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  • Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing by Christopher Hager
  • Antonio T. Bly
Christopher Hager. Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. 328 pp. $39.95.

The complex history of enslaved Americans of African descent having achieved literacy but not necessarily a published body of letters is overlooked in the canon of African American studies. Unlike the belletristic tradition, in which numerous African and African American authors wrote themselves into existence, the unheralded efforts of unlettered slaves have generally eluded significant scholarly attention. One example is the story of Thomas Ducket, a marginally literate man, “who had been sold away from his family in Louisiana.” Missing also is the story of a Virginia slave named Maria Perkins, who struggled to “come to terms with the destruction of her family.” Adam Plummer’s narrative is ignored, yet he kept a “log of his daily life” (8). These are but a few discounted voices that come to light in Christopher Hager’s Word by Word.

In combing through a number of letters, diary entries, archived records, and other sources of writing, Hager reveals compelling accounts of enslaved and newly emancipated African Americans achieving literacy though not letters. In Word by Word, Hagar examined the complex terrain of the African American literacy tradition, highlighting what he calls the “enslaved narrative.” Unlike the escaped-slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others who used their life stories to advance abolition, protest slavery, and achieve humanity through the act of writing, the enslaved narrative celebrated everyday life and the mundane; documented personhood and accomplishment on the parts of those who had learned to read and write; and established what Hager calls a complex “epistolary underground,” in which slaves and free African Americans conversed with one another. “Such rare texts,” he writes, “belong in a category apart from the published, retrospective autobiographies known as fugitive slave narratives” (82). Unlike those who wrote the slave narratives, these African American authors did not seek the light of print; they rather appear preoccupied with maintaining their families and communities.

By Hagar’s account, perhaps the best example of this uncelebrated genre can be found in the example of John M. Washington. Born a slave in 1838 in Fredericksburg Virginia, Washington was taught to read by his mother, Sarah Tucker. In his early [End Page 546] teens, he taught himself to write. In Douglass-like fashion, the Virginia-born man learned first by convincing “two young white men” to act as his teachers, and secondly by way of his literate uncle, George. While Douglass’s narrative stressed the importance of literacy as a way of achieving manhood and freedom, Washington used literacy to realize different ends. “Not only,” Hagar explains, “is communication with his family Washington’s principle motivation to learn to write; it is his connection with an extended family and a broader social network that enables him to learn” (84). Using wallpaper as parchment, the slave struggled to master his letters. By age twenty, he kept a diary. Taking up his pen, he “chronicled parties, gossip, whispers outside church, and walks through the streets of town with his friends.” When not recording such everyday things, Washington wrote love letters and flirtatious notes to Annie Gordon—“a free black girl four years his junior.” Contrary to the form, style, and the composition of the escaped-slave narrative, the Virginia-born man’s enslaved narrative “never mentioned forced labor, punishment, separation from his mother, or any plans for escape” (87), and neither had he mentioned his race or legal status. Instead, what emerges from Hagar’s Word by Word are a number of compelling accounts of enslaved and free African Americans achieving literacy and defining their lives not so much in terms of publication, resistance and agency, but in persevering from one day to the next.

There does remain a question, however, in Hagar’s discussion of the epistolary underground, in which slaves and later free African Americans not far removed from the Civil War corresponded with one another. On October 8, 1852, for example, a Virginia slave woman named Maria Perkins wrote to her husband Richard, lamenting the...

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