William L. Andrews

Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century

Preface by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein Foreword by Marilyn Richardson Acknowledgments Introduction Textual Note I. The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee II. Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labors of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw III. A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch by Mrs. Julia A.J. Foote Notes

The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative

During the African American literary renaissance of the 1850s, the act of narrating was novelized in many slave narratives. But Frederick Douglasss Heroic Slave (1853) and William Wells Browns Cl...

Caste and Class in Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives

Scholars of slave narratives have developed a fine-tuned sense of the role of caste—epitomized by the hierarchical power dynamics between enslaver and enslaved—in antebellum narratives. But research is still rudimentary insofar as class-based dynamics in the narratives are concerned. Within famous and largely forgotten slave narratives, the presence, function, and effects of social stratification among the enslaved as well as whites of the South remain largely uncharted intellectual territory. To realize how class functioned among the enslaved and how class awareness shaped the views and values of those who published the narratives, we must read familiar narratives in new ways and consider unfamiliar narratives for the first time. From John W. Blassingame and George P. Rawick in the 1970s to Deborah Gray White, Michael A. Gomez, and Steven Hahn in more recent years, historians have shown how “class systems,” “social divisions,” “pecking orders,” and “classism” evolved among the enslaved, as did an awareness of what it meant to be ranked in the pecking order on both sides of the color line (Blassingame 155; Gomez 15; Hahn 37; Rawick I: 8; White 130). Many people today know that enslaved domestic workers had advantages—as well as disadvantages—that differentiated them from enslaved agricultural workers. But the most widely read slave narratives, then and now, were produced by men and women who portrayed themselves primarily as skilled workers, such as caulker (Frederick Douglass), ship steward (William Wells Brown), cabinetmaker (William Craft), seamstress (Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Craft, Elizabeth Keckley), blacksmith (James W. C. Pennington), and foreman, a.k.a. slave driver (Josiah Henson, Jermain W. Loguen, Solomon Northup). Skilled slaves had opportunities, rewards, and status that rank-and-file slaves did not have. Few have examined the import of the work the narrators did while enslaved and how that work affected their status and the trajectories of their lives in slavery. Still fewer have pondered the role that work, status, and class played in the development of slave narrators’ self-estimates, social views, and personal values.