The autobiographies of ex-slaves in America are the foundation
of an African American literary tradition, as well as
unique glimpses into the souls of slaves themselves. The
roughly sixty-five to seventy slave narratives published
in America or England between 1760 and 1860 were windows
into the nature of slavery itself; they were first-person
witnesses to the will to be known and the will to write
among a people so often set apart and defined out of the
human family of letters. American slaves wrote their personal
stories first because they were under such pressure to
demonstrate their own humanity in a sea of racial prejudice.
They also wrote to prove that they could be reliable truth-tellers
of their own experience. And they wrote I-narratives in
order to declare their own literary, psychological, and
spiritual independence. The stories that slaves wrote
were not only about how they became free, but were also
precious acts, as the critic William Andrews has put it,
of “free-storytelling.” For former slaves,
some of whom were still legally fugitives when they wrote,
the pen became an instrument of liberation when neither
law nor society offered the same.
“Why does the slave ever love?” wrote Harriet
Jacobs unforgettably in her Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl (1861). “Why allow the tendrils
of the heart to twine around objects which may at any
moment be wrenched away by the hand of violence?”
In language at once so honest and compelling, Jacobs
named one of the deepest dilemmas American slaves faced,
especially women: how indeed to trust, to love children
or a partner with all one’s heart when the world
of endearment and family might be torn apart at almost
any time by sale, brutality, or flight. With the remarkable
insight of an ex-slave woman who suffered sexual abuse,
separation, and a long struggle to find safety, much
less love, Jacobs declared that, “when separations
come by the hand of death, the pious soul can bow in
resignation… But when the ruthless hand of man
strikes the blow… it is hard to be submissive.
I did not reason thus when I was a young girl. Youth
will be youth. I loved, and I indulged the hope that
the dark clouds around me would turn out a bright lining.
I forgot that in the land of my birth the shadows are
too dense for light to penetrate.”
Jacobs tried to free herself from her past in the act
of writing her autobiography. So did Frederick Douglass
in the most eloquent and widely read of all the slave
narratives. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave (1845), the twenty-seven-year-old,
who had escaped at age twenty, left many unforgettable
expressions of the meaning of slavery and freedom. In
a theme found in many slave narratives, Douglass described
his achievement of literacy as life-giving, as “the
light [that] broke in upon me by degrees,” and
that with time, “gave tongue to interesting thoughts
of my own soul.” At the same time, however, Douglass
admitted with stunning honesty that “the more
I read the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers,”
considering them “a band of successful robbers,
who had left their homes and gone to Africa, and stolen
us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us
to slavery.” Like Jacobs, Douglass did not sugar-coat
his experience; his was not merely another success story
for American readers eager for tales of triumph over
adversity. He warned his reader that his literacy had
liberated him to knowledge and a semblance of power,
but it also worked to “torment and sting my soul
to unutterable anguish.” The ability to grasp
and use language, Douglass lamented, “had given
me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.
It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder
on which to get out.”
In their powerful metaphors of darkness and lightness
and of a pit with no ladder, Jacobs and Douglass converted
yearnings for love and literacy, the one a universal
human craving and the other among the modern world’s
most important sources of power and human self-worth,
into ways of understanding slavery and freedom. Both
wrote about anguish, but Jacobs, despite her pain, could
no more stop loving than she could stop breathing, and
no one in the nineteenth century wielded the music of
words better than Douglass in describing America’s
hypocrisy and its promise. To understand this paradox,
to probe the slaves’ own experience in bondage
and their quest for freedom, dignity, and human rights,
there is no better place to begin than the slave narratives.
Jacobs’s and Douglass’s autobiographies
have become merely the two most famous in a genre that
has received tremendous scholarly and pedagogical attention
in recent decades. Until the middle of the twentieth
century, slave narratives were not considered proper
sources for the study of slavery. Ulrich B. Phillips,
the first major historian of slavery to make extensive
use of plantation records, deemed them inauthentic and
biased. Phillips did not acknowledge that ex-slaves
left any genuine testimony on what their lives were
really like. His American Negro Slavery (1918),
the most authoritative work on the subject as late as
the 1950s, pictured slavery as a benign institution
in which masters and slaves acted out natural roles
as parent-like caretakers and chattel laborers who benefited
from contact with a superior civilization. This white
supremacist “Plantation Legend” died hard
in American historiography and popular culture.
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