The Enslaved Narrative: White Overseers and the Ambiguity of the Story-Told Self in Early African-American Autobiography

While the classic American slave narratives, like those by Frederick Douglass, attract much attention and are given wide institutional currency, the earlier narratives—indeed, the progenitors of one of the most American of literary genres—receive comparatively scant attention. This article addresses those incipient narratives (for example, by Pomp, Venture, and Grimes), demonstrating how they inadvertently expose the challenges inherent in bringing slaves, who were often non-literate, into the print-storytelling fold. Through close readings that draw from orality-literacy studies, the essay exposes stark but intriguing signs of the narratives’ heavy reframing and/or interpolation by white “editors”—sometimes to the point of erasing the very legitimacy of early, “authentic” black narration. Such signs include an overemphasis on numerical categories (dates, measurements, etc.), as well as repeated, disquieting shifts in diction, tone, and syntax that suggest a “writerly” modification of prose. In this way, “The Enslaved Narrative” brings to the fore the complex, and perhaps unavoidably awkward, ways in which, in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, slavery, memoir, and authorship commingled—at least until slaves like Douglass could harness the literacy skills and epistemic license to become masters of their own words.