and, 6 Douglass on, 56, 176 Equiano and, 170, 286 folksong research on, 115 literacy and, 223, 303 Monteath’s conversion narrative, 350 Montesquieu on slavery and, 165 proslavery sermons, 56 resistance vs. submission, 56 Ward on, 375 Wheatley on, 170 Christian Recorder, The, 156, 222 “Christmas on the Plantation” (Russell), 59 churches Black leadership in, 222–223 Buffalo convention on, 176–177 early histories of, 42 FWP interviews on, 110, 278 Roper’s lectures in, 155 segregation in, 374, 427 Cinque, Joseph, 211, 213f, 214–216. See also Amistad circulation, 37, 38, 154–160, 372, 377 civil and criminal court proceedings Delaney on, 225 Eldridge in, 417, 419–420, 423 The Federalist Papers on slaves in, 70 freedom suits, 47–48, 363 Grimes and, 75–76 legislative mandate against testimony in, 240 in Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 68 in newspapers, 363 Northup’s case, 77–78 Page 13 of 71

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Index print coverage of, 80 probate, 47, 48 in research on authors, 47 in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 68 sensationalism and, 68 testimonies from, 309 Tocqueville on, 69 for wages, 47–48 Civil Rights movement, 61, 90–91, 192, 194 Civil War Blacks’ role in, 27 causalities of, 25 “The Contrabands” in, 190–191 Keckley’s son in, 256 Marrs in, 224 pension records, 13, 119–131, 271 Clansman, The (Dixon), 191, 193 Clark, J. P., 151 Clarke, George Elliott, 337–338, 352 Clarke, John Henrik, 193 Clarke, Lewis copyright to works of, 154 on environment, 318 on free labor, 324 Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Martin Clarke, 43–44, 152, 155–156, 322, 337–338, 353 Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke, 151, 160, 353 Clarke, Martin, 43–44, 152, 155–156, 322, 337–338, 353 Clarkson, Thomas, 378–379, 383 class, social Andrews on narratives and, 221, 225–228 Douglass and, 185, 270 free labor and, 188 FWP interviews and, 90, 94, 102, 109 historians and, 63, 89, 92–94, 133 Maguire on, 187 Providence riots and, 428 public records and, 46 resistance and, 221 Classic Slave Narrative, The (Gates), 119, 337, 344–345 Clay, Henry, 357 Clayton, Ronnie, 105 Cleaver, Eldridge, 197 Clements, James H., 128 Clifton, Lucille, 310 (p. 441) clothing of Defoe’s Crusoe, 198 in Equiano’s portrait, 200 Page 14 of 71

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Index Keckley’s designing and sewing of, 254, 255, 335 making of plantation, 138–139 in Robert’s portrait, 202 in Truth’s portrait, 206 Washington on, 291 in Wheatley’s portrait, 204 Cocke, John Hartwell, 140–141 Cohen, Daniel A., 68, 69 Cohen, David, 419 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 375–380, 384, 385 Collected Works of Phyllis Wheatley, The (Wheatley), 382–383 Collins, Julia, 45 Collins, Patricia Hill, 248–250, 254 Collison, Gary, 356–357 Colombia, 362 Colonial Slave Law, 349 Colored American, 180 Colored Cadet at West Point, The (Flipper), 224 Colored National Convention (1853), 3 Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Nell), 39, 42 Commonwealth v. Aves, 80 communication, 56, 240–241 community Blassingame’s study of, 31, 62, 91, 193 creation of, 56–57 Cugoano on, 284–285 Equiano on, 285–287 folksongs function in, 57 FWP interviews on, 277–278, 287 George on, 288 Gronniosaw on, 280–283 Hartman on, 309 ideals/values in, 55–57, 290 Jacobs on, 278, 289, 338 Owens on, 143–144 pension records on, 123–125 Prince (Mary) and, 169 Some Memoirs of the Life of Job on, 280 Stevenson on, 277–294 The Story of Mattie J. Jackson on, 305 Wheatley on, 283 Compromise of 1850, 2. See also Fugitive Slave Laws Compton, Wayde, 357 concubinage, 237, 293 Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Race, The (Delany), 42 Confessions of Nat Turner (Gray), 68, 75, 81, 213, 289 Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Styron), 193 Congress, U.S. Page 15 of 71

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Index Constitution’s three-fifths clause and allocating representation in, 47 “Gag Rule,” 80 Great House Farm and, 173 Narrative of James Williams and, 158 conjurers, 56–57, 96. See also healers Connecticut Amistad trial in, 289 Bontemps on, 333 Grimes in, 75–76 hate acts in, 428 Mars on, 329 slavery law in, 373 Smith in, 268 Conrad, Robert Edgar, 350 consensualism, 72 Constitution, U.S. 13th Amendment, 120–121, 374 14th Amendment, 121 15th Amendment, 121 Douglass and Garrison’s reading of, 67 drafting of, 373 three-fifths clause, 47, 70 contraception, 104 contracts, 72–74 Cooper, James Fennimore, 180, 384 Cooper, J. California, 193–194 copyright, 153–154 corn huskings, 139, 293 corn pone, 113 corpses, 3, 246 Cossu-Beaumont, Laurence, 152, 154, 156 Cosway, Richard, 383 cotton gin, 288 Cotton Kingdom, The (Olmsted), 134–136 cotton presses, 138–139 Cottrol, Robert J., 422–423 (p. 442) covers for narratives, 41 Covey, Edward, 151, 184, 187, 221, 260, 267, 270, 272, 300 Covey, Herbert C., 112–113 Covey, James, 213f, 214 Cowper, William, 375, 377–378 Craft, Ellen & William as abolitionists, 64 in Boston, 301–302 Brown (William Wells) and, 302 legal citations of, 81 in Massachusetts, 301 narrative of (see Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom) Page 16 of 71

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Index portrait of Ellen, 207–208 Creeks, 288 Creole, rebellion aboard, 80 creole testimony, 365–366 Crèvecouer, J. Hector St. John de, 320–321, 325 crime publications, 74–75. See also gallows literature criminal code, 74 “Crisis in North America” (Lewis), 353 Crossing the River (Phillips), 193–194 Cruz, Jon, 74 Cuba, 213, 345–347 Cubitt, Geoffrey, 27, 29 Cuffy, William, 130 Cugoano, Ottobah, 279, 283, 284, 383 Cullen, Susanna, 384 Cult of True Womanhood, 249 Culture on the Margins (Cruz), 74 Cummins, Oliver, 428 Cunningham, Valerie, 45 Cupples, Upham, and Company, 341 Curry, James, 160 Curse of Caste (Collins), 45 Cuthbert, Salone, 362, 363, 364 Dabney, Richard, 119 D’Aguiar, Fred, 193, 194 Danky, James, 40 Darwin, Erasmus, 378 Davenport, Cary, 139 Davidson, James West, 98 Davis, Angela, 252 Davis, Charles T., 24–25, 27, 40, 41, 149, 150 Davis, David Brion, 64, 344 Davis, E.M., 159 Davis, Jefferson, 98 Davis, Noah, 201 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 397–398, 407 Davis, Varina, 253 Dawn settlement, 8, 354, 355 “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery” (Bauer), 60–61 Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond (Washington-Williams & Stadiem), 310 Declaration of Independence, 300 Defoe, Daniel, 198 DeForest, John William, 188 Delaney, Lucy A. Bates and, 49 From the Darkness Cometh the Light (see From the Darkness Cometh the Light) death certificate for, 48–49 Page 17 of 71

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Index freedom suit of, 47–48 in “List of Free Negroes,” 48, 49 marriages of, 47, 48 Masonic organizations and, 49 on middle class, 226 on mother, 46 online searches for, 41 public records on, 47 publisher interactions with, 38 Scott and, 49 wage lawsuit of, 47–48 Delany, Martin, 42, 49 Delavan, E.C., 157 Del Monte, Domingo, 346 DeLombard, Jeannine Marie, xi, 12, 67–81 Demby, 244 democratic agrarianism, 316, 319–320 Dessa Rose (Williams), 193–194 Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman, 279–280, 372 Dibble, Fred, 135 Dick (Eldridge’s grandfather), 421 Dickens, Charles, 69, 180 Dickinson, Emily, 384, 386 Dictionary of American Negro Biography (Logan & Winston), 42–43 Dimock, Peter, 194 Dinah, 238 (p. 443) Dirt and Desire (Yaeger), 340 discursive terrain, 165–170, 173, 176–181, 346–347, 371, 431 Disowning Slavery (Melish), 2–3 District of Columbia Bradford on, in Reconstruction era, 8 Keckley in, 7, 226, 253–256, 258, 335 Northup in, 77–78 Wormeny in, 357 “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives” (Stepto), 8 divorce, 104 Dixon, Melvin, 322, 325 Dixon, Thomas, 191, 193 Doctorow, E.L., 194 Documenting the American South, 41, 332–333 Done with Slavery (Mackey), 353, 356 Donlan, Edward. See al-Sadiqa, Abu Bakr Doughton, Thomas, 7, 41, 330, 333–335, 340 Douglass, Anna Murray, 179, 270–272 Douglass, Frederick AASS and, 153 as abolitionist, 64 anti-slavery lecture tours of, 157, 205–206, 299 Page 18 of 71

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Index on Biblical references, 325 “Blind Tom” and, 397, 412 Brown’s (William Wells) letter to, 375 on conjure beliefs, 57 copyright to works of, 154 Covey and (see Covey, Edward) economic panic of 1837 and, 185 on England, 373 Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 155, 180 freedom, desire for, 57 freedom purchase by, 272–273 Gates and, 268 Heglar on works of, 102 “The Heroic Slave,” 265 as house slave, 55 labor and, 185, 187–188, 272 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 7, 25, 189, 202, 220, 227 literacy, struggle for, 57, 150–151, 268 literary criticism of works of, 43, 44, 170–179 marriage of, 179, 270–272 in Massachusetts, 222, 272, 300, 322 McDowell on works of, 10–11 “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” 180 memories of, 24, 25, 172, 300 on middle class, 226, 227 My Bondage and Freedom (see My Bondage and Freedom) Narrative of the Life (see Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass) “The Nature of Slavery,” 67 nickname of, 227 The North Star, 180 papers of, 42, 49 portrait of, 201, 202 on prejudice and job seeking, 187–188 Preston’s biography of, 45–46 publisher interactions with, 38 on religion, 56, 175–177, 222 as ‘representative man,’ 10–11 on slave breeding, 55 Truth and, 205–206 on Tubman, 209 Drew, Benjamin, Jr., 337, 340, 353, 355–356 Drumgoold, Kate, 43, 225 DuBois, Silvia, 225 Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 191, 263–264 on Civil War, 191 dissertation on slave trade, 60 Doctorow and, 194 Page 19 of 71

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Index education of, 60 “The Negro in Literature and Art,” 22 Philadelphia Negro, 324 on Phillips’ image of enslaved people, 91 The Souls of Black Folk, 324 Duke of Argyle, 378 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 189–191 Dunmore, John, 287 Dunning, William A., 93 Dwight’s Journal, 407–409 “Early African American Print Culture” conference, 37 Eason, Barbara, 124 Eason, Isaac, 124, 132 (p. 444) Easton, Hosea, 2 Edes, Peter, 381 Edgeworth, Maria, 384 editors benefits for, 303 of Caribbean texts, 364–365 collaborations with, 152, 298, 309, 365 of FWP narratives, 101, 106–110 legal analysis by, 67–68 manuscript evidence of, 37 music transcribers and, 403 Olney on master outline for, 6 Pringle on, 348 Sekora on, 151, 299 Yellin on, 50 education Black leadership in, 222–223 Burton on, 306–307 Drumgoold on, 225 FWP interviews on, 104 identity and, 222 Iola Leroy on, 188 laws on, 240, 303 literacy (see literacy) religious conversion and, 223 in Rhode Island, 419 Sandford on, 307 The Story of Mattie J. Jackson on, 304–305 Washington on, 192, 223 Egipcíaca, Santa Rosa, 350 Eisnach, Dwight, 112–113 Eldridge, Elleanor, 16, 415–417, 419–424 Eldridge, Robin, 422 Eldridge v. Balch, 423 electoral college, 2 Page 20 of 71

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Index Eliot, Samuel A., 8 Eliot, William, 341 Elizabeth, 222 Elkins, Stanley, 5, 61–62, 91, 105, 193 Ellis, Markman, 70 Ellison, Ralph, 186 Eltis, David, 344 Emancipation Proclamation, 212 Emancipator, The, 157–158 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 171, 180, 384, 385 England abolition of slavery in, 351, 375 Anti-Slavery Society, 347–348, 363 British lawsuits over Black mariner imprisonment in U.S., 80 Brown (William Wells) on, 374 Douglass on, 373 Equiano and, 339, 383–384 “Glorious Revolution” in, 375 Licensing Act in, 375 London, 283, 346, 354 newspapers in, 375–376 printing presses in, 375–376 Public Records Office, slavery documents in, 350 Romanticism in, 375, 379–386 Royal Academy, founding of, 383 Watkins in, 374 Williams in, 157 engravings, 197–204, 212, 213f, 214–216 entrepreneurs, Black, 71–73 environment architecture, 134–136, 137f, 138f, 140–142 Brown (William J.) on, 424–425 identity, perspective, and, 15, 169 location (see geography) manhood and, 265–266 Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge on father’s, 421 environmental criticism, 15, 315–326 environmental justice movement, 316, 324 Episcopal churches, 427 Eppes, F., 140 Equiano, Olaudah Cugoano and, 283 England and, 383–384 Gates and, 268 Hastings and, 383 letters of, 374 marriage of, 384 on memory, 23, 24 Page 21 of 71

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Index narrative of (see Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano) nativity of, 23, 283, 285, 316 portrait of, 197, 199–200 property to personhood conversion by, 73 publisher interactions with, 38 Sharp and, 383–384 Wheatley and, 170 (p. 445) Equiano the African (Carretta), 23, 45, 316, 338–339 Ernest, John background of, xi–xii Brown (Henry “Box”) research by, 38 Chaotic Justice, 45, 151, 301 introduction to slave narrative studies, 1–16 Liberation Historiography, 45 Escott, Paul D., 28, 109, 112, 114 Examiner, 380 Experience and Personal Narrative of Uncle Tom Jones (Jones), 9 Experience of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, The (Jones), 9, 224, 330, 334 Experiences of a Slave in South Carolina, The (Jackson), 329 Fabian, Ann, 23, 68, 156 Fabre, Genevieve, 16 “Face to Face” (Gardner), 44–45, 336 family aspirations for, 57 Ball on, 289–292 Brown (William Wells) on, 318 creation/destruction of, 55, 58 Cugoano on, 284–285 Equiano on, 285–287 Frazier’s study of, 22, 60 FWP interviews on, 96–97, 104, 277–278, 290–291 George on, 288 Gronniosaw on, 280–283 ideals/values in, 55, 290 Jacobs on, 278, 289, 338 King on, 288 master/slave relationship and, 92 Nixon interviews on, 95 pension records on, 123–128 Prince (Mary) on, 284 in Reconstruction, 294 Some Memoirs of the Life of Job on, 280 Stevenson on, 277–294 The Story of Mattie J. Jackson on, 305 Vlach on, 144 Wheatley on, 283 Family Redeemed from Bondage, A (Kelley), 152 Fanatics, The (Dunbar), 189–191 Page 22 of 71

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Index Fannen, Mattie, 290 Far More Terrible For Women (Minges), 292–293 Farrier, Arthur, 428 Faulkner, William, 45, 184, 192 Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 99n, 103. See also Works Progress Administra­ tion Federalist Papers, The (Madison, Hamilton, & Jay), 69, 70 Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) interviews age of former slaves during, 110 The American Slave, 30–31, 39, 89–90, 105, 107–108, 143 Applewood Books series on, 330 audio-recorded, 105, 107, 109 authenticity of, 90, 106–108 bias in, 28, 106, 108–113 Blassingame on, 91, 102, 109, 113 “Born in Slavery,” 105, 107–108, 111 candor in, 113–114 Civil Rights movement and, 90–91 on crafts, 138–139 critiques of, 9, 12–13, 90, 94, 106 Elkins and, 105 end of, 104 environmental criticism of, 317 on family and community life, 277–278, 287 historian’s use of, 62, 90–98 history of, 99n, 103–104 interviewers for, 9, 28, 101 introductions to, 109–110 Jacobs’ index of, 110 Lay My Burden Down, 99n, 104 LOC website for, 99n McCaskill on, 308–309 memory and, 28, 111–113, 115 Musher on, 9, 12–13, 101–116 pension records and, 122 Potts’ index of, 108, 110 questions asked in, 11, 28, 90, 94, 97–98, 99n, 103–104, 110 Remembering Slavery, 31, 91, 98 Schwartz on, 9, 12, 89–98 size of archive, 4, 101–102, 116n1 Slave Narratives, 22 (p. 446) Federal Writers’ Project (Cont.)The Slave Narratives of Texas on, 277 on slave quarters, 134, 135 speech and dialect in, 107 statistical analysis of, 111 Unchained Memories, 105 vs. University oral histories projects, 27–28 Up Before Daylight, 330 Page 23 of 71

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Index value of, 92–98 West on, 93 women interviewed in, 95–96, 102, 104 Feeding the Ghosts (D’Aguiar), 193, 194 Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1, 10 FERA, 99n, 103 Fett, Sharla, 92, 96 Fiedler, Leslie, 192–193 Fifteenth Amendment, 121 Fifty Years in Chains (Ball), 23, 156, 289–292 Fifty Years of Slavery in the USA (Smith), 225–226 Figures in Black (Gates), 73 Finkenbine, Roy E., 74 First Folio (Shakespeare), 198 First Great Awakening, 74 First World War, 29 Fisch, Audrey, 149 Fischer, Isaac, 151, 322 Fisher, Philip, 186 Fisk University, 27–28, 62, 103, 105 FitzGerald, Frances, 30 Five Black Lives (Bontemps), 7, 41, 333–335, 340 Fleischner, Jennifer, 24 Fleming, George, 143 Flight to Canada (Reed), 193, 194 Flipper, Henry Ossian, 224 Florida, 103, 105, 107, 308–309 Flynn, Katherine, 45 Folkes, Minnie, 292 folksongs content of, 57 Douglass on, 173–174, 391, 392 function in community, 57 FWP questions on, 104 Lomax and, 103, 109 research on FWP interviews, 115 Slave Songs of the United States, 408 food Covey and Eisnach on culture and, 112–113 Douglass on, 175–176 FWP interviews on, 95, 111, 277–278 Genovese on, 92, 138 independent production of, 318 Jacobs on, 246 Olney on, 6 preparation of, 252 Simpsons on, 277–278 stealing of, 246, 292 Page 24 of 71

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Index Stevenson on, 291–292 Foote, Julia, 223, 431 Ford, John, 367 Ford, Joseph, 128 Foreman, P. Gabrielle, 45, 248 Forgotten Readers (McHenry), 38, 179, 180 The Forks of Cypress Plantation Slave Quarter, 137f Foster, Frances Smith on authorship/composition, 37–38 on Jacobs’ Incidents, 37–38, 250 on marriages, 254–255 “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins,” 37 “In Respect to Females,” 249 on Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 302 on sex and sexuality, 249 “‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part,” 254–255 Witnessing Slavery, 36, 68, 149 Foucault, Michel, 167, 168, 240–241, 382 Fourteenth Amendment, 121 Franke, Katherine, 271 Franklin, Benjamin, 267 Franklin, John Hope, 42 Frazier, E. Franklin, 22, 60 Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 155, 180 Frederick Douglass Papers project, 42, 49 free bond registrations, 48 Freedmen’s Bureau, 123, 271 Freedom’s Journal, 3, 180 freedom suits, 47–48, 363 free farming, 320–321, 324 free labor, 188, 321, 324 Freelandhouse, “Reverend,” 282 Freeman, Enos, 430 French Physiocrats, 321 French Revolution, 375, 378 (p. 447) From Behind the Veil (Stepto), 43, 261–262 From Bondage to Belonging (McCarthy & Doughton), 7, 41, 330, 333–335, 340 From Bondage to Liberty (Stanford), 307 From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit (Randolph), 224, 228 From Sundown to Sunup (Rawick), 5, 31 From the Darkness Cometh the Light (Delaney) “Face to Face” on, 44–45, 336 literary criticism of, 4, 45 location of, 336 mother’s story in, 46, 225, 336 online searches for, 41 organizations listed in, 45 publication of, 7, 336 Page 25 of 71

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Index public records and, 47 on success after Emancipation, 224 frontispiece, 198–212, 215 front matter, 41, 68, 300 Frost, John, 356 Frost, Robert, 45 Fugitive Blacksmith, The (Pennington) on chattel principle, 71 on environment, 322 location of, 329 manhood and, 265 on plantation networks, 56 sales of, 155 on slave breeding, 55 Fugitive Convention of Canada, 330 Fugitive Slave Laws Bibb and, 353 Canada and, 345, 352, 353 Douglass on, 272 Emerson on, 385 England and, 373 Illinois and, 336 Jacobs and, 325, 338 Loguen and, 354–355 notices of, in Struggles for Freedom, 68 resistance to enforcement of, 80 Roper and, 332 Ward and, 336 Fuller, Margaret, 171 Fulton, DoVeanna S., xii, 14, 45, 248–258, 304 funerals, 293 Furr, Anderson, 292 Future of Environmental Criticism, The (Buell), 315, 324 Gaddis, John Lewis, 96 Gaines, Ernest, 193–194 Gale, Anthony, 160 gallows literature, 68, 74–75, 77, 196, 351 Gama, Luís, 350 Gambia, 283, 372 Gara, Larry, 156 Gardner, Eric, xii, 12, 36–50, 150, 336 Garner, Margaret, 31, 80, 191 Garrison, William Lloyd American Antislavery Office and, 340 anti-slavery lecture tour of, 155 on Constitution, Douglass and, 67 his “Preface” to Douglass’ narrative, 235–237, 261–262, 299–301, 308 historians and, 64 Page 26 of 71

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Index Liberator and, 68, 299 My Bondage and Freedom and, 9 Garrison family papers, 39 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 40 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. AANB, 43 on authorship/composition, 308 Black Biographical Dictionaries, 43 on Black literary tradition, 70 BPLP, 40, 41 The Classic Slave Narratives, 119, 337, 344–345 Figures in Black, 73 Flynn and, 45 on literacy, 268 The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Woman Writers, 39–40, 41 The Slave’s Narrative (see Slave’s Narrative, The) “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” 70 genealogical records, 46 “Generation of Postmemory, The” (Hirsch), 415 Genette, Gérard, 300 Genovese, Eugene D., 5, 91–92, 136–138, 266, 325 (p. 448) geography Black freedom and, 268 categorizing by, 7, 15 Douglass on plantation, 172–173 of escape, 325–326 Old Testament types, tropes, and, 325 Thomas on, 7, 15, 328–342 George, David, 287–288, 352 George, Henry, 278 George Anderson (Dimock), 194 Georgia Ball on farms in, 322 Becoming Free in the Cotton South on, 130 FWP interviews in, 103, 109, 289–292 George in, 352 The Hermitage Slave Quarters, photograph of, 137f Gerhardt, Christine, 315, 319 Gerzina, Gretchen, 45 Ghana, 283, 367 Gilbert, Olive, 204 Gilded Age, The (Twain & Warner), 189 Gillam, Cora, 143 Gilroy, Paul, 341, 371 Glenelg, 356 Goddu, Teresa A., xii, 13, 149–161 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), 192 Godwin, William, 376, 381 Page 27 of 71

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Index Gone With the Wind (Mitchell), 191, 193 Goodell, William C., 79 Good Woman (Clifton), 310 Gordon, Miles, 126, 132 Gordon, Samuel, 126 Gordon-Reed, Annette, 309 Gore (overseer), 244 Goree, Jordan, 139 gothic, 149 Gough, John, 125–126, 132 Gough, Priscilla, 125–126 Gould, Philip, 72, 73, 372 Gould, Virginia Meacham, 254 Grandy, Moses Andrews on, 340 freedom purchase by, 73 narrative of, 69, 71–73, 151, 153, 160, 340 Thompson and, 151 “Grapevine in the Slave Market” (Troutman), 258 Grason, Jerome, 127, 132 Gray, Thomas R., Confessions of Nat Turner, 68, 75, 81, 213, 289 Grayson, Anna Maria, 127 Grayson, Herbert Upton, 127 Grayson, Jerome Bonaparte, 127 Grayson, John Armstead, 127 Grayson, Julia, 127 Grayson, Mary Jane, 127 Grayson, Tolliver, 127 Green, Alice Prophet, 426–427 Green, Elisha, 224, 228 Green and Russell, printers, 340 Greene, Jack, 419 “Greening of African-American Landscapes, The” (Gerhardt), 315 Greenwell, Augustus, 129 Greenwell, French V., 128 Greenwell, Gustavus, 128 Grenada, 283 Griffin, Charles, 130 Griffith, David, 123 Griffiths, D.W., 191 Grimes, William advocates for, 77 Andrews and descendants of, 45 Ashton on, 82 narrative of (see Life of William Grimes, The) Grimké, Sarah & Angelina, 64 Gronniosaw, Betty, 282–283 Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw, 279, 280–283, 383 Page 28 of 71

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Index guardianship, 127 Guinea, 268, 372, 421 Gusdorf, George, 24 Gutman, Herbert G., 5, 92 Guyana, 350 Hackett, Nelson, 357 Hair-Breadth Escape from Slavery to Freedom (Troy), 356 Haiti, 211–213, 351 Haley, Alex, 31, 192–194 Hall, Florence, 362, 363, 367 (p. 449) Hall, Samuel (activist), 26 Hall, Samuel (pension witness), 125 hall-and-parlor house, 135 Hamilton, 356 Hamilton, Alexander, 69, 70 Hamilton, Thomas, 4 Hammon, Briton, 73, 339, 340 Hannah, 238 Hanno, Joseph, 68, 81 Hard-Scrabble Calendar, 428 Harper, Frances E.W., 187–189, 303 Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Yellin), 46, 50 Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, The (Yellin), 42, 46, 49–50 “Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents” (Foster), 37–38 Harris, Joel Chandler, 26 Harris, Leslie M., 271 Hartman, Saidiya V., 70, 172, 243, 245, 309, 408 Harvard University, 39 Hastings, Selina, 383 Hatt, Samuel, 352 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 384 Hayden, Clement “Clem” (father), 128, 132 Hayden, Clem (son), 128 Hayden, Eliza, 128, 129 Hayden, Henry, 128 Hayden, Susan, 128 Hayden, William, 329 healers, 291, 317. See also conjurers “Hearing Slave Voices” (Lean & Burnard), 350 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24, 166 Heglar, Charles J., 102, 302, 315 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 411 Hemings, Elizabeth, 140 Hemings, Eston, 91 Hemings, John, 140 Hemings, Sally, 91, 309 Hemingway, Ernest, 186, 188 Henderson, Phoebe, 138 Page 29 of 71

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Index Henny, 57 Henry, George, 73, 221 Henry, John, 132 Henry, Patrick, 300 Henson, Jim, 356 Henson, Josiah An Autobiography of Rev. Josiah Henson, 9, 219–220 An Autobiography of The Reverend Josiah Henson, 8–9 Biblical references of, 325 Canada and, 353 Eliot and, 8 freedom, desire for, 57 The Life of Josiah Henson, 8, 151, 260, 337, 354 Lobb and, 9 manhood in works of, 265 occupation of, 54 Phillips on narratives of, 59 on property, 318, 324 on proslavery sermons, 56 travels of, 337 Truth Stranger than Fiction, 8–9, 152, 184, 340–341 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, 8–9, 186, 354 “Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life,” 9, 354 The Hermitage Slave Quarters, 137f Herndon, Ruth Wallis, 423 “Heroic Slave, The” (Douglass), 265 Heth, Joice, 394 Hewitson, Mark, 29–30 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 43 Hine, Darlene Clark, 42–43 Hirsch, Jerrold, 104, 109 Hirsch, Marianne, 415 historiography of slavery, 58–63, 90–98, 165–166, 191 History & Memory (Fabre & O’Meally), 16 “History of Abu Bakr al-Sadiqa, The” (Madden), 367–368 History of Mary Prince, The (Prince) authorship of, 347, 348 community and, 169 on environment, 168–169 on knowledge of slavery, 170 literary criticism of, 363 memories in, 168–169 “Narrative of Louis Asa-Asa” in, 348, 350, 363 Pringle and, 347–348 publication of, 345 on punishment, 241–244 on sex and sexuality, 239–244 Sharpe on, 348 Page 30 of 71

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Index on slave trade, 238–240 (p. 450) History of Mary Prince (Cont.)story of, 284, 347 Strickland and, 347–348 Sturge and, 349 on torture, 169, 242 History of the Amistad Captives (Barber), 197, 213–216, 289 History of the Negro Race in America (Williams), 60, 64 History of the US from the Compromise of 1850 (Rhodes), 58 Hodge, Arthur William, 372 Hodges, Alonzo, 123 Hodges, Caleb, 123 Hodges, Deana, 123 Hoffman, Alice & Howard, 112 Holocaust, 29 Home Refugee Society, 353 Hopkins, Mary Ann, 119 Hopper, Daniel, 125 Hopper, Issac T., 160 Hopper, Jack, 123 Hopper, Maria, 123 Hopper, Owen, 125 Hopper, Samuel “Sandy,” 125, 132 Hopper, Sarah, 125 Horrors of Slavery, The (Johnson), 357 Horrors of Slavery, The (Wedderburn), 350 Horton, James, 267 Hostead, John, 125 House of Bondage, The (Roger), 278 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 356 Hugh, “Master,” 184–185, 272 Hughes, Louis, 7 Hume, David, 24 Humes, Gilbert, 428 Hunt, Leigh, 379–380 Hunter, Carolina, 96 Hurston, Zora Neale, 103, 105, 107, 308–309 I Belong to South Carolina (Ashton), 41, 330, 331 identity Black literary, 371 collaboration and, 309, 365 of Douglass, 80–81, 151 education and, 222 environment, perspective, and, 15, 169 fugitive, 430 Fulton on women’s, 248 Hartman on shared, 309 illustrations and, 199, 200 indexing and, 333 Page 31 of 71

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Index literacy and, 151, 180, 307, 365 master’s, architecture of, 243 memory and, 29 music and, 399 portraits and, 202, 203 in Reconstruction, 299 religion and, 56, 222 slavery and, 372 transatlantic, transcultural, 381 Illinois, 46, 336 illustrations authorship and, 198–199 cartoons, 3 deterioration of extant, 38 engravings, 197–204, 212–216 European traditional, 201 frontispiece, 198–212, 215 lithographs, 160, 196, 202 photographs, 14, 44, 202, 205–207 sensationalism and, 196, 216 sentimentalism and, 202, 207, 212 symbolism in, 203 techniques for, 200 Western art and, 198 woodcuts (see woodcuts) Wood on, 14, 196–216 Impartial Citizen (Ward), 355 Impossible Witness (McBride), 46, 346, 375 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) authorship of, 37–38, 151, 250 Blassingame and, 37 canonization of, 36 Child and, 37, 151, 250 on ears, hearing, and sound, 391–392 environmental criticism of, 321, 323, 325 extracts from, in periodicals, 160 on family and community life, 278, 289, 338 Foster on, 37–38, 250 Fulton on, 250–253 on “the genealogies of slavery,” 310 illustrations in, 204 (p. 451) literary criticism of, 4, 43, 44, 184 locations of, 325, 338 on master, 391 memories in, 24 plot structure of, 250 popularity of, 250 publication of, 38, 152, 153 Page 32 of 71

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Index sensationalism and, 171 on sex and sexuality, 56, 245–247, 291–293, 391–392 veracity of, 37 “incorporated embodiment,” 264, 271 Incorporations (Cherniavsky), 264 India, 363 Indiana, 40, 41, 103 Indianapolis Freeman newspaper, 40 individualism American Romanticism on, 384 economic independence and, 274 entrepreneurial ideal and, 266 freedom and, 184 manhood and, 222, 270 markers of, 227 individuality, 200, 202, 203, 293, 364 industrialization, 189 “Inkle and Yarico,” 366 Inquisition, 350 “In Respect to Females” (Foster), 249 In Search of Satisfaction (Cooper), 193–194 Interesting Narrative (Baquaqua), 345, 350–351 Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Equiano) audience for, 38 Baker on, 272, 274 canonization of, 197 circulation of, 38, 377 on community, 285–287 copyright on, 376 editions of, 26 on England, 384 environmental criticism of, 316–317 on family, 278, 279 illustrations in, 197, 199–200 on interracial relationships, 384 on Jamaica, 350 legal status and, 74 literacy and freedom in, 268 literary criticism of, 4, 341 locations of, 338–339, 383–384 manumission certificate in, 272 on marriage, 285 materiality in, 73 memory and, 23–24 on middle passage, 286 Monteath and, 350 publication of, 197, 376–377 reviews of, 376, 381 Page 33 of 71

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Index rhetorical strategies of, 174 Romanticism and, 384 Taylor on, 316 interviews by American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, 110 Blassingame’s in Texas, 113 Byrd’s in Virginia, 109 factors affecting, 21, 28–29 of former slaves, circa Civil War, 110 FWP (see Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) interviews) historian’s use of, 62 Mather’s with Hanno, 68, 81 Nixon’s in Alabama, 95 Reddick’s in Kentucky, 103 reliability of, 28 for University oral histories projects, 27–28, 62 Iola Leroy (Harper), 187–189 Iraq, 194 Irish, 300–301, 429 “I Rose and Found My Voice” (Stepto), 35 Irving, Washington, 384 Islam, 279–280, 282, 368 it-narratives, 70–71, 75 Ito, Akiyo, 38 “‘I Was Born’” (Olney), 6, 23, 71, 150 I Was Born a Slave (Taylor), 154, 316–319, 321–326 Jackson, Alverna, 127 Jackson, Andrew, 151, 157 Jackson, Ellen, 257–258, 305 Jackson, Henry, 127 Jackson, John Andrew, 329 Jackson, Julia Grayson, 127 (p. 452) Jackson, Leon, 37, 151 Jackson, Martin, 113 Jackson, Mattie memories of, 304 The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, 225, 252–253, 256–258, 298, 303–305 Thompson and, 303–305, 308 Jackson, Westly, 305 Jacobs, Donald M., 110 Jacobs, Harriet copyright to works of, 154 as house slave, 55 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (see Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) letters of, 251–252 on memory, 24 papers of, 42, 49–50 portrait of, 204 Page 34 of 71

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Index on prejudice and job seeking, 187–188 publisher interactions with, 38 sales of book by, 156 Stowe and, 153 on writing, 251 Yellin biography of, 46, 50 Jamaica, 345, 349–350, 364, 366 James, Henry, 186 James, Thomas, 228 Jameson, Aron, 142 Jarvis, Charley, 124, 130–131, 132 Jay, John, 69, 70 Jefferson, Thomas on Africans, 421 on agrarian reform, 319–321 as envoy to France, 140 John Hemings and, 140 on memory, 24 Sally Hemings and, 91, 309 on writing, 24 Jeffrey, Julie Roy, 25 Jenkins, Sandy, 57 Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, The (Thwaites), 351 Jeune, Olivier le, 351 Jewett, John, 152, 340–341, 355 Joanna’s Narrative, A West Indian Tale, 366 Johnson, Charles R., 193 Johnson, Charles S., 91 Johnson, Joseph, 376, 380, 381, 384 Johnson, Rachel, 119 Johnson, Samuel, 377 Johnson, Walter, 238–240, 365 Johnson, William Henry, 394 Johnson, William H.H., 357 Johnstone, Abraham, 68, 81 Jones, Edward P., 193–194 Jones, Thomas H., 9, 224, 330, 334 Journal of Negro History, 27, 42, 60, 91 Joyce, Justin A., xii, 13, 165–181 JSTOR database, 27 Jubilee (Walker), 193–194 Kachun, Mitch, xii, 11–12, 21–32, 45 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 355 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 71 Kaufman, Paul, 186 Kazanjian, David, 73 Keckley, Elizabeth marriage of, 254–255 Page 35 of 71

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Index narrative of (see Behind the Scenes) Kelley, Edmond, 152 Kelley, Robin, 98 Kentucky Bibb on, 323, 353 Brown (William Wells) in, 1 education in, 223 FWP interviews in, 103 Green on, 224 Hayden on, 329 Jacksons in, 305 Kentucky State University interviews in, 27–28 Marrs on, 223 Mt. Lebanon Plantation Slave Quarter, photograph of, 137f Reddick interviews in, 103 Smith on, 225 Wash in, 46 Kerber, Linda, 320 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, A (Stowe), 11, 44, 79, 159–160 Kimber, Edward, 143 Kimmel, Michael, 267, 270 Kindred (Butler), 193–194 King, Boston, 73, 288, 352 (p. 453) King, Mary, 374 King Philip’s War, 418 Kirkpatrick, Kathyrn, 384 Knapp, Isaac, 340 knitting, 205f, 206 Known World, The (Jones), 193, 194 Kolchin, Peter, 133 Krueger, Robert, 350 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 104 Kun, Josh, 399, 410–411 labor abolitionism and, 188 Adams on, 226 agricultural, 318–319 Carnegie on, 306 Civil Rights movement and, 194 Davis on, 252 DeForest on, 188 Douglass and, 185, 187–188, 272 free, 188, 321, 324 Fulton on, 248, 251–258 Jacobs on, 250–251 Keckley on, 253 literacy and, 253 Melville and, 187 Page 36 of 71

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Index Phillips on, 4–5, 59 during Reconstruction, 263–264 Santamarina on, 252, 255 slave rebellion/resistance and, 185, 318 Truth on, 252 Washington on, 189 Wertheimer on, 253 LaFantasie, G. W., 419 land records, 46–47 Landscape of History (Gaddis), 96 Lane, Edward, 71 Lane, Lunsford freedom purchase by, 73 narrative of, 44, 69, 71–74, 152–154, 332, 334 language use, 23, 166–167, 347, 365 Lankford, George E., 108 Lapsansky, Philip, 39 Larence, Ellen, 126–127 Larence, Mahala, 126–127 Larence, William, 126–127, 132 La Vie de Toussaint l’Ouverture (St. Remy), 212 Laws Respecting Women, 376 Lay My Burden Down (Botkin), 99n, 104 Lea, 141 leadership, 56 Lean, John, 350 “Learning to Read” (Harper), 303 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 38, 385 Lee, Debbie, 377 Lee, Jarena, 223, 431 Leeward Islands, 372 legal matters apprenticeship, 127, 349, 357–358 Aristodemou on, 381 Black Codes, 127, 353 Blair on, 226 Brown (William Wells) on, 68, 79 civil and criminal court proceedings (see civil and criminal court proceedings) contracts, 72–74 criminal code, 74 Delaney on, 225 DeLombard on, 12, 67–81 Douglass on, 67–68, 76–81 English, on slaves, 372–373 Grimes on, 69, 75–76, 81 guardianship, 127 juries, service on, 263 libel, 76 Page 37 of 71

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Index on literacy, 240, 303 Northup on, 77–78 propaganda and, 78 slave codes, 68, 76, 79, 373 Thomas on, 381–382 Williams on, 226 wills, 280 León, Gerardo Fulleda, 347 Leopard’s Spots, The (Dixon), 191 Lerche, Eliza, 395 Leslie, Kent Anderson, 310 Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecouer), 320–321, 325 Leverenz, David, 266, 267 Levin, Daniel, 194 Levine, Brian, 111, 112 Levine, Lawrence, 5, 92, 115 Lewis, Israel, 353 Lewis, Roscoe, 104, 105 (p. 454) libel, 76 Liberation Historiography (Ernest), 45 Liberator, The advertisements in, 152, 159, 340 Curry’s narrative in, 160 on distribution of Douglass’ narrative, 157 Douglass letter on law in, 78–79 Eldridge’s narrative and, 422 extracts from Douglass’ narrative in, 158 extracts from Williams’ narrative in, 160 first issue of, 68 Liberty (Thompson), 380 Liberty Almanac, The, 157, 159 Liberty Bell, The, 160 Library Company of Philadelphia, 39 Library of Congress (LOC) “Born in Slavery,” 105, 107–108, 111 Botkin’s FWP collection in, 104 website of, 99n Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man, 69 Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours (Allen), 44, 74 Life and Adventures of James Williams, a Fugitive Slave (Williams), 226 Life and Adventures of Peter Wheeler, The (Wheeler), 151 Life and Adventures of Robert the Hermit (Trumbull), 6, 202 Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (Defoe), 198 Life and History of the Rev. Elijah P. Marrs (Marrs), 223–224 Life and Labor in the Old South (Phillips), 4–5, 59 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Douglass), 7, 25, 189, 202, 220, 227 Life of Charles T. Walker, D.D. (Walker), 339 Life of George Henry (Henry), 73, 221 Page 38 of 71

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Index Life Life Life Life Life Life Life Life Life

of Henry George, The (George), 278 of Isaac Mason as a Slave, The (Mason), 278, 334 of James Mars (Mars), 329, 333, 334, 341 of John Thompson, The (Thompson), 322, 334–335 of Josiah Henson, The (Henson), 8, 151, 260, 337, 354 of Rev. Thomas James (James), 228 of the Rev. Elisha W. Green (Green), 224, 228 of Toussaint L’Ouverture (Beard), 212 of William Grimes, The (Grimes) on legal matters, 69, 75–76, 81 location of, 333 profit from sales of, 152–153 publication of, 45, 152 on racism, 69, 229 social class and, 225 study of, 219 Life of William J. Brown (Brown), 415, 416–417, 419–420, 424–431 Light and Truth of Slavery, The (Aaron), 160, 201f, 202 Ligon, Glenn, 203 Lincoln, Abraham, 98, 264, 306–307 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 253, 255–256, 335 Lincoln, Willie, 255, 256 line engraving, 200 Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Smith), 393, 411 literacy aspirations for, 57, 299 bound out children and, 423 Burton on, 307 collaboration and, 298–299, 303, 365 freedmen’s citizenship projects and, 298 freedom and, 268 FWP interviews and, 102 Gates on, 268 Gilroy on, 341 historians and, 92–94 humanity and, 179 identity and, 151, 180, 307, 365 Jackson on, 257–258 laws on, 240, 303 The Light and Truth of Slavery on, 201f numeracy and, 268 pension records and, 124, 129 public model of, 179 religious conversion and, 223 Sandford on, 307 slave rebellion/resistance and, 303 The Story of Mattie J. Jackson on, 304–305 Troutman on insurgent, 258 (p. 455) Page 39 of 71

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Index urban vs. rural labor and, 253 literary criticism canonization and, 36 material contexts and, 149–150 Literary Dollars and Social Sense (Zboray), 38 literary history, Black, 13–14, 70 literary societies, 179 lithographs, 160, 196, 202 Little, Malcolm. See X, Malcolm Lloyd, Colonel, 173–175, 244 Lobb, John, 9 Locke, Alain, 22 Locke, John, 74 Logan, Rayford, 42–43 Loggins, Vernon, 22 Loguen, Jermain Wesley, 54, 337–338, 353, 354–355 Lomax, John A., 28, 103–105, 109–110 Lomax, Ruby, 105 London (Canada), 355 London (England), 283, 346, 354 Long, Fannie, 293 Longest Memory, The (D’Aguiar), 193, 194 Lost Family Found, A (Branch), 341 Loughran, Trish, 156 Louisiana Brooks in, 292 free Blacks in, 419 FWP interviews in, 105, 107, 109 Northup in, 77–78 slave movement to, 288 Louisiana Purchase, 288, 294 l’Ouverture, Toussaint, 211–213, 379 Lucas, James, 98 lynching, 244, 331 Lyrical Ballads, The (Coleridge & Wordsworth), 379, 385 Lytle, Mark Hamilton, 98 Mackey, Frank, 351, 353, 354, 356 Madden, Richard Robert, 346–347, 362, 363, 367–368 Madison, James, 69, 70 Maguire, Ian, 187 mail, censorship of antislavery, 80 Maine, Henry, 72 Making of African America, The (Berlin), 417 Making of America database, 22 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (Spillers), 242–243 managerialism, 263, 266 Mandle, Jay R., 264 Manhood and the American Renaissance (Leverenz), 266, 267 Page 40 of 71

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Index Manning, Abscom, 123 Many Thousands Gone (Berlin), 92 Manzano, Juan Francisco, 345, 346–347 mapping, 168–169 March, The (Doctorow), 194 marketing anti-slavery lecture tours and, 156 of Blind Tom’s sheet music, 400 by Brown (Henry “Box”), 153 by Equiano, 200 by Truth, 207 Fabian on, 156 Jacobs on, 156 location and, 341 numbers used in, 155 Webb and, 155 Marrant, John, 73, 74, 352 marriages arranged, in Africa, 280 Bibb on, 271, 273–274 Brown (William Wells) on, 273 Douglass on, 270–271 Equiano on, 285 Foster on, 254–255 Franke on, 271 Gronniosaw on, 282 pension records and, 123–124 polygamous, in Africa, 280 Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom on, 302–303 Slavery in New York on, 271 Marrs, Elijah P., 223–224 Mars, James, 329, 333, 334, 341 Marsh, Bela, 152 Marvelous Musical Prodigy, The, 395–397, 400, 411 Marx, Karl, 71, 193 (p. 456) Maryland Ball in, 289, 292 Blind Tom concert in, 407 Douglass in, 222, 289, 322 Keckley in Baltimore, 255 pension records on slavery in, 125–126 slave quarters in, 136f, 143 slavery law in, 373 Some Memoirs of the Life of Job on, 279–280 Sotterly Plantation Slave Quarter, photograph of, 136f Watkins on, 329 Mascuch, Michael, 71 Mason, Isaac, 278, 334 Page 41 of 71

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Index Mason, Regina, 45 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1 From Bondage to Belonging on Worcester, 334 Boston (see Boston) Commonwealth v. Aves, 80 Douglass in, 222, 272, 300, 322 Lane in, 332 slavery law in, 373 Wheatley in, 283 The Worcester Slave Narratives, 7, 41, 330, 333–335, 340 Massie, Ishreal, 141–142 masters definition of, 67 historian’s use of papers from, 93–95 magistrates and, 349, 358 in pension files, 127–128 portrayal of, 65 relationship to slave, 91–92, 244 Slavery Abolition Act compensation for, 373 Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire (Burnard), 364 material contexts, 149–161 materialism, 266 Mather, Cotton, 68, 81 May, Sam’l J., 262 McBride, Dwight A. background of, xii Impossible Witness, 46, 346, 375 on print culture, 13 “Reading Communities,” 165–181 on Romanticism, 377 McCarthy, B. Eugene, 7, 41, 330, 333–335, 340 McCaskill, Barbara, xii, 14–15, 298–310 McCoy, Beth A., 299–300 McDowell, Deborah E., 10–11, 270 McFeely, William, 184 McGill, Meredith, 150, 154 McHenry, Elizabeth, 38, 179, 180 McHenry, “Jerry,” 354–355 McKoy, Millie-Christine, 225 Meachum, John Berry, 44 “Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, The” (Douglass), 180 Melish, Joanne Pope, 2–3, 417–418 Melville, Herman, 171, 180, 186–187, 384 Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (Eldridge), 415–417, 419–425, 430–431 Memoirs of the Life of Boston King (King), 73, 288, 352 Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days (Burton), 298, 305–308 memory Page 42 of 71

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Index accuracy of, 28–29 African American history and, 16, 25, 28 Baquaqua on, 351 Cather on animated, 391 collective, 24–25, 29–30, 169 constructed nature of, 168 factors affecting, 21, 28–29 FWP interviews and, 28, 111–113, 115 identity and, 29 Kachun on, 11–12, 21–32 Levine on, 111, 112 Olney on, 23 postmemory, 16, 415–416 reliability of, 28 theft of, 24 University oral history interviews and, 27–28 “Memory Theory” (Hoffman), 112 men artisanal tradition of, 266 entrepreneurial ideal of, 266 FWP interviews of, 104, 114–115 market economy and, 14, 263 patrician paradigm of, 266–268, 270 portraits of, 197–203 traits of nineteenth century, 265 Men of Mark (Simmons), 42 (p. 457) metaphors, 23 Metcalf, Nathaniel G., 428 Methodist Magazine, 352 Methodists, 292, 427 Mexico, 292 Michigan, 203, 225 Michigan Observer, The, 158, 160 Middle Passage (Johnson), 193 midwives, 291 military Dunmore’s Proclamation on, 287 enlistment in, 263 pension for service in, 13, 119–131, 271 Washington’s Continental Army, 287, 422 Mill, John Stuart, 385 Miller, Anna, 138–139 Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 152 Miller, Randall M., 141 Miller, Steven F., 31, 91, 98 Millie-Christine, 394 Milton, John, 375, 384 Milwaukee, 7, 220, 329 Page 43 of 71

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Index Minges, Patrick, 292–293 Mingo (Blind Tom’s father), 393 Mingo (FWP interviewee), 291 miscarriages, 104 Mississippi, 104, 107, 288 Missouri freedom suit case files for, 48 Polly Wash in, 46 St. Louis (see St. Louis) Miss Ravenal’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (DeForest), 188 Mitchell, Margaret, 191 Moby-Dick (Melville), 186–187 modernism, 43, 186 Mohawk, 351 Molloy, Sylvia, 346–347 Monteath, Archibald, 345, 349–350, 363 Montejo, Esteban, 345–347, 363 Montesquieu, 165, 166 Monticello, 91, 140 Montreal, 351, 353, 356–357 Montreal Gazette, 357 Montserrat, 384 Moodie, Susanna, 347. See also Strickland, Susanna Moody, Joycelyn K., xii–xiii, 16, 415–431 Moore, A. M., 135 Moore, Samuel Downing, 351 Morattico plantation, 142 Moravian church, 349–350 Moravian Society, 347 More, Hannah, 375, 380 Morgan, Edmund, 80, 185 Mormino, Gary R., 105 Morrison, Toni, 31, 191, 193–194, 408 Morrow, Mandy, 143 Moses of Her People, The (Bradford), 8 Mt. Lebanon Plantation Slave Quarter, 137f Mr. and Mrs. Prince (Gerzina), 45 Muir, John, 326 murder by Hodge, 372 of Demby, 244 extradition for, 69 by Garner, of her child, 191 (see also Beloved) Jacobs on, 246 of Maurepas’ family, 212 onboard the Amistad, 214 proslavery tales of, 93 sensationalism and, 65, 236 Page 44 of 71

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Index in Southampton slave revolt, 213 by Stielazen, 277 Murdoch, Francis B., 49 Murphy, Lawrence, 277 Musher, Sharon Ann, xiii, 9, 12–13, 27–28, 101–116 music of “Blind Tom,” 393–412 folksongs (see folksongs) identity and, 399 Kun on, 399 relaxing with, 293 slave impact on, 138 Muslims, 279–280, 282, 368 My Bondage and Freedom (Douglass) advertisements for, 155 on Black authorship, 76 consistency with other works, 7 on Constitution, 67 Garrison and, 9 illustrations in, 201, 202 (p. 458) My Bondage and Freedom (Cont.)on labor, 185, 272 on legal matters, 67–68, 76–81 manhood and, 265, 270, 272–274 manumission certificate in, 272–273 publication of, 152 on religion, 222 sales of, 155 Myers, Amrita Chakrabarti, 96 My Southern Home (Brown, William Wells), 219, 227 Nancy, 336 Narragansett tribe, 422, 423, 426 Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Slaves of Surinam (Stedman), 210, 211f, 362, 363, 366, 376 Narrative of Bethany Veney, The (Veney), 225, 334 Narrative of Henry Box Brown (Brown & Stearns) appendix of, 262 authorship of, 151, 260–261 Douglass on, 180 illustrations in, 203 manhood and, 262, 274–275 May address in, 262 Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown and, 9, 260–262 preface of, 262 promotion of, 261, 262 sales of, 261 on slave as property, 81 Stepto and, 262 Narrative of Henry Watson (Watson), 152 Page 45 of 71

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Index “Narrative of James Curry,” 160 Narrative of James Watkins (Watkins), 329 Narrative of James Williams (Williams), 22–23, 75, 77, 152, 157–160, 340 Narrative of Joanna, The, 366 “Narrative of Louis Asa-Asa,” 348, 350, 363 Narrative of Lunsford Lane (Lane), 44, 69, 71–74, 152–154, 332, 334 Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Truth) attention generated by, 225 audience for, 223 authorship of, 9 circulation of, 155 illustrations in, 204–207 law and, 75 location of, 341 printing of, 152–153 publication of, 152, 220 Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper (Roper), 44–45, 155, 332, 338, 353 Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration (Rowlandson), 186 “Narrative of the Interesting Origins, A” (Foster), 37 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, The (Bibb) Biblical references in, 325 Canada and, 353 Cherniavsky’s incorporation and, 264 copyright to, 154 Douglass on, 180 environmental criticism of, 323, 325, 326 on hiding after escape, 326 illustrations in, 202–203 location of, 338 manhood and, 262, 264, 265, 273–274 on marriage, 271, 273–274 on Ohio River, 325 publication of, 152, 260 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture (Smith) Cherniavsky’s incorporation and, 264 on commoditization, 69, 71, 73, 268 Cruz on, 74 Douglass and, 267 environmental criticism of, 317 Horton on, 267 location of, 333 manhood and, 262, 264, 267, 269–270, 274 numeracy and, 268–269 on property, 269, 274 on slave trade, 268 Narrative of the Life and Labors of the Rev. G. W. Offley, A (Offley), 333, 334 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) abolitionists and, 9, 298, 299 Page 46 of 71

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Index advertisements for, 340 audience for, 67, 170–179 (p. 459) on Aunt Hester’s beating, 23–24, 172, 236–237 canonization of, 36 Cherniavsky’s incorporation and, 264 circulation of, 154 consistency with other works, 7 on Covey, 260, 267, 270 on ears, hearing, and sound, 392 environmental criticism of, 317 on family and community life, 278, 289–290 on folksongs, 391, 392 Garrison’s “Preface” to, 235–237, 261–262, 299–301, 308 George Anderson and, 194 Hartman on, 172 identity and, 80–81, 151 ideology in, 184–185 in libraries, 30 literary criticism of, 4, 183–184 manhood and, 262, 264–267, 270–274 marketing of, 157 on marriage, 270–271 on memory, 24 Moby-Dick and, 186 on murder of Demby, 244 My Bondage and Freedom and, 9 number of copies sold, 26 on patriarchy, 270 Peabody on, 364–365 Phillips (Ulrich) on, 59 Phillips (Wendell) perfactory letter for, 261, 299–301, 308 on prejudice and job seeking, 187–188 publication of, 152, 155, 159, 340 Quarles’ edition of, 219 on religion, 222 rhetorical strategies of, 170–179 sales of, 155 Smith and, 267 sound stories in, 410–411 spirituality in, 183 Stepto on, 261–262 Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (Brown) Cherniavsky’s incorporation and, 264 Ernest on, 151 on family and community life, 278 on freedom, 260 illustrations in, 203 legal rhetoric in, 68, 81 Page 47 of 71

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Index literary criticism of, 184 locations of, 341 manhood and, 262, 264, 274 preface of, 262 publication of, 260, 261 purpose for writing, 9 Stearns’ book and, 9, 260–262 Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy (Grandy), 69, 71–73, 151, 153, 160, 340 Narrative of the Life of the Rev. Noah Davis, The (Davis), 201 Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars (Gronniosaw), 280–283, 383 Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Martin Clarke (Clarke), 43–44, 152, 155–156, 322, 337– 338, 353 Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke (Clarke), 151, 160, 353 Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A (Hammon), 73, 339, 340 Narrative of the Writings of Andrew Jackson (Jackson), 151 Narrative of Thomas Smallwood, A (Smallwood), 354 Narrative of William Hayden (Hayden), 329 Narrative of William Wells Brown (Brown) Biblical references in, 325 environmental criticism of, 318 on legal matters, 68, 79 literary criticism of, 184 locations of, 335 manhood and, 265 on marriage, 273 printing costs of, 152 publication of, 152, 260 sales of, 154, 155 slave code in, 68 on slave sales, 59 “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves” (Peabody), 364–365 National Anti-Slavery Standard, The, 160 National Archives, 13, 119–131, 271 national convention movement, 176 (p. 460) National Manhood (Nelson), 263, 265–266 Native Americans, 104, 186, 265, 288, 418–419. See also specific tribes Nature (Emerson), 385 “Nature of Slavery, The” (Douglass), 67 Nautchees, 288 Negro Affairs Committee, 104 Negro Author, The (Loggins), 22 “Negro Boy, The” (Hunt), 380 “Negro in Literature and Art, The” (Du Bois), 22 “Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature, The” (Locke), 22 Negro Seamen Acts, 80 “Negro Slave Family, The” (Frazier), 22, 60 Neither Fugitive nor Free (Wong), 69, 70, 72, 78, 80 Page 48 of 71

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Index Nell, William Cooper, 39, 42 Nelson, Dana, 263, 265–266, 339 Nelson, John, 140 neomodernism, 43 “Neo-Slave Narratives” (Smith), 372 New Hampshire, 45 New Jersey, 336, 373 Newman, Richard S., 74 New Man, The (Bruce), 220–221 New Orleans, 419 newspapers in Black Literature collection, 40 court testimonies and depositions in, 363 in England, 375–376 freedom suit coverage in, 48 postal distribution of, 223 purpose of, 180 slave narratives in, 25 on Union activities in St. Louis, 257 Newton, John, 375, 378 New York City “Anti-Slavery Depository, Publication Office, and Free Reading Room” in, 157 Baquaqua in, 351 commodity exchanges in, 254 Douglass in, 270–271 Gronniosaw in, 280, 282 Slavery in New York on, 271 New York Conspiracy, 80 New York State Life of Rev. Thomas James on, 228 Narrative of James Williams in, 159 national convention at Buffalo, 176–177 NYC (see New York City) slavery law in, 373 Ward in, 336 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 168 Nigeria, 280–282 Niles, Elisha, 317 Nixon, H. C., 95, 99n North American Slave Narratives (Andrews), 41, 156 North Carolina Aunt Sally on, 339 free Blacks “warned out” of, 73 FWP interviews in, 109, 292, 293 Jacobs in, 338 Keckley in, 335 Lane on, 332 pension records on slavery in, 126, 129 Page 49 of 71

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Index Roper on, 332 North Carolina Slave Narratives (Andrews), 7, 41, 71–74, 330, 332 North-Side View of Slavery, A (Drew), 337, 340, 353, 355–356 North Star, The, 180. See also Frederick Douglass’ Paper Northup, Solomon occupation of, 54 St. John and, 78 Twelve Years a Slave (see Twelve Years a Slave) Wilson and, 78, 318 Notable Black American Women (Smith), 42–43 Nova Scotia, 331, 352, 357 “Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative, The” (Andrews), 416, 420–421 Novlin, Mary, 291 Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (Price), 376 Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (Priestley), 376 Occom, Samson, 382, 383 O’Connell, Daniel, 300–301 O’Connell, Deidre, 394, 399, 400, 403–407, 410–411 (p. 461) Octoroon (Picquet), 278, 291–293 “Ode on the Slave Trade” (Coleridge), 379 O’Donovan, Susan E., 130 Offley, Greensbury Washington, 45, 333 Ohio, 158, 190–191, 323, 353 Ohmsted, Frederick Law, 134–136 Oklahoma, 99n, 109 “Old Clothes Scandal,” 256 “Old Ned,” 282 Oliver, Perry H., 394 Olney, James, 6, 23, 71, 150, 400 O’Meally, Robert, 16 Oronooko (Behn), 200 Othello (Shakespeare), 384 “Other Interesting Narrative, The” (Bugg), 38 Our Nig (Wilson), 38 Owens, Leslie Howard, 143–144 Owens, Wade, 293 Oxford African American Studies Center, 43 Oxherding Tale (Johnson), 193 Page, Thomas Nelson, 26 Paine, Thomas, 376 Painter, Nell Irvin, 45, 152–153 Palmer, Archibald, 349 Parfait, Clair, 152, 154, 156 Parker, Allen, 334 Parker, Caleb, 132 Parker, Peter, 128 Parker, Theodore, 188 Parkhurst, Henry M., 1 Page 50 of 71

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Index Paton, Diana, 349, 357–358 Payne, Bruckner, 240 Peabody, Ephraim, 154, 364–365 Peace of Paris, 352 Pearl, rebellion aboard, 80 Peculiar Institution, The (Stampp), 5, 61, 63, 91, 277 Peel, William, 356 Pen is Ours, The (Fagan & Bond), 40, 249 Pennington, Dylan, 272 Pennington, James W.C. legal citations of, 81 narrative of (see Fugitive Blacksmith, The) occupation of, 54 Pennsylvania, 25, 260, 356, 367, 376 Pennsylvania Journal, 376 pension records, 13, 119–131, 271 Pequot War, 418 Perdue, Charles L., Jr. on interviews, 28 Weevils in the Wheat (see Weevils in the Wheat) Pereira dos Santos, Mariano, 350 Philadelphia Negro (Du Bois), 324 Phillips, Caryl, 193–194 Phillips, Robert K., Weevils in the Wheat. See Weevils in the Wheat Phillips, Ulrich B., 4–5, 59–60, 91, 103, 105 Phillips, Wendell, 64, 67, 261, 299–301, 308 Philosophy of History, The (Hegel), 166 photographs, 14, 44, 202, 205–207 Picquet, Eliza, 278, 291–293 Pierce, Yolanda, 317 Pilgrims, 300 Pillars of Salt (Cohen), 68, 69 “pise” buildings, 140–141 Pitts, Reginald, 45 plantations architecture of, 134–136, 137f, 138f, 140–142 arts, crafts, and practical skills on, 138–140 Bassingame on, 5 economic and environmental challenges of, 321 geography of, 172–173 Harris and Page’s stories of, 26 networks on/between, 55, 56 Phillips on, 4–5, 59 Schoepf on Virginian, 143 slave quarters on, 134–136, 137f, 138f, 140–144 slavery on, vs. urban, 254 Stampp on, 5 Thistlewood on Jamaican, 364 Page 51 of 71

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Index Wedderburn on Jamaican, 350 wild places outside, 317, 322–323 Plea for Emigration, A (Shadd), 355 Poe, Edgar Allan, 384 Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave-Trade, A (Williams), 380 Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba (Manzano), 347 Poems on Various Subjects (Wheatley), 204, 283, 383 political power, 74, 104, 189, 263, 325 (p. 462) Pooley, Sophia, 351–352 pornography, 196 pornotrope, 236, 242 Portelli, Alessandro, 112 Post, Amy, 39, 251 postmemory, 16, 415–416 postmodernism, 90 pottery, 138 Potts, Howard E., 108, 110 Poznanski, Joseph, 403–407 Preston, Dickson J., 45–46 Price, Richard, 376 Priestley, Joseph, 376 Prince, Mary community and, 169 narrative of (see History of Mary Prince, The) Warner and, 349 Prince, Nancy, 223 Pringle, Thomas, 347–349 print culture abolitionism and, 65, 69, 166 adaptation for, 23 archivally-based approaches in, 37 book history, 149, 152, 154, 156 Caribbean hybrid foundation of Black, 363 Douglass on, 76 “Early African American Print Culture” conference, 37 gallows literature, 68, 74–75, 77, 196, 351 Goddu on material contexts, 13, 149 historian’s assessment of, 65 law and, 69 McBride and Joyce on, 13 Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and, 420 numeracy and, 155, 268 Reconstruction and, 416 probate, 47, 48 Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, The (Davis), 64, 344 profit from sales, 152–153 propaganda, 8, 23, 69, 78 property Page 52 of 71

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Index Brown (Henry “Box”) on, 81 Brown (William Wells) on, 318 crime and status as, 74–77 documents, in research on authors, 46–47 The Federalist Papers on slaves as, 70 gallows literature and status as, 74–75, 77 Henson on, 318, 324 it-narratives of, 70–71, 75 manhood and, 266, 270–271, 273–274 ownership of, by free Blacks, 417, 422, 423, 426 religion and status as, 74 Smith on, 269, 274 Prophet, Hannah, 422 prostitution, 350 providence, 184 Providence Female Tract Society, 423 Provincial Freeman, The, 353–354, 355 psychological assessment of slavery, 61, 63 Public Advertiser, 384 publication cost of, 152–153 histories of, 38 location of, 152, 156, 220, 334 location of narratives and, 328 material contexts of, 151–156 number of, nineteenth century, 25, 219 of women’s narratives, 249 Pudd’n’head Wilson (Twain), 188–189 punishment Douglass’ description of, 174–175, 178 The Federalist Papers on, 70 FWP interviews on, 104 Jacobs on, 246 Locke on, 74 Moby-Dick on, 187 personhood and, 76 Prince (Mary) on, 241–244 submission via unpredictable, 55, 57–58 Thistlewood on, 364 Pyatt, Jane, 293 quadroon, 374 Quakers, 419, 423 Quarles, Benjamin, 42, 64, 219 Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine, 22, 160 “Question of Ethics, A” (Carnegie), 306 quilting, 138, 139, 293 “Race, Violence, and Manhood” (Yarborough), 265–266, 267 “Race Question in America, The” (Stanford), 306–307 (p. 463) Page 53 of 71

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Index race riots, 427–428 Radano, Ron, 399, 411, 412 Randolph, Peter, 43, 224, 228 rape breeding and, 237 Equiano on, 285 families and, 291 Foster on, 249 FWP interviews on, 111 Keckley on, 253 readers as witnesses to, 236 scopic terror from, 237 Simpson on, 277 in women’s vs. men’s narratives, 248, 249 rationalism, 384 Rawick, George The American Slave, 30–31, 39, 89–90, 105, 107–108, 143 Fisk University oral history interviews and, 105 indexes to works of, 107 From Sundown to Sunup, 5, 31 Reader’s Guide Retrospective, 22 Readex American Historical Newspapers, 22 realism, 149 Recollections of Slave Times (Parker), 334 Reconstruction Andrews on reforms in, 228–229 Bradford on District of Columbia in, 8 Du Bois on, 191, 263–264 Dunning and, 93 family and community in, 294 FWP interviews on, 104 historians’ study of, 64 identity in, 299 labor during, 263–264 Mandle on freedom in, 264 O’Donovan on, 130 print culture and, 416 racial violence in, 107 Reddick, Lawrence, 103 Redpath, James, 211 Reed, Ishmael, 193–194 Reed, William, 130–131 Reeve, Clara, 377 Refugees from Slavery in Canada (Howe), 356 Regosin, Elizabeth, xiii, 13, 119–131 religion Albert on, 293 Ashy on Fantee, 367 Page 54 of 71

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Index Black leadership in, 222–223 Christianity (see Christianity) Douglass on, 56, 175–177, 222 Equiano on, 316 The Fanatics on, 190 First Great Awakening, 74 FWP interviews on, 104 identity and, 56, 222 Islam, 279–280, 282, 368 property to personhood conversion by, 74 research using FWP collection, 115 Second Great Awakening, 74 songs in FWP collection, 115 The Story of Mattie J. Jackson on, 305 violence and, 176 Remembering Slavery (Berlin et al.), 31, 91, 98 Resistencia y cimarronaje (León), 347 revisionist histories of slavery, 28 Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life (Loguen), 337–338, 353, 354–355 Reynolds, Emily E., 336 Reynolds, Joshua, 200 Rhode Island, 268, 415–431 Rhodes, James Ford, 58 Richard, Shadrack, 289 Richardson, Lewis, 357 Rights of Man (Paine), 376 Riis, Thomas, 402 Ripley, C. Peter, 355–357 Robert, 6, 202 Roberts, Anderson, 129 Roberts, Nelly, 129 Roberts, Solomon, 129 Robertson, John William, 352 Robeson, Paul, 192 Rodman, Samuel, 423 Roe, Nicolas, 380 Roger, Octavia, 278 Roll, Jordan, Roll (Genovese), 5, 136–138, 325 Romanticism abolitionism and, 170, 375–380 in America, 384–386 bondage and, 186, 187 (p. 464) Romanticism (Cont.)concepts of, 372 in England, 374, 375, 379–386 guarantees of, 348 interracial relationships and, 384 literary criticism of narratives and, 181 Page 55 of 71

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Index on Nature, 167 on self, 386 slavery and, 15, 374–380 violence and, 172 Wheatley and, 382–383 women’s rights and, 381 Roots (Haley), 31, 192–194 Roper, Moses, 44–45, 155, 332, 338, 353 Rowlandson, Mary White, 186 Royal African, The (Sessarakoo), 200 Ruggles, Jeffrey, 45, 261 Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (Craft) illustrations in, 207–208 legal citations of, 68, 79 locations of, 330–331, 341 writing of, 7, 298, 301–303 Rushdy, Ashraf, 193 Russell, Irwin, 59 Sacks, Oliver, 394, 409–410 Said, Omar ibn, 333, 341 St. Catharines, 355–356 St. John, Thaddeus, 78 St. Louis African American history, culture, and, 329, 335–336 city directory listings in, 48 Delaney in, 47–48, 336 Jacksons in, 257–258, 304 Keckley in, 253–254, 258, 335 “List of Free Negroes” in, 48, 49 probate records for, 48 Union occupation of, 257 St. Remy, M., 212 St. Vincent, 349 salt, 252 Sambo, 5, 193 Sammons, Mark, 45 Samuels, Ellen, 301 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 302 Sancho, Ignatius, 283 Sandford v. Scott, 2, 80, 335 Sandoval, Arturo, 362, 363 Sandwich, 353, 355 San Francisco Elevator newspaper, 40 Santamarina, Xiomara, 252, 253, 255 Sawyer, Fred, 129, 132 Sawyer, John, 129 Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Bradford), 208–211, 225 Scenes of Subjection (Hartman), 70, 172, 243, 245, 309 Page 56 of 71

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Index Schacter, Daniel L., 110 Schantz, Mark S., 423, 427 Schoelcher, Victor, 347 Schoepf, Johan David, 143 Schomburg, Arthur, 39 Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Woman Writers, The (Gates), 39–40, 41 Schulman, Ivan A., 346 Schwalm, Leslie, 26, 92 Schwartz, Marie Jenkins, xiii, 9, 12, 89–98 scopic terror, 237, 241 Scott, Dred & Harriet Delaney and, 49 Sandford v. Scott, 2, 80, 335 Scott, James C., 144 Scruggs, Lawson, 42 Second Great Awakening, 74 Second Treatise of Government, The (Locke), 74 Second World War, 29–30 secret societies, 49, 104 Seguine, James, 125 Sekora, John, 37–38, 68, 71, 149, 151, 299 self, Romantics vs. slave narrators on, 386 self-purchase fraud, 72–73 Selling of Joseph, The (Sewall), 340 Senegal, 333 Senegambia, 279–280 sensationalism Black humanity and, 71 court cases and, 68 illustrations and, 196, 216 Jacobs and, 171 property to personhood conversion by, 74 sex and sexuality and, 65 violence and, 65, 236 (p. 465) sentimentalism Bibb and, 273 Black humanity and, 71 consensualism and, 72 Douglass and, 172–173 illustrations and, 202, 207, 212 manhood and, 265 Oronooko and The Royal African, 200 rhetorical strategies of, 250, 354 sex and sexuality and, 65 slave narratives and, 71, 149, 186 violence and, 65 servant, definition of, 204 Sessarakoo, William Unsah, 200 Page 57 of 71

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Index Seven Years War, 294 Sewall, Samuel, 340 sex and sexuality Abdur-Rahman on, 235–247 in apprenticeship system, 349 Blassingame on, 293 Brown (Kimberly) on, 242 Cugoano on, 285 Cult of True Womanhood and, 249 family/community ideals/values and, 55–56 Foster on, 249 FWP interviews on, 104, 111, 114, 277 Jacobs on, 56, 245–247, 291–293, 391–392 Picquet on, 293 Prince (Mary) on, 239–244 sensationalism and, 65 sentimentalism and, 65 Stevenson on, 292–293 Williams on, 292–293 Shadd, Mary Ann, 353–354, 355, 357 Shadrach Minkins (Collison), 356–357 Shaffer, Donald R., 121–122 Shakespeare, William, 198, 384 Sharp, Granville, 378, 383–384 Sharpe, Jenny, 348, 364 Shaw, Stephanie J., 92, 115 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 194 Sherrad, Lucinda, 135 Sibell, 367 Siemerling, Winfried, xiii, 15, 344–358 Sierra Leone, 287, 352 silence, 240–241, 345 Simmons, William J., 42 Simpson, Ben, 277, 294 Simpson, Emma (sister), 277 Simpson, Emma (wife), 277–278 Sketches of my Life in the South (Stroyer), 330, 334 ‘Sketch of a Negro Code’ (Burke), 378 Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America (Stroud), 79 Skinner, Quentin, 184 Skipworth, George, 141 slave breeding, 55, 59, 237 slave codes, 68, 76, 79, 373 slave coffles, 59, 368 Slave Community, The (Blassingame), 5, 31, 62, 91, 193 slave gang, 322 slaveholders. See masters Page 58 of 71

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Index Slave Life in Georgia (Brown, John), 24, 201, 319 Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History, The (Starling), 4, 68, 149, 185 slave narratives chronological pattern in, 334 collaboration on, 298–310, 364, 402–403 conventions for, 6, 249 deconstructing, 90 definition of, 362 description of, 4 deterioration of extant, 38 etymology of, 22 Gates on classic, 119 goals of, 44, 321, 365 “hybrid” nature of, 372 pre- vs. post-Civil War, 219–225, 229 proslavery responses to, 46 purpose of, 14, 25 rhetorical strategies of, 377 on self, 386 similarities in, 6, 23, 44 value of, 10 Slave Narratives:A Folk History of Slavery in the US from Interviews with Former Slaves (FWP), 22 Slave Narratives of Texas, The (Tyler & Murphy), 277 slave-owner. See masters slave pens, 367 (p. 466) slave quarters, 134–136, 137f, 138f, 140–144 slave rebellion/resistance accommodation and, 92 the Bauers’ study of, 60–61 Cugoano on, 285 Elkins on, 105 environment and, 60 forms of day-to-day, 144 Fulton on women’s, 248 FWP questions on, 104 Hall on, 26 images of, 211–216 justification for, 223 as labor uprising, 185, 318 literacy and, 303 Myers on women’s, 96 religion and, 56 roles and, 55 selfhood and, 221 shipboard, 197 silence and, 241 spies and, 175 Page 59 of 71

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Index University oral history interviews on, 28 Vlach on, 144 slavery capitalism and, 266 effects of, 10 historiography of, 58–63, 90–98, 165–166, 191 identity and, 372 knowledge of, 1, 170 Montesquieu on Christianity and, 165 plantation vs. urban, 254 psychological assessment of, 61, 63 representations of, 1, 4 revisionist histories of, 28 Romanticism and, 15, 374–380 Slavery (More), 380 Slavery Abolition Act, 373 Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Elkins), 5, 61–62, 91, 105, 193 Slavery in New York (Berlin & Harris), 271 Slavery in the United States (Ball) advertisements for, 152 copyright to, 154 extracts from, in periodicals, 160 Fischer and, 151, 322 locations in, 289, 292, 322 printing of, 152 publication of, 156 Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine on, 22 on race and gender, 339 slaves Bauers on behavior of, 60–61 in census, 47, 48, 133 definition of, 67 relationship to master, 91–92 Slave’s Friend, The, 160 Slave Ship, 372 Slaves in the Family (Ball), 310 Slave’s Narrative, The (Davis & Gates), 24–25, 27, 149, 150 Slave Songs of the United States, 408 Slave Testimony (Blassingame), 153, 293 slave trade auction depictions, 238–239 Brown (William Wells) on preparations for sale in, 59 Cugoano on, 284 Du Bois’ dissertation on, 60 family division by, 55, 58 FWP interviews on, 96, 104 Johnson on, 238–240 legal end to African, 277, 288 Page 60 of 71

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Index Nixon interviews on, 95 pension records on, 125–128 Prince (Mary) on, 238–240 prosecution of traders, 77–78 Rhode Island’s illegalization of, 417–418 Romanticism and, 15, 375, 377–380 Smith on, 268 Transatlantic Slave Trade Database on, 344 white women and, 239 Slave Trade Act, 372–373 Slave-Trading in the Old South (Bancroft), 60 Slotkin, Richard, 68 smallpox, 128 Smallwood, Thomas, 353, 354 Smith, Adam, 320, 321 Smith, Amanda, 222, 225 Smith, Charlotte, 380–381 Smith, Craig V., 151 Smith, Cuff, 269 (p. 467) Smith, David, 222 Smith, Harry, 225–226 Smith, James L., 227, 333, 338 Smith, Jessie Carney, 42–43 Smith, Kimberly, xiii, 15, 315–326 Smith, Mark, 393, 411 Smith, Meg, 269 Smith, Solomon, 269 Smith, Valerie, 372 Smith, Venture family of, 269 freedom purchase by, 73, 268 narrative of (see Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture) Niles and, 317 Smith College, 39 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 378 Sojourner Truth (Painter), 45 Solomon, Job Ben, 279–280 Some Memoirs of the Life of Job (Bluett), 279–280 Somerset, James, 372, 383 “‘Something Akin to Freedom’” (Sharpe), 348, 364 song sheets, 202, 203, 400, 405f Sorisio, Carolyn, 253, 256 Sotterly Plantation Slave Quarter, 136f Soul by Soul (Johnson), 238–240, 365 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 324 sound stories of “Blind Tom,” 392–412 of Jacobs, 391–392 Page 61 of 71

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Index Radano on, 399 recorded FWP interviews, 105, 107, 109 in songs (see folksongs) Weheliye on, 399 Southall, Geneva, 394, 400 South Carolina Crèvecouer on Charleston, 320 FWP interviews in, 103, 109, 113, 290–291 George on, 288 I Belong to South Carolina, 41, 330, 331 Jackson on, 329 slave quarters in, 135, 143 Southern Quarterly Review, The, 160 Southern University, 27–28, 62 Southey, Robert, 375, 380 South-side View of Slavery, A (Adams), 59, 337, 355 Sparks, Elizabeth, 290 “Speech Made by a Black of Guardaloupe,” 362, 363, 366 “Speech of John Talbot Campo-bell, The,” 366 “Speech of Moses Bon Sàam,” 366, 367 Spielberg, Stephen, Amistad, 31, 197 Spillers, Hortense, 236, 242–243 Spindel, Donna J., 28–29, 111 spinning yarn, 138–139 spirits, 98 Spivak, Gayatri, 364 Spurgeon, Charles H., 339 Stadiem, William, 310 Stampp, Kenneth, 5, 61, 63, 91, 277 Stanford, Peter Thomas, 306–308 Stanley, Amy Dru, 272 Staples, Robert, 265–266 Stark, Sylvia, 357 Starling, Marion Wilson bibliographic efforts of, 39, 363 on number of narratives, 344 on researching narratives, 4 The Slave Narrative, 4, 68, 149, 185 Stauffer, John, 334 Stearns, Charles anti-slavery lecture tour of, 261 Narrative of Henry Box Brown (see Narrative of Henry Box Brown) occupation of, 260 Stedman, Joanna, 366 Stedman, John Gabriel, 210, 211f, 362, 363, 366 Stepto, Robert B., 8, 35, 43, 261–262 Sterling, Dorothy, 39, 96 Sterling/Robertson Plantation Slave Quarter, 138f Page 62 of 71

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Index Stevenson, Brenda E., xiii, 14, 277–294 Steward, Austin, 329, 337, 353 Stielazen, Alex, 277 Still, William on Black Canadian communities, 356 Ripley on fugitive slaves and, 356 The Underground Rail Road (see Underground Rail Road, The) stipendiary magistrates, 349, 358 stipple engraving, 200 (p. 468) “Story of a Fugitive” (Hopper), 160 “Story of Anthony Gale” (Gale), 160 Story of Archer Alexander, The (Eliot), 341 Story of Mattie J. Jackson, The (Jackson), 225, 252–253, 256–258, 298, 303–305 Story of the Life of John Anderson, The (Twelvetrees), 68–69, 201 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Henson and, 8–9 Jacobs and, 153, 250 A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 11, 44, 79, 159–160 legal discourse by, 69 Lincoln and, 250 Lobb and, 9 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see Uncle Tom’s Cabin) “‘Strangest Freaks of Despotism, The’” (Abdur-Rahman), 237, 241 Strickland, Susanna, 347–349 Stroud, George M., 79 Stroyer, Jacob, 330, 334 structure, 23 Struggles for Freedom (Watkins), 68, 329 Stuckey, Sterling, 186 Sturge, Joseph, 349 Styron, William, 193 suicide, 421 Sumner, Charles, papers of, 39 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education, 61, 374 Sandford v. Scott, 2, 80, 335 Suriname, 366 Sydenham, Lord, 357 Szendy, Peter, 412 “Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian, The” (Jackson), 37 Tappan, Lewis, 22–23, 77 taxes, Constitution’s three-fifths clause and, 47 Taylor, John, 321 Taylor, Samuel S., 107, 109 Taylor, Yuval, 154, 316–319, 321–326 Temple University, 39 Texas Blassingame interviews in, 113 Page 63 of 71

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Index FWP interviews in, 103, 107, 134, 138–139 slave movement to, 288 The Slave Narratives of Texas, 277 slave quarters in, 135, 138f, 143 Sterling/Robertson Plantation Slave Quarter, photograph of, 138f textile industry, 138–139, 252, 288 textual masochism, 241, 243 Thayer and Eldridge (publisher), 38 Thirteenth Amendment, 120–121, 374 Thirty Years a Slave (Hughes), 7 “‘This is no hearsay’” (Clarke), 337 Thistlewood, Thomas, 364 Thomas, Brook, 72 Thomas, Helen, xiii, 15, 371–386 Thomas, “Master,” 175–176 Thomas, Rachel, 128 Thomas, Rhondda Robinson, xiii, 7, 15, 328–342 Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (Gordon-Reed), 309 Thompson, George, 151, 155 Thompson, James, 380 Thompson, John, 322, 334–335 Thompson, L.S., 303–305, 308 Thoreau, Henry David, 165, 166, 171, 326 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (Cugoano), 283, 284, 383 Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade (Newton), 378 Three Years in Europe (Brown, William Wells), 374 Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 351 “‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part” (Foster), 254–255 Tirrell, Captain, 305 tobacco, 322 Tobin, James, 384 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 69 To Embark, 203 Tomkins, Jane, 250 Toronto, 354, 355 torture at Abu Ghraib, 194 descriptions of, sales and, 236 Douglass on Gore’s, 244 Hartman on, 243 individual vs. collective, 169 lynching and, 244 (p. 469) of Maurepas, illustration of, 212 Prince (Mary) on, 169, 242 To Tell a Free Story (Andrews), 36, 68, 119–120, 374, 386, 403 Toussaint l’Ouverture a Biography and Autobiography, 211–213 Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, 344 Page 64 of 71

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Index transgressive erotics, 245 Tribute for the Negro, A (Armisted), 198 Troutman, Philip, 258 Troy, William, 356 True American, The (Ward), 355 Trumbull, Henry, 6, 202 Truth, Sojourner anti-slavery lecture tours of, 153, 155, 205–206 biographical data on, 49 death of, 220 Douglass and, 205–206 Gilbert and, 204 on labor, 252 narrative of (see Narrative of Sojourner Truth) portraits of, 204–207 speeches of, 7–8 Truth Stranger than Fiction (Henson), 8–9, 152, 184, 340–341 Tubman, Harriet, 8, 44, 208–211, 225, 355–356 Turnage, Wallace, 26 Turner, Darwin T., 149 Turner, Ellen. See Jackson, Ellen Turner, J. M. W., 372 Turner, Nat Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner, 68, 75, 81, 213, 289 Providence riots and, 428 rebellion of, 80, 211, 213, 303 Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, 193 Twain, Mark, 113, 186, 188–189 Twelvemonths Residence in the West Indies, A (Madden), 367–368 Twelvetrees, Harper, 68–69, 201 Twelve Years a Slave (Northup) advertisements for, 155 environmental criticism of, 318–319, 322–323 on legal matters, 77–78 location of, 332–333 manhood and, 265 Phillips on, 59 publication of, 78, 155 on religion, 56 on swamps, 322–323 synopsis of, 77–78 on whippings, 55 Twenty-Two Years a Slave (Steward), 329, 337, 353 Tyler, Ron, 277 Unboxing of Henry Brown, The (Ruggles), 45, 261 Unchained Memories, 105 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) Fiedler on, 192–193 Page 65 of 71

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Index as “The Great American Novel,” 188 Henson and, 8–9, 186, 354 A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 11, 44, 79, 159–160 Lincoln, Jacobs, and, 250 literary criticism of, 186 reviews of, 321 A South-side View of Slavery and, 355 visual elements in, 196 Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life (Henson), 9, 354 underground railroad, 12, 26, 352, 354, 355–356 Underground Rail Road, The (Still) advertisements for, 40 on escapes, 292 illustrations in, 197–198, 216 Life of William J. Brown and, 431 literary criticism of, 25–26, 42, 45, 198, 216 locations in, 337 Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and, 431 modern works and, 39 publication of, 356 sales of, 26 United States Colored Cavalry (USCC), 119, 123, 132 United States Colored Infantry (USCI), 132 United States Colored Troops (USCT), 123, 132 University of Rochester, 39 Unvarnished Truth, The (Fabian), 23, 68, 156 Up Before Daylight (Brown, James Seay), 330 (p. 470) Up From Slavery (Washington) on African American self-help, 227–228 audience for, 219 on clothing, 291 on education, 192, 223 on family and community life, 278 on labor and politics, 189 literary criticism of, 4 USCC, 119, 123, 132 USCI, 132 USCT, 123, 132 “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves” (Blassingame), 62 “‘Us Quarters Fixed Fine’” (Vlach), 135 USS Hornet, 372 Van Dyke, Charlie, 291 Van Wagenen, Isabella, 75. See also Truth, Sojourner Vassa, Gustavus. See Equiano, Olaudah Veney, Bethany, 225, 334 veracity, 22–23, 171–172, 175, 180. See also authenticity Vesey, Denmark, 80, 303 Vigilance Committees, 25, 298, 356 Page 66 of 71

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Index Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A (Wollstonecraft), 381 violence Amelioration Act on, 372 Brown (William J.) on, 427–430 FWP interviews on, 107 in Reconstruction, 107 religion and, 176 Romanticism and, 172 sensationalism and, 65, 236 sentimentalism and, 65 Stampp on, 61 submission via unpredictable, 57–58 Yarborough on, 265–266, 267 Virginia Ball on farmers in, 322 Ben Venue plantation, 142 Bremo plantation in, 140–141 Dunmore’s Proclamation in, 287 English colonial slavery in, 373 FWP interviews in, 103–105, 107, 109, 141, 290, 292, 293 George on, 287 Hayden on, 329 Morattico plantation, 142 pension records on slavery in, 123–129 Schoepf on plantations in, 143 slave codes of, 373 slave quarters in, 135, 140–143 Southampton slave revolt in (see Turner, Nat) Virginia Landmarks of Black History (Calder), 142 Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Blake), 373 Vlach, John Michael, xiv, 13, 133–144 Voice of the Fugitive, The (Bibb), 353–354 voting, 104, 121, 263 Waddill, John P., 78 wages Bibb on, 273 of Brown (William J.), 430 DeForest on fair, 188 Delaney’s lawsuit for, 47–48 of Douglass, 184–185, 268 Lincoln on, 264 Wagner, Bryan, 76 Walker, Charles T., 339 Walker, David, 2, 179, 354, 431 Walker, Margaret, 193–194 Wallace, Marie Stark, 357 Wallace, Maurice, xiv, 14, 260–275 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 201, 336–337, 339, 353, 355, 373–375 Page 67 of 71

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Index Wardrop, Daneen, 301 Warner, Ashton, 345, 347, 348–349, 363 Warner, Charles Dudley, 189 Warner-Lewis, Maureen, 345, 350 War of 1812, 72, 372 Warren, Kenneth W., xiv, 13–14, 183–194 Wash, Polly, 46, 47–48, 336 Washington, Booker T. autobiography vs. slave narrative of, 197 Burton and, 307–308 Up From Slavery (see Up From Slavery) Working with the Hands, 324 Washington, D.C. See District of Columbia Washington, George, 287, 357 Washington, John, 26 Washington, Martha, 94 (p. 471) Washington Post, The, 403 Washington-Williams, Essie Mae, 310 Watchman, The, 379 Watkins, James, 68, 329, 374 Watson, Henry, 152 weaving, 138–139 Webb, Richard D., 155 Webb, William, 226 Webster, Daniel, 2 Wedgwood, Josiah, 378, 383 Weekly Advertiser, 376 Weekly Anglo-African, The, 160 Weevils in the Wheat (Perdue et al.) on Byrd’s interviews, 109 on family and community life, 293 Hunter on slave stories in, 96 questions asked in FWP interviews in, 99n, 104 setting of, 98n on slave hideouts, 141 Weheliye, Alexander, 399 Weiner, Mark S., 80–81 Weld, Theodore Dwight, 44, 79, 158 Wellesley College, 39 Welter, Barbara, 249 Wertheimer, Barbara Mayer, 252, 253 Wesley, John, 352 West, Emily, 93 Wheatley, Phillis Blind Tom and, 396–397 in Boston, 204, 383 on Christianity, 170 The Collected Works of Phyllis Wheatley, 382–383 Page 68 of 71

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Index on community, 283 Equiano and, 170 on family, 283 Gates and, 268 in Massachusetts, 283 Ottobah and, 283 Poems on Various Subjects, 204, 283, 383 portrait of, 204 property to personhood conversion by, 74 Romanticism and, 382–383 Wheeler, Peter, 151 Whipple, Frances Harriet, 416–417, 420–422, 424 White, Deborah Gray, 92, 95–96 White, John, 341 White, Shane & Graham, 105, 114 white abolitionist narratives accuracy of, 167 literary criticism of, 44 natural rights, natural law, and, 169–170 in post-emancipation era, 25 in prefaces, 6 on rebellion/resistance, 211 scholarly study of, 38 slavery archives connected to, 39 testimonials as, 6 Whitman, Walt, 38, 171, 384–386, 410, 412 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 156 Wiesel, H. J., 407–409 Wiggins, Charity, 393–394 Wiggins, Thomas “Blind Tom,” 16, 392–412 Wilberforce, William, 378–380 Wilkins, Frederick “Shadrach,” 357 Williams, Dorothy, 357 Williams, Eric, 351 Williams, George Washington, 60 Williams, Heather Andrea, 304 Williams, Helen Maria, 380 Williams, James, An Apprenticed Laborer in Jamaica, 345, 349, 362–363 Williams, James, Life and Adventures of James Williams, 226 Williams, James, Narrative of James Williams, 22–23, 75, 77, 152, 157–160, 340 Williams, Nancy, 126 Williams, Raymond, 375 Williams, Rose, 292–293 Williams, Rufus, 292–293 Williams, Sherley Anne, 193–194 William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Clarke), 193 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 250–252, 256 wills, 280 Page 69 of 71

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Index Wilson, David, 78, 318 Wilson, Harriet, 38 Wilson, Lulu, 292 Wilson, Samuel, 125 Wilson, Willoughby, 125 Windsor, 355, 356 Winks, Robin, 8–9, 351, 353, 354, 357 (p. 472) Winston, Michael, 42–43 Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 7, 220, 329 Wise, Margaret A., 129 Witnessing Slavery (Foster), 36, 68, 149 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 376, 377, 381 Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege (Leslie), 310 Womble, Planey, 126–127 women Cult of True Womanhood on, 249 Fulton on stories of, 14, 248–258 FWP interviews of, 95–96, 102, 104, 114–115 as interviewers for FWP, 109 market economy and, 263 McDowell on stories of, 11 portraits of, 203–204 punishment by masters, 55, 57 slave rebellion/resistance by, 96 Women of Distinction (Scruggs), 42 Wong, Edlie L., 69, 70, 72, 78, 80 Wood, Cooper, 124 Wood, Marcus, xiv, 14, 160, 196–216 woodcuts of Aaron, 202 in Bibb’s narrative, 203 of Brown (Henry “Box”), 160, 203 of Douglass, 202 in History of the Amistad Captives, 213f, 214–216 of Truth, 204, 206 of Tubman, 208, 209f, 210 Woodson, Carter G., 60, 91 Woodward, C. Vann, 27, 28 woodworking, 134, 139–140 Woolhopter, Phillip David, 75 Wordsworth, William, 374, 376–379, 385, 386 Working with the Hands (Washington), 324 Works Progress Administration (WPA), FWP interviews (See Federal Writers’ Project interviews) World War I (WWI), 29 World War II (WWII), 29–30 Wormeny, Lavina, 357 WPA Oklahoma Narratives (Baker), 99n Wright, Gavin, 266 Page 70 of 71

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Index writing, reason and, 24 “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes” (Gates), 70 X, Malcolm, 197 Yaeger, Patricia, 340 Yale College, 75 Yarborough, Richard, 265–266, 267 Yearsley, Anne, 375 Yellin, Jean Fagan archival work of, 38, 49–50 Harriet Jacobs: A Life, 46, 50 The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 46, 49–50 on Jacobs’ Incidents, 37, 50, 250 The Pen is Ours, 40, 249 on profit from Jacobs’ narrative sales, 152 on publication of Jacobs’ narrative, 152, 153 on sales of Jacobs’ book, 156 Yetman, Norman, 102–103, 291, 292 Young, Arthur, 321 Young Frederick Douglass (Preston), 45–46 Youra, Steven, 236 Zackodnik, Teresa, 301 Zboray, Ronald and Mary Saracino, 38

Page 71 of 71

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