Fugitive Slave, Fugitive Novelist: The Narrative of James Williams (1838)

In November 1838, abolitionist James Birney announced the American Anti-Slavery Society's (AASS) withdrawal of one of its publications: the Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama. Announced in The Liberator (2 Nov. 1838), the withdrawal was a serious blow to the AASS since Williams's narrative, its first full-length fugitive slave narrative, was a runaway bestseller that had been widely reprinted and circulated during the year ("Narrative"). Ironically, the narrative's popularity precipitated its subsequent downfall when it came to the attention of readers from the Alabama region that Williams described as his home turf. These readers accused the narrator of being an "imposter." One newspaper editor in particular, J. B. Rittenhouse of the Alabama Beacon, led the attack, raising enough doubts about the slave narrator's credibility to imperil the Society's national reputation and antislavery work. Rittenhouse claimed that it was a slander on the individuals it named, a "gross fiction," a "foul fester of falsehood," and a "'weak invention of the enemy'" (Alabama Beacon, 29 Mar. 1838; reprinted in [Untitled item], The Emancipator, 19 Apr. 1838).

Rittenhouse's objections to the narrative were not surprising given the disparaging light it cast on local slave owners, but Birney was taken aback by the charges against the narrative's protagonist. He assured The Emancipator's readers that "it [would be] saying too much for the powers of the man, to suppose that James, in his circumstances, could bring out such creations as the theory of the nonexistence of the facts implies" ([Untitled item]). Not even a "lying heart," he said, could fabricate this story. Birney then initiated a public investigation intended to uphold the Society's legitimacy, but after failing to identify the individuals named in Williams's account, and stalled by the fugitive's disappearance from the scene, the antislavery society admitted it could not corroborate the narrator's identity and withdrew the book (The Emancipator, 20 Sept. 1838; reprinted in "Narrative," The Liberator, 2 Nov. 1838).¹

Consider these concerns in light of a New York Times front-page article in September 2013, announcing new evidence for the identity of the author of The Bondwoman's Narrative, the recently discovered nineteenth-century novel first published in 2002 (Bosman A1). A literature professor from South Carolina confirmed what up until then was only hopeful speculation—that the author was a formerly enslaved black woman—thus establishing it as one of the earliest examples of a black tradition in the US. This discovery vindicated Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who first found and published the manuscript and who had employed extensive genealogical research and analyses of the manuscript's ink and paper in a widely publicized effort to authenticate the author's identity as a formerly enslaved African American woman. This elaborate process of validation speaks to the prevailing sway of nineteenth-century abolitionist imperatives to prove a writer or narrator's authenticity, an aspect that remains key currency in our critical literary methods today. The controversy surrounding Hannah Crafts's identity typifies the long afterlife of these antebellum values postslavery, post–Jim Crow, and post–Civil Rights, and suggests why the Williams narrative has existed in critical limbo—with few exceptions—since 1838. It also suggests that a critical reevaluation of the narrative is long overdue—one that expands our horizons of interpretation and allows us to explore other ways of rendering this fascinating text intelligible.

Our ongoing investments in empirical, biographical accuracy continue to shape our assessments about narratives in general terms of what constitutes narrating authority: who—amanuensis or slave—has the upper hand, assessments influenced by John Sekora's decades-old labeling of the slave narrative as a "black message in the white envelope" (482). More importantly, critical discussions about the lineages and legacies of African American literature frame authenticity as authorizing scholarly claims to "firstness," enacting, as Rafia Zafar has labeled it, the "curse of firsts" (619–20). The most recent case, which Zafar describes as "pen-swords clashing," features pioneer scholars in...