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75 c h A P t E r t w o Truth Stranger than Fiction African American Identity and (Auto)Biography As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.—AudrE LordE, “Poetry is not a Luxury” In his 1880 memoir, My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People, William Wells Brown begins with a note about his autobiographical reflections . The book’s “earlier incidents,” he explains, “were written out from the author’s recollections. The later sketches here given, are the results of recent visits to the South, where the incidents were jotted down at the time of their occurrence, or as they fell from the lips of the narrators, and in their own unadorned dialect” (113). Brown is being typically disingenuous , for what readers actually find in My Southern Home, albeit beyond their awareness, is a narrative partially made up of many other texts that Brown had published through the years. The book reprints, verbatim, passages, episodes, and narrative snippets from a wide range of Brown’s publications, including his Narrative of William W. Brown, first published in 1847; both the 1853 Clotel and 1864 Clotelle; his 1858 play The Escape; his first historical study, The Black Man, appearing in 1863; and another historical work, The Negro in the American Rebellion, brought out in 1867. Brown’s complexly multitextual and multivocal performance in My SouthernHomeislargelyanewiterationofhisongoingself-transformations comprising a series of autobiographical statements and strategies that appeared throughout his publishing career.1 Included are not only Brown’s own four American and five British editions of the Narrative, but also the accounts of his life that open Clotel and The American Fugitive in Europe (1855); William Farmer’s “Memoir of William Wells Brown,” which comes t r u t h s t r a n g e r t h a n F i C t i o n 76 at the beginning of Brown’s Three Years in Europe (1852); and Alonzo Moore’s “Memoir of the Author” that opens The Rising Son (1874).2 The various versions correspond generally, though sometimes their details are contradictory, and they often present inaccurate information—to the point where it is easy to wonder whose authority should be accepted in any given account. In addition to this biographical mix, a blending of genres weaves the author’s life in and out of fiction, autobiography, biography , and history. For example, among the biographical sketches in The Black Man is a fictionalized account of Brown’s own life, under the title “A Man without a Name,” which later becomes chapter 36, “A Thrilling Incident of the War,” of his history The Negro in the American Rebellion. As Russ Castronovo has argued, “These diverse autobiographical accounts do not so much constitute a complete life, inviolable in the authority of its own experiences, as they subtly reconstitute history, implying its mutable and selective aspects” (Fathering 167). The chaotic turns on his autobiographical trail make Brown a particularly complex illustration of a characteristic pattern in nineteenth-century African American (auto)biographical publications—the subject of this chapter. Against the background of the understanding of race presented in Chapter 1, I will consider those narrative characteristics and contextual contingencies that make nineteenth-century African American (auto) biography African American. In other words, I wish to deviate from the usual approach to understanding the role of race in African American experience and identity in order to account for the ongoing and complex construction of identity, the highly contingent dynamics of social and individual experience in the nineteenth century. Instead of viewing these autobiographies, implicitly or explicitly, as narratives that proceed from race, from the identity of their authors or putative narrators, I suggest we view them as strategic representations of race—that is, attempts to represent the cultural process and dynamics of the ongoing but shifting (and shifty) construction of race, the means by which narrators tried to locate themselves and claim authority over their own autobiographies. How did the chaotic constructions of race shape individual lives? By what means can these constructions be identified, negotiated, and represented? And what are the implications of these constructions for readers of African American (auto)biographies? These questions are often at the heart of the autobiographical texts we study. Nineteenth-century African American...

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