Cheap Editions, Little Books, and Handsome Duodecimos: A Book History Approach to Antebellum Slave Narratives

The question then occurred to me, Could I not, by making a book, do something to relieve myself and my children. . . . This idea struck me with so much force, that I have yielded to it—that is, to write a short Narrative of my own life, setting forth the trials and difficulties the Lord has brought me through to this day, and offer it for sale to my friends generally, as well as to the public at large.

—Noah Davis (71-72)

The fact that negroes are turning Book makers may possibly serve to remove the popular impression that they are fit only for Boot blackers & although they may not shine in the former profession as they have long done in the latter, I am not with out hope that they will do themselves good by making the effort.

—Frederick Douglass (qtd. in McKivigan 439)

After being subjected to a century of what John Sekora aptly called “cultural repression” (100), antebellum slave narratives have taken pride of place in the American literary canon. Once ignored, disparaged, or simply forgotten, these accounts of life in bondage and freedom are now widely read, studied, and anthologized to the extent that non-specialist audiences—undergraduate students of American literature, for example—may be tempted to equate antebellum African American writing with the genre of the slave narrative. Several groundbreaking studies published in recent years emphasize how much more complex black literary production was in the decades preceding the Civil War. In Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2002), Elizabeth McHenry explores the world of literary societies organized by free blacks in the urban North and the varied print culture that emerged from them. Eric Gardner engages us to look toward “unexpected places”—geographic (Missouri, Indiana, and California) and generic (newspaper columns, letters to editors, and essays)—to widen our understanding of nineteenth-century African American literature (Unexpected). The contributors to Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein’s edited collection Early African American Print Culture (2012) examine a vast and fascinating array of printed materials, including black gallows literature, poetry chapbooks, and conversion narratives.

In this essay, I suggest that the reconstruction of African American literary experience in all its complexity should go hand in hand with a deconstruction of what we think we know about the slave narrative—or, to use a less loaded term, with a defamiliarization of the genre. The story of the slave narrative is well rehearsed: narratives of ex-slaves, critics say, were usually written in collaboration with white abolitionists, with anti-slavery societies “subsidizing publication” (Stewart 142); they “loomed large in the campaign literature of abolitionism, furnishing propaganda of considerable proportions” (Quarles 65); they met with considerable success, going “through multiple editions” and selling “in the tens of thousands” (Andrews 668); they were “largely directed toward a northern white audience” (Bland 34); and they “soon emerged as a distinct genre recognizable by its form, content, and relation to the cultural matrix” (F. S. Foster 5). None of these statements is fundamentally untrue. The overall picture they paint of antebellum slave narratives is, however, a distorted one. The slave narrative as we think of it today is essentially a modern construct; the phrase “slave narrative” itself had little currency in antebellum America. Different narratives took different paths, meeting only occasionally on the shelves of an anti-slavery depository or in the oft-quoted review of Boston Unitarian minister Ephraim Peabody.¹ Some were deeply embedded in abolitionist discourse while others were primarily commercial ventures meant to profit from the “Uncle Tom” frenzy of the 1850s. Some were very popular, but a number of locally produced narratives were not—and were not meant to be. Most were directed toward a Northern audience, but copies of certain narratives did circulate in the South. Because the fate of a given narrative depended to a large extent on the way it was published and disseminated, a book history approach to antebellum slave narratives can help us redefine our notion of the literary form we have...