What are slave narratives?

Slave narratives are the slaves' experience, in the slaves' own words, without the mediation of someone who listens and interprets. And, there are many of them. Some of them were taken down as testimony, and are in the Library of Congress. And there's, in many cases, there's a lot of mediation, because the slaves, it was illegal for them to read or write. Many, many people were illiterate. And so they would tell their stories to someone who then would write it down.

And, and what's on paper, then, has to do with, the attitudes of the interviewer, how the interviewer, interpreted the language. But even in cases where, there's a, a tremendous screen from the interviewer--for instance, the screen of language-- I think that some Southern interviewers were, had something invested in recording the slaves' lack of standard English.

And so you will see, in trying to replicate the, what you call the "accent," but what we now call a kind of Black English, that has its own syntax, that's related, perhaps, to some African languages, you will see this exaggerated. And you will see a kind of language that, if you've ever been in a Black community and spoken that language, you don't, you recognize, the foreign-ness of the transcription.

So that's one kind of, recording of the slave narrative. Still, there's information in those narratives that is not in, the recorded history written by, White people, or people who were, who were not slaves. Who didn't have the, experience of being born as, as chattel, and dying as chattel.

and then, the wonderful, famous ones, are the ones where the slaves knew how to, read and write, and told their own story in the language they chose, with all the specificity, of choice, that is a part of any writer's life. Frederick Douglass, for instance, wrote one of the most powerful, ones. And one of the best known.

But there were, there were others. and some of them that come to mind, Harriet Jacobs', slave narrative, it's so interesting because it was, --well, it was, she wrote it under a pseudonym. And for a long time, the corroborating evidence, that such a person had really existed, that these, disguised names, slightly disguised names, and places really existed, that this was an historical document and not a novel-- the corroborating evidence was not, around.

But it was discovered at Smith College, in the, archives, the letters from the family that she belonged to. That, that matched events, where they lived, when they moved, whose daughter got married when, all of these things matched her, her narrative, and it was then revealed that, Linda Brent, the name that she had written under, was Harriet Jacobs indeed, and that this was, a slave narrative, an historical account written by the person who lived it.

So that is a, a very exciting one. And then the story itself is just horrifying. And, especially the stories of, the misuse of women, you know, a characteristic, way of dealing with this at the time was that even when the slaves wrote the narrative, they were advised to draw a veil over certain events too terrible to be mentioned. And this drawing of a veil meant that sexual, use of women and, horrible things that actually happened to people, that were widespread part of people's, lived experience, these things were not known except by rumor. They were covered over.

And they were covered over in a way that amounts to a lie about what slavery was. So--in the slave narrative where a veil is not drawn over, these events, they become very important documents of actual people. Not generalized, not homogenized, not seen through a screen. But, this sounds romantic when I say it, but it really; my experience is of one heart speaking to another.

When a slave father, who has escaped writes to his wife, "Send me some of the children's hair," you know something that you don't know about that experience. From, objective historical account of how many slaves existed. You know something about the importance of family, the deprivation of, being separated. You know something about a Black family, about a slave family, that those relationships were important. And that even having a lock of the child's hair would mean something to a person. That's not the picture you get of the slave family that, where oppression was so great it destroyed all family feeling. Nobody knew who they were related to, or cared.

So that's some of how I react to slave narratives. And obviously they touch me, very deeply. I identify with them. An odd thing to say; I'm a privileged, educated woman. Living in the last part of the 20th century. And much of the oppression that is experienced by other African Americans right now, I don't deal, I don't have to deal with. Because of my privileges. And yet, I find, in the courage of the slaves, in their perseverance, in their, ingenuity, in their continuation of culture, in the ways that they found to enjoy themselves and to create things, I find tremendous sustenance in that for my own life.

Well, now, it is odd, because in my schooling, I mean, I grew up in Virginia, and I was schooled in segregated schools. I had some advantages even there. My aunt was the principal of the elementary school I went to. And it was a school, I think, not, not atypical of Black schools in the South, where it didn't matter what the Board of Education said, and what the approved textbooks said, the continuation of culture and the teaching of things about, Black people of history, that was a part of our school. We sang spirituals in assembly, and we sang them for enjoyment. Nobody said, "You should know this, 'cause this is part of your history." These were the songs that you sang.

So you knew a lot about it. You knew something about it. But it was certainly not a part of any curriculum, that I, ever studied. And I knew family stories. Told with a great deal of laughter, generally, and a tremendous sense of enjoyment in remembering people who had gone before. In my grandmother's house. My mother told these stories, my grandmother told these stories, my aunt, my uncle. My father, sometimes, participated, but that was sort of, he was estranged from his family, so in a sense, he didn't have as many stories, though he was there.

So I knew these stories. But making the connection between the stories, and reading actual slave narratives really came later in my life. I was at, already, living in Northfield. I was at Carleton. And I used to go sort of, foraging through the college bookstore. I'd look at the books that, --I wasn't teaching yet, my husband was on the staff, my children were small. And, as I'd go through the bookstore, I'd look at what they, people had ordered for various classes.

And there would be small, almost pamphlet-sized, books of slave narratives. And I started to read those. And I hadn't set out to be on any kind of a, a quest for my past or any of these terms. They, they just interested me. They caught my attention so much, and I'd just go back and get another one and another one.

In some way they were like--well, to say "adventure stories" is, too little, it's too little a description--but they had everything. Would they make it? Could they stand it? When they tried to escape, and how did they do it, and would someone find out and they would be caught, and how did they get the perseverance to keep trying again? It was wonderful. It was so satisfying. The horror in it was awful, but it was satisfying to--to see in print something that confirmed the experience that was daily denied by the world around me. Not the Black world, but about-- "Slavery was a long time ago. It wasn't so bad. Plus, it's over now. This shouldn't matter to you."

Well, it all did matter. And it was terrible, And it has everything to do with what is going, what was going on then-- this was late 60s, early 70s--it has everything to do with the inequities that persist today. And the fact, I think, the fact that politically we do not deal with, either slavery or the disappointments of the Reconstruction period--"disappointments," that's a weak word for what happened, about Reconstruction--I think that that, in that denial and that refusal to come to grips to that, is really, in that denial are the roots of the difficulties that persist today, racially.

So that's my opinion, and that's what that reading, meant to me. And it has continued to interest me. I come back to it may seem odd to make an assignment like that in, a Black dance history class, where we're talking about, dancing and we're talking about culture. But I find that many of my students have never read a slave narrative, don't know they exist, don't know that this record, in the voices of the people who lived it, from so long ago, that's there. That exists. Anybody could go get one. Anybody could read that.

So, yes, I was shocked. It’s hard to describe how a shocking, awful thing can be satisfying. But it's satisfying because it is a truth, that, that explains things to you. Makes life make sense, even if it makes a terrible sense.