To Tell a Free Story

The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865

William L. Andrews

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780252060335
  9780252012228
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252054631
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

To Tell A Free Story traces in unprecedented detail the history of Black autobiography from the colonial era through Emancipation. Beginning with the 1760 narrative by Briton Hammond, William L. Andrews explores first-person public writings by Black Americans. Andrews includes but also goes beyond slave narratives to analyze spiritual biographies, criminal confessions, captivity stories, travel accounts, interviews, and memoirs. As he shows, Black writers continuously faced the fact that northern whites often refused to accept their stories and memories as sincere, and especially distrusted portraits of southern whites as inhuman. Black writers had to silence parts of their stories or rely on subversive methods to make facts tellable while contending with the sensibilities of the white editors, publishers, and readers they relied upon and hoped to reach.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography: Notes toward a Definition of a Genre
• Chapter 2. Voices of the First Fifty Years, 1760–1810
• Chapter 3. Experiments in Two Modes, 1810–40
• Chapter 4. The Performance of Slave Narrative in the 1840s
• Chapter 5. The Uses of Marginality, 1850–65
• Chapter 6. Culmination of a Century: The Autobiographies of J. D. Green, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs
• Conclusion. “Free at Last”: From Discourse to Dialogue in the Novelized Autobiography
• Notes
• Annotated Bibliography of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865
• Annotated Bibliography of Afro-American Biography, 1760–1865
• Index