| But the revolution in African American
history, which coincided with the modern civil rights
movement in the 1950s and 1960s, brought a renewed attention
to and use of the slave narratives. Historians began to
make careful use of the narratives as sources of historical
information, and most importantly, as guides to the slaves’
perspective on their own felt experience. With this rediscovered
tool of research, historians and literary critics have
been able to open the world the slaves themselves made
and interpreted – their folk life, religious expression,
modes of resistance, mores and values, and their ultimate
psychological survival. What indeed was it like to be
a slave? What were the slaves’ daily feelings, yearnings,
crises, and hardships? Why did some special few escape
bondage while most could not? Was slavery a closed world
of total oppression, or a world of reciprocal give-and-take
between slaves and their masters for control of production,
time, and self-worth? The best of the slave narratives
offer complex answers to these questions.
Autobiography is self-indulgent by definition; as the
reconstruction of a personal story it often masks as
much as it reveals. The best autobiographies are not
merely factual summaries of a person’s life; they
are artistic creations, plotted narratives that serve
the ends of the author and impose a story on the reader.
The slave narratives were no exception to this trend.
But this makes these tales no less authentic as literary
works, or as sources for understanding history. The
slave narratives are both an original genre of American
literature and a source for reconstructing historical
experience.
Ex-slaves were constantly under suspicion about the
veracity of their stories and the authenticity of their
writing. Some of the more famous narratives, such as
Sojourner Truth’s (1837), were narrated through
an amanuensis, since the author was illiterate. Many
slave narratives were published with letters serving
as endorsements from important white abolitionists,
attesting to the authenticity of the author’s
work – Lydia Maria Child for Harriet Jacobs, and
William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips for Frederick
Douglass. And many narratives include the phrase in
their titles, “Written by Himself” or “Herself.”
This necessity of endorsement and verification was
more a measure of the prejudices of the white reading
public than of the literary abilities of former slaves.
Whatever those prejudices, however, slave narratives
garnered huge audiences in antebellum America, and most
slave narrators wrote their own books. Many became bestsellers,
Douglass’s Narrative selling 30,000 copies
within the first five years of its publication. The
narratives by Charles Ball (1837); William Wells Brown
(1847); Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, and James Pennington
(all in 1849); Solomon Northup (1853); and Ellen and
William Craft (1860) also were widely read. Many Northern
whites were extremely eager to understand slavery from
the slaves’ own viewpoints; they loved stories
of escape, ascension tales of overcoming great obstacles
to achieve hope and triumph. As America’s great
political crisis over the expansion of slavery began
to sever the political culture and eventually the Union
itself in the 1850s, slave narratives only grew in popularity.
Indeed, some scholars conclude that it was the slave
narratives that forged the large reading audience that
Harriet Beecher Stowe then captured in unprecedented
numbers with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.
One of the best ways to teach about American slavery
is first, to help students understand the overall history
of the African slave trade (especially valuable is Olaudah
Equiano’s narrative, 1789), the emergence of slavery
in colonial America (African-born Venture Smith’s
story from Connecticut, 1798), its growth as both a
Northern and especially a Southern institution rooted
in money-crop agriculture, and eventually as the dominant
economic and political force in the “slave society”
that the South became by the antebellum period. With
that accomplished, teachers can then assign slave narratives
that give students access to the slaves’ daily
lives, their psychological worlds, their treatment and
experiences in the master-slave relationship, and their
quest for freedom. It is in the slaves’ own voices
that we might come to understand that most ubiquitous
of American concepts – “freedom,”
a word and an idea we best comprehend by seeing and
feeling its denials.
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