Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creating (review)

Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creating. By Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Pp. 208. Cloth $67.00; paper $22.95.)

As the title suggests, Sterling Bland Jr.'s analysis of slave narratives deals mainly with their literary qualities—"the voice" of the narrator (5), the rhetorical creation of "identity" (xiv), and the "literary recitation" of the story (162). In these, the author's stated goals, there is much that is commendable, especially in the in-depth examinations of Frederick Douglass's famous Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1846) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom (1860). Each text is examined from a variety of perspectives—the use and meaning of metaphors, the form and content of various passages, and the use of religious language and biblical precedent. At times didactic, often pedantic, and discussing the best-known and most popular narratives, the author's style and subject matter should not diminish the book's original contribution. As he concludes, "Yet they [the narrators] were able somehow to merge collective experience with individual hopes and ambitions and in the process create writing as thoroughly 'American' as the work of any of those writers usually associated with that phenomenon" (163).

Considering the heavy reliance among some historians during the past generation on fugitive slave narratives, from John Blassingame's The Slave Community (1972) to Walter Johnson's prize-winning Soul by Soul (2000), the book has special relevance for historians. While some scholars have maintained a skepticism of this genre in seeking to uncover the essential elements of the South's "peculiar institution." Bland's analysis suggests a number of areas where the voices of successful runaway slaves are especially problematic, including: 1) successful runaways to the North were a highly unrepresentative group; 2) often they garbled facts and forgot important events; 3) they wrote primarily during the last twenty-five years of an institution that spanned more than two and a half centuries; 4) the narrators sometimes describe what they did not see, relying on second- and thirdhand information; 5) they embodied the American success story, hardly typical for African Americans.

The narratives are especially lacking, Bland contends, in providing specific information about "an individual self." He observes: "Rather, they are concerned with identity, especially black identity, as a cultural fabrication. Slave narratives became literary ghosts in a cultural machine that paradoxically made them completely fluid and fictional even as their authors and endorsers insisted upon their unvarnished truth" (4). This is largely because of the political context and the underwriting of their publications by abolitionists. "Illusion" and "masking" occurred frequently, as former slaves move from historical context to rhetorical strategies. The slave narrative becomes "simultaneously a literary document of personal expression and a political document designed and manipulated by others, often abolitionists, in support of their own agenda" (15). The author argues that narratives cannot be viewed as history, autobiography, fiction, or truth. Rather, they require "a style of reading that acknowledges that they are the project of a series of oppositional forces that, even for the narrators themselves, are elastic in their influence and meaning" (159).