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· 163 · 5 Venture Smith, One of a Kind Vincent Carretta T HE PUBLICATION of a collection of archeological, critical, and historical essays on Venture Smith’s Narrative acknowledges the place that the story of Smith’s life holds in the African American literary canon. Few would now dispute its current canonized status as a work considered worthy of study on its own literary merits.1 But far more difficult to answer is the question of the historical place and role of Smith’s Narrative in the evolving tradition of the genre of the African American slave narrative, in which authors or their editors, or both, were aware of the form, content, and significance of the works of their predecessors , and influenced their successors in that tradition. By author, I mean the subject of the narrative, who recounted his or her own life, either directly to his or her audience or through the intervention of a white amanuensis, who in turn recorded the narrative, which he or she then edited before publication in print. Hence, the author may or may not also be the writer, who commits the autobiographical narrative to paper. Smith’s Narrative seems clearly indebted to the slave narrative tradition established before 1798, from which, however, its author appears to intentionally deviate. For example, it was not an abolitionist text in either the pre-1808 or post-1808 sense of abolitionist. It apparently was not designed to participate in the international campaign whose primary goal was the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, accomplished in both Britain and the United States in 1808. Nor does it seem to have anticipated later texts aimed at the abolition · 164 · m e m o r y of the institution of slavery. On the other hand, Venture’s willingness to resist slavery physically, his refusal to wait for emancipation in the afterlife, and his skepticism about “white” Christianity did anticipate significant aspects of nineteenth-century slave narratives, exemplified by Frederick Douglass ’s Narrative (1845). But Smith’s Narrative apparently did so without influencing the later narratives, at least in part because in 1798 it was published only in Connecticut, and reprinted only there in 1835 and 1897. It was not included in nineteenth-century abolitionist anthologies, perhaps in part because , as I will argue, it is ideologically so different from other works by authors of African descent. Even more complex than locating Smith’s Narrative in the canon or tradition of the African-British and African-American slave narrative is the challenge of identifying in Smith’s Narrative the “black message in a white envelope ,” to use John Sekora’s inspired metaphor describing so-called as-told-to slave narratives.2 Venture Smith’s amanuensis and the author of the preface to his Narrative may have been Elisha Niles, a Connecticut schoolteacher and post rider between Middletown and New London. The style and content of Smith’s Narrative, however, differ greatly from Niles’s other writings, which are pervasively religious.3 Moreover, some contend that Niles may have been a slaveowner, although census records from his home town of Colchester dispute this.4 To what extent does the message we receive in the text of the Narrative proper conflict with the voices we hear in the paratext—the preface and the testimony titled “Certificate”—that frame the text? To what extent may those paratextual voices attempt to “contain” Smith’s message, and thus control the reader’s response to it? Can we distinguish Venture Smith’s voice from that of his editor, and if so, how? The Narrative comprises three chapters: the first covers Venture’s life in Africa, the second his life as a slave in America, and the third his life as a freeman. The story of Smith’s life can be summarized in a few paragraphs. According to the Narrative, Venture was born around 1729, the eldest son of the first of the three wives of “Saungm Furro, Prince of the Tribe of Dukandarra ” in Guinea, Africa. His father named him Broteer, and he was “descended from a very large, tall and stout race of beings, much larger than the generality of people in other parts of the globe, being commonly considerable above six feet in height, and every way well proportioned” (5). When he was about six years old he was kidnapped by an army of slave catchers “instigated by some white nation” (8) and eventually brought to...

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