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In the spirit of Black History Month, I’d like to draw your attention to some African American literature that explores the history and memory of slavery. When it was legal, slavery had a profound effect on all aspects of African American life; after the Civil War, it continued to influence the lived experience of African Americans, and even today, it indirectly shapes the racial system in which all Americans function. It should come as no surprise that America’s collective history of slavery informs a great deal of African American literature.
From autobiographical slave narratives to twentieth-century revisitations of slavery in an imagined context, literary depictions of slavery contain a wealth of insight. In these texts, one encounters the cruelty and suffering that accompanied slavery. They also capture the ambivalence of slave life, reflected in the strategies that slaves used to survive and to create lives apart from their masters’ control. Contemporary explorations of slavery allow authors to dig below the surface of nineteenth century slave narratives to endow slave characters with a full range of emotional experiences. All of these texts help us to understand the triumph of perseverance that was every day life for slaves.
Below is a list of autobiographies and fiction that give a sense of this rich tradition. And if any of it sounds interesting, drop me a line (callahan.138@osu.edu), or, hey, sign up for one of my classes!
Perhaps the most famous slave autobiography, Narrative documents Douglass’s life under slavery, his dramatic escape, and his new life as a free man. An important tool for abolitionists, Douglass’s book was also an international best seller. It’s a great read, and if you want to read more, you’re in luck, because he also wrote two other autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881)..
Jacobs’ account of her life in slavery was unusual in its explicit (for the time) account of the constant sexual harassment she suffered from her white master. She fakes her own escape and spends an unbelievable seven years hidden in a tiny attic to avoid the attentions of her master.
Credited as the first African American novel, Clotel has elements of a slave narrative and addresses themes of sexual exploitation under slavery similar to Incidents. The twist? Clotel is the enslaved daughter of a slave and an American president. The father is based loosely on Thomas Jefferson, whose liaison with a slave was rumored at the time (and has been substantiated more recently).
I’ve skipped a hundred years to include some contemporary revisioning of slavery, including this really cool novel that features an African American woman in 1976 who gets transported back in time to early 19th century Maryland so that she can save the life of one of her ancestors and ensure her own survival. She is startled to discover that her ancestor is a white slave owner. And that’s just the first two chapters!
Morrison, an Ohioan, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, and this novel is the one for which she is best known. It is the story of a woman literally haunted by her personal history of slavery. A beautiful and complicated novel.
This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is profound reading. It examines a community composed of slaves, free black people, and white people in Virginia. In a further complication of our understanding of slavery, some of the free black citizens are slave owners themselves. It also incorporates historical documents to blur the boundaries among fiction, memory, and history.
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