Teaching African American Literature

Theory and Practice

Maryemma Graham, Sharon Pineault-Burke, Marianna White Davis, Maryemma Graham, Sharon Pineault-Burke, Marianna White Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136671982
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This book is written by teachers interested in bringing African American literature into the classroom. Documented here is the learning process that these educators experienced themselves as they read and discussed the stories & pedagogical.

1

NARRATING SLAVERY

William L. Andrews
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

PART I

History of African American Autobiography

The autobiographical narratives of former slaves comprise one of the most extensive and influential traditions in African American literature and culture. The slave narrative is now probably the single most widely studied literary tradition in African American literature. Slave narratives are assuming increasing prominence in major anthologies of American literature, in reevaluations of the mid-nineteenth-century American literary renaissance, and in courses, both undergraduate and graduate, devoted to the history of American first-person narrative. Scholars now recognize the slave narrative’s profound resonance in, and sometimes its direct influence on, classic white American fiction, as well as many modern African American novels, and some of the most popular black autobiographies of the post-World War II era.

The best-known slave narratives were written by fugitives from slavery who used their personal histories to illustrate its horrors. They probably did not think that their eyewitness reports of their experiences in slavery would lead to literary distinction in their own day—and certainly not in ours. Nevertheless, many of the most important figures in African American literature before 1900, including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, launched their writing careers via the slave narrative. After the turn of the century, a single former slave’s autobiography, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901), overshadowed all other black narratives, fictional and nonfictional, for at least the first four decades of this century, until the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). The most celebrated post-World War II African American novel, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), has often been associated with patterns and themes pioneered in the slave narrative. The great popularity of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) in the 1960s, surely the most influential African American autobiography of our time, revived interest in and study of the slave narrative—mainly because Malcolm’s autobiography revoices some of the most important patterns and themes of the slave narrative tradition. And the slave narrative continues to make its presence felt in recent fiction by African Americans, spawning the term “neoslave narrative” as a classification for some of the most powerful and influential novels of the last forty years, including Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990), which won a National Book Award.

The slave narrative’s impact on prominent works of fiction in white American literature has been considerable. For instance, the most widely read and hotly debated American novel of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), was profoundly influenced by its author’s reading of a number of slave narratives, especially Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and The Life of Josiah Henson … as Narrated by Himself (1849). To these and other ex-slave autobiographies Stowe readily admitted she owed many graphic incidents and the models for some of the most memorable characters in her novel, including Uncle Tom himself and George Harris.

What is Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) if not the story of a runaway slave’s search for freedom? Mark Twain’s knowledge of and participation in the slave narrative tradition was not slight. I would argue that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is his most notable contribution to the tradition, though in some ways that novel constitutes an unfortunate revision of some of the slave narrative’s classic themes. The key thing is to recognize that the two most important works of fiction created in the United States in the entire nineteenth century—Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—are both steeped in the slave narrative tradition and are themselves contributions to it.

In the twentieth century, consider the fate of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Styron’s novel is based on a slave narrative published in 1831 and widely read in the North and South. Styron’s novel was tremendously influential and controversial, so much so that a weighty book, Albert Stone’s The Return of Nat Turner (1992), has been published recently on the novel and its cultural impact in the 1960s. Styron’s novel is the last of a breed of fiction that goes back to the early nineteenth century, in which a white author writes a slave narrative using the slave’s point of view (see also Richard Hildreth’s Archy Moore, 1836; or Mattie Griffiths’s The Autobiography of a Female Slave, 1857). What does it mean that whites stopped writing slave narratives after Styron’s novel? And indeed, that whites stopped writing novels through the point of view of blacks after that book? Did the furor over Styron’s appropriation of Nat Turner signal a necessary stage in the twentieth-century liberation of the slave narrative from the agenda of white literature, so that it could reemerge in the 1970s and beyond as a key enabling tradition for African American literature?

But perhaps in getting so far into recent literary history I have not taken enough time to outline the history of the slave narrative proper and its place in the history of African American autobiography.

More than any other literary form in African American letters, autobiography has been celebrated since its inception in the slave narrative as a powerful means of addressing and altering sociopolitical as well as cultural realities in the United States. Nineteenth-century abolitionists sponsored the publication of the narratives of escaped slaves out of a conviction that first-person accounts of those victimized by and yet triumphant over slavery would mobilize white readers more profoundly than any other kind of antislavery discourse. A similar belief in modern black American autobiography’s potential to liberate white readers from racial prejudice, ignorance, and fear has prompted an unusually large and generally supportive response on the part of publishers, reviewers, and critics to African American autobiographers of the twentieth century, particularly since the 1960s.

During the formative era of African American autobiography, from 1760 to the end of the Civil War in the United States, approximately seventy narratives of fugitive or former slaves were published as discrete entities, some in formats as brief as the broadside, others in bulky, sometimes multivolume texts. Slave narratives dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America, far outnumbering the autobiographies of free people of color and the handful of novels published by American blacks during this time. After slavery was abolished in North America, ex-slaves continued to produce narratives of their bondage and freedom in substantial numbers. From 1865 to 1930, during which time at least fifty former slaves wrote or dictated book-length accounts of their lives, the ex-slave narrative remained the preponderant subgenre of African American autobiography. During the Depression of the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project gathered oral personal histories and testimony about slavery from two thousand five hundred former slaves in seventeen states, generating roughly ten thousand pages of interviews that were eventually published by George P. Rawick in a “composite autobiography” of nineteen volumes. Marion Wilson Starling, one of the slave narratives’ most reliable historians, has estimated that a grand total of all contributions to this genre, including separately published texts, materials that appeared in periodicals, and oral histories and interviews, numbers approximately six thousand.

The earliest slave narratives have strong affinities with popular white American accounts of Indian captivity and Christian conversion in the New World. But with the rise of the antislavery movement in the early nineteenth century came a new demand for slave narratives that would highlight the harsh realities of slavery itself. White abolitionists were convinced that the eyewitness testimony of former slaves would touch the hearts and change the minds of many in the northern United States who were either ignorant of or indifferent to the plight of African Americans in the South. In the late 1830s and early 1840s the first of this new brand of outspokenly antislavery slave narratives found their way into print. These set the mold for what would become by midcentury a standardized form of autobiography and abolitionist propaganda.

Typically the antebellum slave narrative carries a black message inside a white envelope. Prefatory (and sometimes appended) matter by whites attests to the reliability and good character of the narrator and calls attention to what the narrative will reveal about the moral abominations of slavery. The former slave’s contribution to the text centers on his or her rite of passage from slavery in the South to freedom in the North. Usually the antebellum slave narrator portrays slavery as a condition of extreme physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual deprivation, a kind of hell on earth. Precipitating the narrator’s decision to escape is some sort of personal crisis, such as the sale of a loved one or a dark night of the soul in which hope contends with despair for the spirit of the slave. Impelled by faith in God and a commitment to liberty and human dignity comparable (the slave narrative often stresses) to that of America’s Founding Fathers, the slave undertakes an arduous quest for freedom that climaxes in his or her arrival in the North. In many antebellum narratives, the attainment of freedom is signaled not simply by reaching the free states but by renaming oneself and dedicating one’s future to antislavery activism.

Advertised in the abolitionist press and sold at antislavery meetings throughout the English-speaking world, a significant number of antebellum slave narratives went through multiple editions and sold in the tens of thousands. The first of the great slave narratives, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, went through eight editions in Great Britain between 1789 and 1794, despite the fact that Equiano’s was a two-volume autobiography and therefore not inexpensive to obtain. Moses Roper’s fugitive slave narrative of 1838 went through ten editions in twenty years. Solomon Northup’s story sold twenty-seven thousand copies in its first two years of publication. Numerous slave narratives were simultaneously published in England and the United States, and more than a handful were translated into such European languages as French, German, Dutch, even Celtic.

This popularity was not solely attributable to the publicity the narratives received from the antislavery movement. Readers could see that, as one reviewer put it, “the slave who endeavours to recover his freedom is associating with himself no small part of the romance of the time.” To the noted transcendentalist clergyman Theodore Parker, slave narratives qualified as America’s only indigenous literary form, for “all the original romance of Americans is in them, not in the white man’s novel.” White reviewers of fugitive slave narratives often compared these questing slaves with the heroes of European epic or with the ideals of the American “irrepressible desire to be free.” Emerson foresaw and welcomed an increasingly democratic American literature in the 1850s, a literature that would replace “the sublime and beautiful” with “the near, the common, and the low.” The Dial, launched in 1840, was determined to encourage work “not so much from the pens of practiced writers,” as from “the discourse of the living.” In other words, leading Romantic writers of the day were very much open to the experimental nature of slave narratives and indeed, almost certainly, read them.

In 1845 the antebellum slave narrative reached its epitome with the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass’s Narrative became an international bestseller, selling more than thirty thousand copies in its first five years, its contemporary readership far outstripping that of such classic white autobiographies as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), and The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Moby-Dick (1851) combined during their first five years of existence. The abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison introduced Douglass’s Narrative by stressing how representative Douglass’s experience of slavery had been. But Garrison could not help but note the extraordinary individuality of the black author’s rendering of that experience. It is Douglass’s style of self-presentation, through which he re-created the slave as an evolving self bound for mental as well as physical freedom, that makes his autobiography so important.

After Douglass’s Narrative, the presence of the subtitle, Written by Himself, on a slave narrative bore increasing political and literary significance as an indicator of a narrator’s self-determination independent of external expectations and conventions. In the late 1840s well-known fugitive slaves such as William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and James W. C. Pennington reinforced the rhetorical self-consciousness of the slave narrative by incorporating into their stories trickster motifs from African American folk culture, extensive literary and biblical allusion, and a picaresque perspective on the meaning of the slave’s flight from bondage to freedom.

As the slave narrative evolved in the crisis years of the 1850s and early 1860s, it addressed the problem of slavery with unprecedented candor, unmasking as never before the moral and social complexities of the American caste and class system in the North as well as the South. A heightening severity of subject matter and tone signaled the slave narrator’s determination to break through the genteel proprieties of discourse that had previously inhibited the freedom of the genre to tell the whole truth. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass revised the triumphant ending of his Narrative of 1845 and revealed that his search for freedom had not reached its fulfillment among the abolitionists. Having discovered in Garrison and his cohorts some of the same paternalistic attitudes that had characterized his former masters in the South, Douglass could see in 1855 that the struggle for full liberation would be much more difficult and uncertain than he had previously imagined. Thus the slave narrative in the 1850s and 1860s asks increasingly searching questions about the meaning of freedom in a country as pervasively racist as fugitives found the northern United States to be.

Slave narratives also began to ask unprecedented questions about the relationship of slavery to the exploitation of women, white and black, in the United States. Harriet Jacobs, the first African American female slave to author her own narrative, challenged conventional ideas about true womanhood and freedom in her strikingly original Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Jacobs’s autobiography shows how sexual exploitation made slavery especially oppressive for black women. But in demonstrating how she fought back and ultimately gained both her own freedom and that of her two children, Jacobs proved the inadequacy of the image of victim that had been pervasively applied to female slaves in the male-authored slave narrative.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Elizabeth Keckley’s autobiography, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), forecast new directions in which the slave narrative would go after the abolition of the institution of slavery itself. Though her experience in slavery was plainly parallel to that of Jacobs, Keckley would not discuss her sexuality or the moral implications of her having borne a child by a white man while she was a slave, preferring instead to stress how her energy and determination had propelled her out of the South and ultimately to economic success and intimacy within the inner circle of the Lincoln family. In most post-Emancipation slave narratives, slavery is depicted as Keckley represents it, as a kind of crucible in which the resilience, industry, and ingenuity of the slave was tested and ultimately validated. Thus the post-Emancipation slave narrative argued the readiness of the freedman and freedwoman for full participation in the post-Civil War social and economic order. Booker T. Washington’s popular Up from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: When Teaching Matters
• Chapter 1 Narrating Slavery
• Chapter 2 A Rip in the Tent: Teaching (African) American Literature
• Chapter 3 Multiple Voices, Multiple Identities: Teaching African American Literature
• Chapter 4 Little Ham’s Self-Invention: Teaching Langston Hughes
• Chapter 5 Freeing the Female Voice: New Models and Materials for Teaching
• Chapter 6 A Female Face: Or, Masking the Masculine in African American Fiction Before Richard Wright
• Chapter 7 Voices of Double Consciousness in African American Fiction: Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright
• Chapter 8 To Shatter Innocence: Teaching African American Poetry
• Chapter 9 The Way We Do the Things We Do: Enunciation and Effect in the Multicultural Classroom
• Chapter 10 Teaching Against the Odds
• Chapter 11 Interrogating “Whiteness,” (De)Constructing “Race”
• Chapter 12 Lying Through Our Teeth? The Quagmire of Cultural Diversity
• Chapter 13 Selected Bibliography for Teaching African American Literature
• About the Contributor
• Index