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  • In the Vestibule of Another World
  • Jamie Parra (bio)
A Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina, Charlotte S. Riley. Edited by Crystal J. Lucky, Wisconsin University Press, 2016.
The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life, J. W. Loguen. Edited by Jennifer A. Williamson, Syracuse University Press, 2016.

Expressing the real is an arduous job.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

During her travels in South Carolina during the 1870s, the African American preacher Charlotte S. Riley was asked on two different occasions to confirm that she was "a real woman." The first time, following one of her sermons, a white stranger approached and began inspecting her. When asked why he did so, the stranger replied that he was investigating whether she was "a real woman or an angel." Apparently satisfied that she was not an apparition, he declared that "The world is coming to an end, for I never seen this before, but I see it to-night." The second time, a woman from the congregation that she had just addressed approached to explain that her white employer instructed her to "look at your fingers and see is you a real woman" (Riley 66). Riley describes both incidents without commentary in her 1902 memoir, and it is impossible to know precisely what provoked these questions about her ontological status, but both speculations upon her body suggest something about her work and its cultural context: a female former slave often in poor health who could engage large audiences, she cut an improbable figure, and the question of not who but what she was, her interrogators apparently believed, could be worked out by examining her physical person. These moments show how easily a fascination with her sermon became a fixation on her body and how potentially limiting her audience's expectations could [End Page 157] be. For these strangers, Riley's body seemed an unlikely source for such a voice, leading to their fixation on her flesh. Skin, as in Frantz Fanon's famous visual schema, becomes the site of racialized subjectivity, where the black self is fixed by the white other's gaze "the same way you fix a preparation with dye" (89). The strangers' disbelief belongs to a much larger history of the representational burden placed upon black cultural production and the bodies of its producers—the burden to both appear representative and express authenticity.

Each of Riley's anecdotes describes a moment of representational crisis. Her preaching is experienced as an uncanny performance, raising questions about the meaning of her body, questions that can only be settled by looking—a reifying of her identity that places her "back in the world" and makes her appear authentically herself (Fanon 89). Placing Riley's memoir alongside J. W. Loguen's 1859 slave narrative—both of which have recently been republished in critical editions—this essay-review explores some of their responses to the demand for authenticity placed on African American writers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Riley and Loguen write against a backdrop in which authenticity was both expected and nearly guaranteed because of their blackness and histories in slavery, yet their work risks defying the expectations of authentic literary discourse to represent the truth of personhood or slavery. Loguen wanders in and out of different fictional modes, refusing to represent a clear mimesis of past events; Riley resists the generic pressure to make an object of her own selfhood. Through very different formal strategies, they create slave narratives unburdened by the tradition's demand for an authentic narrative voice.

Both The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life and A Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina (originally titled The Autobiography: A Mysterious Life and Calling in 1902) are written by former slaves who became well-respected preachers in the African Methodist Episcopal church. Their biographical similarities end about there, however. Born into plantation slavery in rural Tennessee, where he experienced severe physical abuse, Loguen fled as far north as Canada before spending most of his adult life in...

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