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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
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
Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014
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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).
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.
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
cultures. She is also founding Director of UTSA’s African American Literatures and
Cultures Institute.
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About the Contributors
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).
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About the Contributors
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.
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).
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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
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
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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
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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:
(Melish 2)
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
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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.
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
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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: Afro-
American 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
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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
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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)
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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,
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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
(p. 10)
as much about those filters as about the conditions of slavery or the struggle for freedom.
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.
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Introduction
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
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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.
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Introduction
literature, and then the ways that literature, in turn, became an important presence in
slave narratives.
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
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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.
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.
John Ernest
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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory
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
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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 “so-
called ‘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 post-
World 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
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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
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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.
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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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Berlin, Ira, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller. Remembering Slavery: African Americans
Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. New York: New
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Rawick, George P.. From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. West
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Slave Narratives and Historical Memory
Mitch Kachun
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Slave Narratives and Archival Research
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
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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.
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 well-
known 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
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[14] ‘There have been half a dozen battles in miniature with the
Indians in America. It looked so odd to see a list of killed and
wounded just treading on the heels of the Peace.’ Letter of
October 17 and 18, 1763, to Sir Horace Mann.
[15] Bouquet to Hamilton, Governor of Pennsylvania, Fort Pitt,
August 11, 1763: Canadian Archives, as above, p. 66.
CHAPTER II
CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN WAR OF
INDEPENDENCE AND THE QUEBEC ACT
It was said of the Spartans that warring was their salvation and
ruling was their ruin. The saying holds true of various peoples and
races in history. A militant race has often proved to be deficient in the
qualities which ensure stable, just, and permanent government; and
in such cases, when peace supervenes on war, an era of decline
and fall begins for those whom fighting has made great. But even
when a conquering race has capacity for government, there come
times in its career when Aristotle’s dictum in part holds good. It
applied, to some extent, to the English in North America. As long as
they were faced by the French on the western continent, common
danger and common effort held the mother country and the colonies
together. Security against a foreign foe brought difficulties which
ended in civil war, and the Peace of 1763 was the beginning of
dissolution.
In the present chapter, which covers the history of Canada from
the Peace of Paris to the outbreak of the War of Independence, it is
proposed, from the point of view of colonization, to examine the
ultimate rather than the immediate causes which led to England
losing her old North American colonies, while she retained her new
possession of Canada.
It had been abundantly prophesied that the outcome Prophecies that the
British conquest of
of British conquest of Canada would be colonial Canada would be
independence in British North America. In the years followed by the loss
1748-50 the Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, travelled of the North
American colonies.
through the British North American colonies and Peter Kalm.
Canada, and left on record his impressions of the feeling towards the
mother country which existed at the time in the British provinces.
Noting the great increase in these colonies of riches and population,
and the growing coolness towards Great Britain, produced at once
by commercial restrictions and by the presence among the English
colonists of German, Dutch, and French settlers, he arrived at the
conclusion that the proximity of a rival and hostile power in Canada
was the main factor in keeping the British colonies under the British
Crown. ‘The English Government,’ he wrote, ‘has therefore sufficient
reason to consider the French in North America as the best means
of keeping the colonies in their due submission.’[16]
Others wrote or spoke to the same effect. Montcalm was credited
with having prophesied the future before he shared the fall of
Canada,[17] and another prophet was the French minister Choiseul,
when negotiating the Peace of Paris. To keen, though not always
unprejudiced, observers the signs of the times betokened coming
conflicts between Great Britain and her colonies; and to us now
looking back on history, wise after the event, it is evident that the end
of foreign war in North America meant the beginning of troubles
within what was then the circle of the British Empire.
Until recent years most Englishmen were taught to Incorrect view of
believe that the victory of the American colonists and the conflict
between Great
the defeat of the mother country was a striking Britain and her
instance of the power of right over might, of liberty colonies
America.
in North