Reframing History: Insider/Outsider Paradigms in Ten Books about Slavery

Determining how to tell stories of slavery to current young adult readers entails concerns about how to make slavery relevant for those who are not themselves enslaved. While authors during the early nineteenth century had the same concerns when writing to their audiences, twenty-first-century writers face the potential resistance of readers who believe slavery is a long-since-passed event. That is not the case, however, as Marjorie Gann and Janet Willen demonstrate in their study Five Thousand Years of Slavery. Moreover, the slavery of earlier centuries in the Americas has not been a closed event inasmuch as repercussions of racial discrimination and conflict have persisted. The ten books reviewed here offer a range of narrative strategies to present issues of slavery to young readers. While they all condemn slavery, they present it through different prisms: adventures stories, dual-perspective narratives, fictionalized autobiographies, non-fiction accounts, and discussions of post-slavery racial exploitation. Narrative decisions—such as the choice of point-of-view characters or depicted levels of violence—shape these perspectives of slavery fundamentally. What these texts share often, to varying degrees, is a tension between insider/outsider perspectives, whether in dual narratives with conflicting viewpoints or in fictionalized autobiographies where characters authorize their insider experiences of slavery. Such use of insider/outsider perspectives comments on implicitly—and attempts to counter—the contemporary reader’s probable sense of insularity.

Four of the texts—Ann Towell’s Grease Town, Jean Rae Baxter’s Freedom Bound, Judith Plaxton’s Morning Star, and Manu Herbstein’s Brave Music of a Distant Drum—present fictional stories of slavery that are structured around representations of insider/outsider experience, setting up a sometimes tenuous balance between those who experience racial exploitation and those who witness it or stand only about its borders. Set in Oil Springs, Ontario, Grease Town describes a little-known race riot that occurred there in March 1863 as a way of exploring the after-effects and, in some ways, the undergirding rationalizations for slavery. The story is told from the point of view of white twelve-year-old Titus Sullivan, who flees the protective custody of his aunt for adventure with the male company of his brother and his Uncle Amos in a “rough and tumble” oil town (43). The place—a “dirty mess that reeks of sulphur and oozes black liquid that everyone says is as precious as gold” (1)—sets the stage for issues of poverty, exploitation, competition, and greed. Questions about inclusivity and segregation are played out in the social miasma of this town, particularly as issues of race come into play.

It is here that Titus meets a black person for the first time—Moses Croucher...