Something Akin to Freedom

The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women

Stephanie Li

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781438429724
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why would someone choose bondage over individual freedom? What type of freedom can be found in choosing conditions of enslavement? In Something Akin to Freedom, winner of the 2008 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in African American Studies, Stephanie Li explores literary texts where African American women decide to remain in or enter into conditions of bondage, sacrificing individual autonomy to achieve other goals. In fresh readings of stories by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Gayl Jones, Louisa Picquet, and Toni Morrison, Li argues that amid shifting positions of power and through acts of creative agency, the women in these narratives make seemingly anti-intuitive choices that are simultaneously limiting and liberating. She explores how the appeal of the freedom of the North is constrained by the potential for isolation and destabilization for women rooted in strong social networks in the South. By introducing reproduction, mother-child relationships, and community into discourses concerning resistance, Li expands our understanding of individual liberation to include the courage to express personal desire and the freedom to love.

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INTRA-INDEPENDENCE: RECONCEPTUALIZING FREEDOM AND RESISTANCE TO BONDAGE

Frederick Douglass describes in his 1845 Narrative, his transformative encounter with The Columbian Orator (1797), an eighteenth century collection of speeches that served as a popular eloquence manual for students of rhetoric. In particular, Douglass notes the impact that a dialogue between a master and slave had upon him. Through reasoned argumentation, the slave convinces the master to emancipate him. Dou-glass writes that “these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery” (33). The Columbian Orator gives voice to a certain kind of freedom that Douglass felt within him but that he could not entirely express. Following his reading of these key passages, Douglass describes how he became obsessed with his desire for freedom.

Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind and moved in every storm. (33)

Freedom becomes omnipresent for Douglass. He sees it in all places though its manifestation is remarkably unspecific. It shines from each star and inhabits every object, yet what does freedom look like? The question requires no answer because Douglass's nineteenth-century readers knew what constituted freedom; they too would have read The Columbian Orator or would at least have been well-versed in the ideal of freedom Douglass sets forth in his narrative. It is the freedom described by the framers of the Constitution, “the unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” which launched the independence of the fledgling United States of America. As such, freedom requires no definition because it is as natural as the world from which it shines. Douglass is careful to suggest that The Colombian Orator does not introduce him to an unknown concept, but rather it enables him to speak its claims and thereby to recognize it both within himself and in everything around him.

Freedom is so simple, so elementary that it needs no further elaboration. Significantly, however, it is a concept that Douglass must learn through his study of The Colombian Orator. This socially prescribed process suggests that his conception of freedom is not an intrinsic category, but instead it must be taught to him. Though he may perceive freedom in all things, this naturalized perception is socially produced. We must consequently recognize that his version of freedom is constructed to coincide with the expectations of his intended white audience and hence with ideals that emerged from a specific history of privilege and oppression. Despite its apparent simplicity, Hirschmann reminds us that “the value that we place on freedom, as well as the meaning we give to the word, is in no way essential or natural but the product of particular historical relationships that have developed throughout time” (“Toward a Feminist Theory” 52). As many critics have noted, Douglass derives his understanding of freedom from familiar national ideologies that enshrine self-reliance and autonomy. David Dudley positions Douglass in the tradition of early American writers who celebrate individual achievement:

If young Benjamin Franklin arriving (alone) from Boston to Philadelphia epitomizes the white American version of the myth of the free man about to succeed in the land of unlimited opportunity, then Frederick Douglass and all male slaves, who, like him, escaped slavery alone and made their way North represent the African American version of the same myth. (6)

Dudley's emphasis on Douglass's escape from slavery highlights the fundamental opposition between bondage and flight established in male slave narratives. In a text that Deborah McDowell identifies as “the prototypical, premier example of the form,” which “‘authorized’ most subsequent slave narratives” (37), freedom requires escape from the South.¹ Despite this seemingly obvious association, it is important to note that flight did not guarantee unconditional freedom for escaped slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which applied to Douglass and countless others, made Northern states uncertain territory as former slaves were legally required to be returned to their masters in the South. While escaped slaves were not under the immediate control of vicious overseers, they were subject to the dangers of a fugitive existence. Even former slaves who were able to avoid the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Law did not enjoy basic freedoms granted to American citizens such as the right to vote or bear witness.

These examples demonstrate that in the nineteenth century, there was no true freedom for African Americans, even for those labeled “free” under the law. Rather, freedom, as understood as both a legal concept and a literary trope, is a conditional state of being, subject to limitations that are occluded by the rousing descriptions offered by Douglass and other slave narrators. Douglass admits that although he initially felt “the highest excitement I ever experienced” when he first landed in a free state, he soon “was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness,” realizing that he “was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery” (69). Douglass's flight does not afford him the freedom to return to the place of his birth, to know and reunite with friends and family, nor to be treated as an equal to white Northerners. Although he toured England immediately following the publication of his 1845 Narrative so as to avoid slave catchers, Dou-glass does not elaborate on the effects of the Fugitive Slave Law in the early version of his autobiography, implying that flight was sufficient to safeguard his freedom. Such details about what can only be described as his further escape to England would undermine what Charles J. Heglar terms “Douglass's transformational, linear movement from slave to freeman” by which “critics almost unanimously describe the structure of all slave narratives” (18). Arna Bontemps similarly charts a simplistic journey in Douglass's classic text, one that begins in the slave's “private hell of oppression” and ends in a “promised land and a chance to make a new life as a free man” (vii).

By contrast, Harriet Jacobs does not conflate escape to the North with escape from bondage, describing in great detail the difficulties she encountered as a fugitive slave and the friends who protected her. At the end of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda Brent concludes that the great aim of her life—to care and provide for her children—is a task still unfulfilled: “The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children's sake far more than for my own” (201). In Jacobs's narrative, the freedom she most desires remains unrealized, indicating that physical bondage is not the only obstacle she must confront. As Hazel Carby observes, “The consequences of being a slave woman did not end with the abolition of slavery as an institution but haunted the texts of Black women throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth” (Reconstructing Womanhood 61). Even after both she and her daughter are free, Linda struggles to provide basic necessities for Ellen. She contends with various forms of discrimination and a lack of economic resources common to recently emancipated slaves. There is no simplistic “promised land” for Linda and her family, only a sustained commitment to improve their lives.

However, it is Douglass's text that has established the central arc of slave narratives in which flight, as Stephen Butterfield affirms, acts as a “conscious metaphor for the fugitive's personal and social movement from anonymity to identity, from self-contempt to self-respect, from ignorance to enlightenment, and from sin to salvation” (27). Even Henry Bibb, whose 1849 narrative demonstrates a remarkable emphasis on familial relations between slaves, prefaces his text with the statement, “And if I could reach the ears of every slave to-day, throughout the whole continent of America, I would teach the same lesson, I would sound it in the ears of every hereditary bondman, ‘break your chains and fly for freedom!’” (11). Despite the simplistic connection between freedom and flight, this conflation obscures the influence of national ideologies concerning individual self-uplift on slave narrators as well as a significant gender bias that has only recently been questioned by the work of new historians. My purpose here is to demonstrate the limitations of equating freedom with flight and suggest alternative modes of resistance to slavery that protected other forms of freedom. While flight certainly led to a state of greater individual autonomy, it did little to safeguard ties to family and community and could actually damage such relationships. The research of contemporary historians such as Emily West, Stephanie M. H. Camp and others, as well as slave narratives that operate outside the standard trajectory from bondage to freedom, reveal a more complex struggle. Prevailing American discourses continue to champion an ideal of individual liberty based in rugged self-reliance, but texts by Harriet Jacobs and even Frederick Douglass aspire toward a freedom that merges independence with commitments to others.

SLAVE RESISTANCE: HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS AND MALE SLAVE NARRATIVES

In his influential study of slave life, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1976), Eugene Genovese claims that slaves who “unambiguously chose to fight for or fly to freedom” offer the most significant resistance to bondage. Although he details the role of theft, lying, and arson, among other activities intended to disrupt plantation life and notes the benefit that such insurgent behavior had upon the “collective spiritual life” of the slave community, he identifies these activities as a form of accommodation. They amount to “a way of accepting what could not be helped without falling prey to the pressures for dehumanization, emasculation, and self-hatred” (598). This conclusion not only demonstrates the underlying male bias that permeates Genovese's study, but by characterizing accommodation as a type of acceptance, Genovese de-emphasizes both its subversive qualities and the specific conditions from which such behavior emerged. While to contemporary scholars flight and armed insurrection may provide the clearest indication of resistance, the ease with which we may identify such opposition does not imply a lack of active insurgency among those who remained in and perhaps even chose captivity.

By highlighting flight and insurrection, Genovese suggests that only an explicit oppositional stance, embodied through certain types of action, constitutes meaningful resistance to slavery.² However, these rigid parameters fail to account for the peculiarities and complexities of slave existence in addition to the particular commitments of enslaved women. As Leslie Howard Owens observes, the plantation system “possessed qualities that permitted many slaves enough leeway within the setting of bondage to work out a variety of personally beneficial responses to the demands of their existence” (72). Although all slaves were denied legal rights, there was a significant range of experiences across and within individual households and plantations. While some slaves were allowed an array of privileges that included travel and rudimentary education, others labored in the fields and endured daily acts of physical violence. Moreover, Deborah Gray White distinguishes the type of labor assigned to enslaved women from that of men: “Female slavery had much to do with work, but much of it was concerned with bearing, nourishing, and rearing children whom slaveholders needed for the continual replenishment of their labor force” (69). Because the living conditions and labor expectations of slave women differed significantly from those of enslaved men, it is imperative to consider modes of resistance and alternative forms of agency that recognize these gendered positions.³

By seeking evidence of “unambiguous choice” from enslaved persons, Genovese ignores the instability of identity, agency, and volition caused by conditions of bondage as well as the specific roles men and women played within the slave economy. Moreover, Genovese bases his understanding of resistance upon individual achievement, ignoring the commitments and responsibilities slaves had to others. His formulation implies that resistance is somehow incompatible with the preservation of family, home, and community. Both flight and insurrection fundamentally threaten personal relationships because such expressions of resistance are necessarily accompanied by dislocation, separation, and the disruption of personal bonds. Freedom here threatens to become the achievement of an isolated existence, not the preservation of a socially integrated and community-oriented self. This narrow approach to resistance and the quest for freedom demands a more complex and nuanced engagement with an understanding of the personal connections slaves formed with others as well as the nature of collectively or relationally based identities. Could Douglass have achieved another kind of freedom had he opted to struggle within the slave system rather than flee it entirely?

More recent historical work into the daily life of slaves has widened our understanding of how families and support networks contributed to a culture of resistance. Emily West notes that such scholarship allows for “a broad definition of slave resistance—incorporating many actions that did not directly threaten the system of slavery.” West argues that this more expansive approach is particularly “relevant when investigating the lives of slave women, since they were more likely than men to engage in indirect resistance” (3). Larry Hudson, Jr. shifts focus from the plight of individual slaves to the ways in which family acted as “the primary institution in the slave quarters” (141). He demonstrates how family units allowed a degree of economic viability for slaves as well as protection from disease and death. Although the makeup of these families varied considerably, in her study of slave couples in antebellum South Carolina, West concludes, “relationships between spouses facilitated the desire for and the development of a social space between the lives of slaves and owners and a means of resistance against oppression” (3). Similarly, Sharon Ann Holt identifies the preservation of family as “a form of conscious resistance” because “organizing and behaving as families … frustrated white beliefs and desires” (195). While these families did not adhere to conventional two-parent households, Marie Jenkins Schwartz demonstrates how families acted as critical sites of education and support for as Wilma King observes, “many enslaved parents demonstrated an unfailing love for their offspring and socialized them to endure slavery by teaching them to work hard and to pay deference to whites while maintaining self-respect. These lessons constituted a major act of resistance to the demoralizing effects of slavery as children learned about their culture and how to survive as slaves” (143).

The work of these and other historians has done much to further our understanding of how resistance can draw strength from a collective source and how exercising choice in raising children improved the lives of slaves. However, despite this more complex approach to resistance, Arlene R. Keizer notes that “the black slave in rebellion against white domination is the prototype for a black resistance subjectivity, a founding model of African American and Afro-Caribbean subjectivity” (9). This archetype and its longevity derive from slave narratives written by men such as Douglass, Bibb, and William Wells Brown, who appear to support Genovese's claim to the primacy of flight as the best way to combat the institution of slavery and its dehumanizing effects. While organized rebellions were regarded with fear and anxiety by white Americans throughout the antebellum period, escape to the North was presented as the necessary and urgent response to the atrocities of slavery in these and other widely disseminated abolitionist tracts.

The most well-known male slave narratives describe flight as the ultimate goal of the slave and suggest that individual liberation is the most effective, if not the only, respectable approach to bondage. Valerie Smith observes that “by mythologizing rugged individuality, physical strength, and geographical mobility,” male slave narrators “enshrine cultural definitions of masculinity” (39). Within this paradigm, resistance to slavery is characterized as a determined movement toward emancipation. Just as Douglass speaks of his “manly independence” (247) in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), William Wells Brown exclaims upon becoming free, “I was no more a chattel, but a man!” (419). For both writers, liberty is presented as the fulfillment of manhood. Male slave narrators primarily trace a journey from bondage to freedom, focusing upon individual endeavors to counter the brutality and injustices of the slave system. Such accounts depend upon troubling connections between freedom, masculinity, and individuality. As a result, enslavement becomes linked to femininity and personal attachments, qualities that fundamentally impede the individual's pursuit of freedom.

Before leaving his family to escape to the North, Henry Bibb reflects upon the bonds of love and affection that threaten to keep him in slavery:

It required all the moral courage that I was master of to suppress my feelings while taking leave of my little family. Had Malinda known my intention that time, it would not have been possible for me to have got away, and I might have to this day been a slave. Notwithstanding every inducement was held out to me to run away if I would be free, and the voice of liberty was thundering in my very soul, “Be free, oh, man! be free,” I was struggling against a thousand obstacles which had clustered around my mind to bind my wounded spirit still in the dark prison of mental degradation. (46)

For Bibb, his wife, Malinda, and family are “obstacles” to achieving his greater goal of freedom. They “bind” him to a life of enslavement, while the “voice of liberty” calls upon his sense of masculinity, urging him to “be free.” Bibb's loved ones represent attachments that prevent him from actualizing his manhood, tempting him to accept the continued humiliations of slave life. Bibb at last responds to the promise he made to himself prior to his marriage and the birth of his child, to run away and secure his own freedom. Although Bibb attempts to rescue his wife and daughter by returning to the South to free them, Heglar observes that Bibb “transforms his wife and child into emblems for his attachment to a slave community, which he must escape in order to gain his freedom” (45). They come to represent impediments to his ultimate life goal, and as such he must sacrifice them to fulfill his manhood.

Just as Bibb sets out alone in his escape to the North, Douglass describes an individual act, his physical domination of Covey, as “the turning-point in my career as a slave.” After beating Covey in combat, he reflects that the episode “rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free … however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” Douglass lives in bondage for many more years, but from this moment on “Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger” (50). This sentence expresses the actual change that occurs for Douglass; he here achieves the freedom not to be beaten, and thus conceptually freedom becomes equated with a degree of physical autonomy. Although his labor still belongs to Covey, his physical body will no longer be touched or assailed by his master. The scene is powerful and satisfying in its triumphant conclusion, but simply unimaginable for a female slave. Not only would a woman be unlikely to dominate a man physically, but more importantly the battle between bondwoman and master in the antebellum period was necessarily sexual.

The entire institution of slavery depended upon the bodies of black women for its survival. In the antebellum South, slave status was determined through the mother. Barring exceptional circumstances, a child born of a female slave was destined to a life of bondage, irrespective of the father's racial identity or social position. While the laws of the South denied female slaves the freedom to nurture their children, black women were forced to act as mothers to the institution of slavery, most significantly following the end of the transcontinental slave trade in 1807. Although the biological connection between mother and child determined the identity and fate of the newborn slave, the social implications of this bond were destroyed at the very moment of birth. Paradoxically, American slavery relied upon a relationship that it then sought to deny. As the source of slavery's perpetuation through “breeding” and the crucial determinant of her children's social and legal status, black women stood at the very center of slavery's power and destructive influence.

The condition of black women under antebellum slavery presents especially difficult issues concerning forms of personal freedom and collective resistance. For bondwomen, bearing children was a means of slavery's perpetuation, and yet it could not be divorced from feelings of love and hope. This paradox highlights the often contradictory ways in which women subverted the dynamics of physical bondage. Given the predetermined violence underlying their function in the slave economy, enslaved women ostensibly had no sexual agency, by which I mean control of their reproductive abilities. However, works like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and the recently published nineteenth-century text, The Bondwoman's Narrative (2002) by Hannah Crafts, attest to the ways in which black women used their bodies and reproductive abilities as forms of resistance against the institution of slavery. They engaged in a variety of strategies that subverted the control slave masters had over them physically. Though rape was an expectation for female slaves, the surrender of all sexual ...