Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend by Jr. Ron J. Jackson and Lee Spencer White (review)

Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legendrecounts the story of Joe, an enslaved man who was one of the few Texian survivors of the Alamo siege. Joe provided “the clearest and most complete account of the final assault on the Alamo,” one that solidified his name in Texas history (p. xvii). Despite his acclaim, little has been known about Joe other than what could be found in scant primary source fragments. Authors Ron J. Jackson Jr. and Lee Spencer White intervene in this deficient history with an impressive examination of Joe’s experiences before and after the Alamo. The result of a seventeen-year investigation, their book takes into account legal documents, newspapers, slave narratives, travel logs, census records, journals, and letters. “We opened and closed county courthouses, state archives, and university collections,” the authors write, “often skipping lunch to read old documents until they were blurry from our exhaustion” (p. xvi). Jackson and White posit that this labor of love was necessary to overcome the particular difficulties in researching enslaved people. Their approach has resulted in hard-won breakthroughs in Joe’s story, which simultaneously fills important gaps in the scholarship on the Alamo and on slavery in the state of Texas.

The text begins with a tense imagining of Joe’s actions and mood on March 5, 1836, the night preceding the final assault on the Alamo. From there, Jackson and White backtrack to consider the events that led to Joe’s presence at the battle. The second half of the book is devoted to the incidents that took place once Joe’s owner, William Barret Travis, was drawn into the Texas Revolution along with his slave. Scholars of Texas military history will appreciate the detailed tracing of the pair’s route along the Texas frontier from Joe’s perspective, which brings new life to a likely familiar narrative of the revolution. Along the way, Jackson and White provide a comprehensive view of the debates over slavery that raged in Texas in order to portray Joe’s legal status as a bondman and his complex relationships with his owners. Linking Joe’s story with the story of Texas implicitly suggests that slavery is central to what W. Fitzhugh Brundage refers to as “Texas’ mythic past” (Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, eds., Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas[College Station, Tex., 2007], xiii). The rendering of this past in earlier accounts has too often silenced enslaved voices and minimized slavery in favor of mythologizing and glorifying Texas as part of what Randolph B. Campbell calls the “romantic West” ( An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865[Baton Rouge, 1989], 1). Jackson and White’s text provides an important counternarrative for these partial narratives that have overlooked the perspectives of people of color on the Texas frontier.

Jackson and White, however, overreach in their somewhat novelistic renderings of Joe’s interactions and innermost thoughts. Indeed, the text occasionally provides intimate details that would be difficult for a researcher to obtain without resorting to imagination. For example, Jackson and White write with descriptive emotion about Joe’s possible responses to seeing his mother whipped and his family divided; elsewhere, there is the problematic claim that “given their perilous position,” Travis and Joe “likely spoke as equals, as two souls standing on the doorstep of eternity” (p. 5). Flowery and romanticizing inferences aside, these moments of fictive liberty function not as detraction but ultimately as invitation to understand the story of Joe as central to the drama of the Texas Revolution. By approaching Joe’s life in this manner, the authors also open the text to audiences both scholarly and popular. Though Joe’s story is engaging, equally entertaining is the story of the authors’ own research and obsession with their subject...