From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives (review)

From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives includes eight slave narratives published between 1842 and 1895. Each of these narratives was authored (or dictated) by a formerly enslaved person who—at one point in his or her life—lived in the city of Worcester. B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton (professor emeritus and instructor, respectively, at the College of the Holy Cross) edited this volume in order to present the "wide-ranging discourse[s] of freedom" that contradict "popular assumptions that African Americans had a marginal relationship to literary production and social communication in antebellum America" (xxiii). The narratives reveal a "collective African American intention to remember slavery and document, for the African American community, the lived experience of former bondsmen and enslaved women" (xxv).

In their introduction, the editors situate the narratives within this larger African American community as well as the Worcester free black community that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest data on blacks in Worcester suggests that about twenty slaves lived in the city immediately before the Revolution, but this population expanded exponentially (in numbers and influence) after formerly enslaved peoples obtained their freedom at the end of the eighteenth century. By the dawn of the Civil War, Worcester was home to about two hundred black men and women and was a center of abolitionist discourse. McCarthy and Doughton bring the city to life in their introduction and then pivot from their discussion of the place to confirm that the slave narrative—which presented narratives of enslavement, trial, and triumph—enabled black writers to present and preserve a collective memory for that community.

The first group of narratives includes antebellum publications by Lunsford Lane (1842), John Thompson (1856), Rev. Thomas Jones (1857), and Rev. G. W. Offley (1859). Of particular note here is Thompson's lengthy narrative, which documents (in great detail) his escape from slavery as well as his voyage on a New Bedford whaling ship. None of these four narrators discuss their lives in Worcester, though the different routes that each took to the mill city hint at the diversity in the city's free black community in the years preceding and during the Civil War. The second group of narratives—all authored or dictated after emancipation—echoes the first in terms of its focus on the experience of enslavement. At the same time, these later narratives do highlight some aspects of black life in postwar Worcester. For example, Betheny Veney (1889), Isaac Mason (1893), and Allen Parker (1895) likely attended the same church, and Mason and Rev. Jacob Stroyer (1879) both rose to prominence in the town. Of particular interest to Civil War scholars may be the narratives of Parker and Stroyer. Parker (the only narrator to discuss his war experiences at any length) escaped from slavery by joining the U.S. Navy in 1863, and he served on a gunboat until the end of the war; Stroyer was pressed into service as a laborer for the Confederate army, and he sustained a leg wound during shelling from Fort Wagner just a few months after the assault by the Massachusetts 54th.

Other than that the eight narrators all lived in Worcester at one time or another, there are few links that bind these narratives together, and therein lies both the charm and the challenge of the volume. Though individual narratives (especially those of Thompson and Stroyer) are humorous, moving, and stylistically adept, the very diversity of those narratives renders From Bondage to Belonging of uncertain utility as a classroom text. Certainly, though, this volume should interest general readers unfamiliar with the slave narrative genre or readers with an interest in the evolution of an African American community in Worcester. This aspect of the collection comes to the fore in the editors' ably-researched and detailed introduction, wherein Doughton and McCarthy document the struggles and successes of a black community proud of its...