Epilogue

The epilogue notes that kinship, privilege, occupation, intragroup status, and social mobility affected crucial transitions in self-awareness as well as class awareness among the narrators. Growing self-respect kindled in many narrators a desire for a future that coalesced around an imagined free self. Narrating this process of inner growth individualized and liberated African American personhood in mid-century literature. Slave narratives from this generation created the most sophisticated commentary on caste and class in the South to be found in nineteenth-century American literature. In the late nineteenth century, former slaves continued to publish autobiographies in large numbers. Their experiences in slavery and perspectives on it were often very different from those of the antebellum narrators. Without taking into account the slave narratives published between 1865 and 1901, our comprehension of slavery and the full diversity of African American self-portraiture in the slave narrative will remain limited and partial.

Emerging Class Awareness

Chapter 1 examines key terms pertaining to socioeconomic distinction, particularly “caste,” “status,” and “class,” as they apply to mid-century narratives. The chapter notes factors that differentiated the enslaved economically as well as socially, among them types of work, kinship, and connections to whites. It explains the importance of class awareness to the slave narrative and differentiates that awareness from standard ideas about class consciousness. Also discussed are commonalities of experience shared by most of the fifty-two African American slave narrators whose life stories are the focus of this book. Concluding the chapter is an overview of discourse involving class critique and social advancement among African Americans as articulated by black writers from David Walker to Martin R. Delany and Frederick Douglass. The widening range of class-inflected ideas expressed in mid-century narratives attests to an emerging class awareness in contemporary essays and journalism, as well as autobiography, by black Americans.

Class and Conflict

Chapter 3 begins by reviewing the depictions of class differences among slaveholding and nonslaveholding whites in the South, centering on the contempt the narrators expressed toward “lazy” and “idle” slaveholders and “mean masters.” Yet some narratives recount class-based alliances between upper-echelon slaves and their “friends” in the white upper class. This chapter explores dissension the narrators attributed to envy, treachery, betrayal, and threats of violence between a favored “confidential” minority of domestic or skilled slaves and a resentful enslaved majority. The chapter examines narrative depictions of conflict, verbal and physical, between whites and blacks whose “impudent” bearing, speech, and behavior often identified them, insofar as the indignant whites were concerned, as intractable “gentlemen” and “lady” slaves. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the class implications of Douglass’s memory of a fight between an enslaved woman, Nelly Kellem, and an overseer in My Bondage and My Freedom.

Work, Status, and Social Mobility

Chapter 2 contains a comprehensive examination of the work and socioeconomic mobility of mid-century narrators while they were still enslaved. The work that narrators did before they achieved freedom and the leverage and mobility that many gained from that work significantly affected their self-estimates and their views of other slaves as well as slaveholders and nonslaveholders. Most mid-century narratives were produced by former skilled slaves, whose stories often dramatize how personal self-respect and pride, earned privileges, and mounting aspirations for opportunities and autonomy led to various kinds of resistance to control and, eventually, to freedom. This chapter also examines the least studied of the mid-century narratives, those by former agricultural workers (field hands) to explore their perspectives on work, exploitation, and freedom. The chapter concludes by examining the roles of paternalism, privilege, and intraracial—particularly family—relationships in the early life of Frederick Douglass.

Introduction

The introduction explores the concept of privilege as it is discussed in mid-century slave narratives. Slaves were denied constitutional and legal rights accorded to American whites, but privileges—sought or received, earned or negotiated, won or lost—shaped the lives of many mid-century narrators, especially the most famous ones, as their narratives make amply clear. A privilege could bring enhanced material resources, social advantages, or prerogatives that could make an almost unbearable bondage to some degree more tolerable. Access to privileges was a major basis for social distinctions and rankings among the enslaved. Slave narratives indicate that the higher one’s socioeconomic status in slavery, the better one’s chances were of escaping. Most of the sixty-one slave narratives examined in this book came from persons who launched themselves into freedom from positions of relative privilege in the upper echelons of slavery.

The Fugitive as Class Exemplar

Chapter 4 reviews the fugitive slave narrative’s role in rehabilitating the character of the slave by representing the fugitive slave as a special class of “superior” men and women who proved themselves worthy of freedom by refusing a degraded, victimized status. Traits of admirable character, such as initiative and intelligence, sometimes distinguish aspirants for freedom from so-called ordinary slaves, implying that those whom the fugitives left behind them were liable to judgment for acquiescing to their enslavement. However, many narratives note multiple factors, including emotional ties and fear of reprisals, that made flight for freedom untenable for most slaves. In some narratives scenes of parting, in which fugitives struggle emotionally and ethically with the idea of abandoning enslaved loved ones, dramatize an excruciating dilemma: how to justify a final and irrevocable assertion of an individual priority, freedom, over the needs and welfare of loved ones, family, or community.