Classic Slave Narratives

Classic Slave Narratives

Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1987

Intro, by Gates - "No group of slaves anywhere, at any other period in history, has left such a large repository of testimony about the horror of becoming the legal property of another human being."

1. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (circa 1770's)

• He comes from Africa, someone's talking about Benin in the 1750's, they had "calculators", the guys who kept track of time (in years); they knew stars, and they knew math, and they were the only ones
• Slaves had no idea how a sailing ship worked - "I asked how the vessel could go. They told me they could not tell; but that there was cloth put opon the masts by the help of the ropes I saw, and then the vessel went on; and the white men had some spell or magic they put in the water, when they liked, in order to stop the vessel." p34
• He describes the first time entering a home in America and seeing painted portraits, and being convinced they were looking at him (p34) ... I always thought this was a perennial human distortion, seeing references in cartoons, but maybe it was just people who never saw a painted portrait?
• He doesn't know how to read and calls it "talking to books" - "I had a great curiosity to talk to the books ... For that purpose I have often taken up a book, and talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me..." p43
• Sheep tail pudding, in Turkey p125

2. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (circa 1810's)

(I have no notes; parts of this account are so messed up I couldn't write it down)

3. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave (circa 1830's)

• In all these stories, when you go somewhere, you say origin, destination, the name of the ship, and the captain, every single time - "I sailed from Baltimore to St. Michael's in the sloop Ananada, Captain Edward Dodgson."
• Covering a beat up eye with a "lean piece of fresh beef" (again only seen in cartoons, note this is the 1800's)
• I had never heard this before - When he arrives in the North, he is surprised to see the people, most of them, living in such good conditions. In the South, if you have no slaves, you are poor as hell. Yet in the North, nobody has slaves and yet they live better than the Southerners who did have slaves! He thought you needed the slaves to live a good life. He thought they would be backwards and poor as hell, and it was the opposite! p323

4. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent, and edited by Lydia Maria Childs (circa 1840's)

• Black slave women nursed white babies all the time, and of all things, you think you would hear about that more often. 
• Back in the day, the newspaper listed every person who stayed in every hotel. (Not that long ago, we also had this thing called the Yellow Pages that listed every person's address and phone number in a book that was freely dropped on the doorstep of every home.) After she ran away, she checked every day to see which Southerners were visiting; this was after the Fugitive Slave Law