Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 1816–1861 by Keith Michael Green (review)

In Bound to Respect, English Professor Keith Michael Green exposes the complex, messy, and often unpredictable system of bondage faced by African Americans in the early-nineteenth century through the prism of slave narratives. In five chapters, Bound to Respect conjures the labyrinthine cultural, commercial, and contextual transactions between servility and Southern bondspeople, free blacks, and the Atlantic creoles particularized in the scholarship of historians like Ira Berlin (see Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves). In his own words, Green characterizes his work as an “exploration of the many underappreciated forms of captivity [that] blacks experienced and recounted in the first half of the nineteenth century” (7). The title itself contains hints about the underlying argument summoning images of the binding of timeworn volumes, and audiences bound by “stories of confinement” and freedom. Likewise, it invokes the great aspirational endeavor of completing a slave narrative for bondsmen and women under the dire conditions of subjugation, and the desire for respectability, self-fashioning, and political protest and representation encapsulated in the manuscripts. Primarily concerned with close readings of slave narratives and autobiographical and biographical writings that “reveal marginalized forms of black suffering and confinement,” Green zooms in on portrayals of black imprisonment in the South, bondage in Native American territories, children and indentured servitude in the North, and captivity in Northern Africa (7).

Bound to Respect begins with analysis of Uncommon Sufferings, the narrative of Briton Hammon, a Massachusetts slave once kidnapped by Native Americans during an eighteenth-century shipping voyage to the Yucatan peninsula. In the course of his time with the coastal Calusa Native tribe in Florida they reportedly “us’d [him] pretty well” (3). However he was soon captured once again by a Spanish schooner and spirited away to Cuba where he encountered another type of bondage tempered by the ability of slaves to buy their freedom or regulate their enslavement through the cortacion system. During a twelve-month stint in the castle of the Cuban Governor Francisco Antonio Cagigal de la Vega, Hammon experienced the closest thing to freedom he had ever known. Like others, he wielded the ability to move among free blacks in Havana and keep some of the money resultant from his labor. This relative freedom abruptly ends when he refuses conscription into the Spanish navy and is imprisoned for four years and seven months. After a number of other absorbing turns of intrigue in his story including a term with a bishop as a travel aid, Hammon coincidentally reunites with his former master while serving as a cook on a vessel headed back to Massachusetts, and seamlessly resumes his original committal. This circuitous route through various forms of detention exemplifies the complexity of black captivity in eighteenth-century America that Green conveys in his work. He paints a portrait of an American landscape rife with pitfalls and traps for enslaved blacks, and crisscrossed with disparate yet connected forms of subjection. “One form of bondage,” Green writes, “does not patiently wait for another to end before it begins” (6). The Hammon narrative makes clear that the types of enslavement blacks faced were often variegated, negotiable, and diverging, yet pervasive and seamless aspects of their experiences.

Considering a number of different narratives, Green argues that antebellum authors sought to legitimize claims to “personhood” and citizenship while simultaneously “framing articulations of protest” (8). Well-told stories transmogrified dehumanized bondspeople into human subjects imbued with cognitive and emotional stoutheartedness, which was protest in itself. However, Green acknowledges that some authors and editors sought fame and profit instead of citizenship and political demonstration. Whatever the goal of the writing, he asserts that slave narratives always had implications on the strained racial hierarchies rigidly structuring American society, momentarily suspending protagonists in the territory between bondage and respectability. They likewise represented a sort of rebirth or reevaluation of self for the author, and offered an opportunity to seize “literary...