Cultivating the Past

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in days when hope, unborn, had died.
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

Our Mothers' Gardens: The Slave Past

Slave Narratives and Autobiography
Proofs of Humanity  The most significant literary legacy from the Slave past is the autobiography, a tradition that endures in contemporary writers such as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. The two most representative slave narratives were The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. But the slave narratives are not merely individual stories, but testimonials by a representative who speaks for those still enslaved who cannot tell their own stories. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison introduced Douglass as this type of representative self:

Fortunate, most fortunate occurence! -- fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful thraldom!-- fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of universal liberty! -- fortunate for the land of his birth, which has a wlaready done so much to save and bless!

Garrison also proclaims that Douglass is a fellow man, created in the image of God, and therefore -- like a white man -- "created but little lower than the angels."

There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact -- in intellect richly endowed -- in natural eloquence a prodigy -- in soul manifestly "created but little lower than the angels" -- yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave .. . by the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the terms of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beast of burden, a chattel personal, nevertheless!

Astonishing as it may seem today, one of the tasks of the slave narrative was to prove that Blacks were human. The "proofs" of humanity were the ability to reason, shown by literacy and by being able to demonstrate cause and effect logic, and possession of a soul, shown by spiritual yearning and by the desire for creative expression. The slave narrative demonstrated these proofs in both content and form. Douglass' narrative focuses not only on the factual details of slavery, but also on the psychology of slavery.

Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me and behold a man transformed into a brute!

To be a slave was to have one's spirit broken, to be reduced from a human created in the image of God to an unthinking animal without hope or faith.

The Female Slave  Like Douglass, Jacobs insists that her narrative is not told for her own benefit:

I have not written of my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. ...May the blessing of God rest on this imperfect effort in behalf of my persecuted people!

The story of a female slave was also uniquely affecting to its primary audience of white, Northern, middle class women. These women believed that from their "domestic sphere" of hearth and home they were the moral guardians of the nation, and were especially horrified by slavery's tangible threat to a woman's virtue, as well as by how the slave woman was denied the protection of a legal marriage. Most disturbing to the female audience was how slavery tore mother from child, and how slave children never had even childhood freedom, but instead "followed the condition of the mother." The purpose of the slave narrative and such abolitionist works as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was to stir up a moral feeling for the slave. If the audience wept at the slave's sorrows, or defied the laws and urged on the fugitive slave's flight to freedom, then their hearts would prove the slave laws immoral, inhuman, and unnatural.

Freedom and the Obligation of Memory
Writing and Social Action After Emancipation, African-American women writers imagined themselves as the moral guardians of the racial past, and that they were duty-bound to create literary works that were "of lasting service to the race," as Frances Harper's heroine Iola Leroy declared. While male race leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois participated in the public forums of political engagement, writers such as Harper and Pauline Hopkins used their novels and stories as agents of social change. Recalling Douglass' declaration that "none are free until all are free," Harper insisted that those Blacks privileged with talent, education, and economic resources were obligated to the less fortunate of the race to work toward literacy and better social conditions. In Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted, the mulatto heroine chooses to identify with her Black heritage after being convinced by her beloved that African-Americans must tell their own stories and not rely on even the most sympathetic white writer.

Why not ... write a good book which would be helpful to them? I think there is an amount of dormant talent amony us, and a large field from which to gather materials for such a book... Out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers.

The Slave Past as Literary Subject What version of the African-American story should be told is still a matter of controversy. Despite the Afrocentric emphasis on the African past, recent African-American authors have chosen to tell stories set in the slave past, a past now unknown by many members of their own race. In addition to Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, the following novels retell the story of the slave past.

Jubilee, Margaret Walker.
The Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, Charles Johnson.
Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams. Celia: A Slave, Melton McLaurin
Family, J. California Cooper.
Cambridge, and Crossing the River, Caryn Philips.

To these writers, as in earlier generations, the Slave past is still a necessary subject.

The Testimony of the Past
The legacy of the Slave past survives in two ways. First, in archival collections, such as the Library of Congress and second, in courses teach the African-American past to new generations.

Memory and the Internet  The Library of Congress preserves both written and oral accounts of slavery, and has pioneered making these primary sources available on the Internet. The LOC is perhaps the single most important guardian of the voice of the slave, and also has created several points of entry to their manuscript collections and online exhibitions:

Memory in the Classroom   Here is a sampling of the courses on the slave past and slave narrative being offered in schools around the nation.

Suggested Further Reading

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood.
Andrews, William. To Tell a Free Story.
Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
nice cheap paperback edition with narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Price, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs in one volume.

Walker, Shange, and Slave Narratives -- Assignments