The Blind African Slave: Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace

Introduction

Introduction In 1810 in St. Albans, Vermont, a small town near the Canadian border, an anomalous narrative of slavery was published by an obscure printer. Entitled The Blind African Slave; Or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace, it was greeted with no fanfare, and it has remained for nearly two hundred years a faint specter in our cultural memory. Published two years after the United States Congress officially abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade and two years before the outbreak of the War of 1812, The Blind African Slave lacked significant political appeal at the moment. For the antebellum abolitionists, it held little propaganda value since it described slavery in New England, not in the South. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, few readers expressed interest in the experiences of African Americans in “free” states like Vermont. Perhaps twenty-first century readers will recognize the historical significance of a memoir that offers us an opportunity to view the slave trade, West Indian culture, the Seven Years War, New England slavery, the Revolutionary War, and early Vermont culture from the perspective of an extraordinarily perceptive African victim and participant. Brace’s tragic experiences followed the patterns of bondage forced upon millions of people, most of whose voices were silenced. Through his narration, Brace forges meaning and an identity from his violent, fragmented, courageous life. Childhood in Africa Because it is an “as-told-to” autobiography, The Blind African Slave is a composite text shaped by the interests, politics, research, and desires of its abolitionist editor, Benjamin Prentiss, as well as by the voice, memory, politics, and desires of its narrator-subject, Jeffrey Brace. In the opening quarter of the book, Prentiss constructs a third-person voice that blends 3 his voice as “author” with the voice of Brace as “narrator.” Because Brace at the time of his capture was a teenager who knew no English, his ability to translate his childhood memories into places and concepts comprehensible to English readers was circumscribed. Prentiss supplemented Brace’s narration with his own research into African history and geography . A well-intentioned but inexperienced researcher and writer, Prentiss cited, with varying degrees of accuracy, a range of popular autobiographical , encyclopedic, and literary texts written by Europeans about Africa and slavery.1 The Africa section of the memoir echoes conventions of eighteenth-century travel literature in that it describes family structures , laws, customs, religious beliefs, royalty, government, trade, architecture , geography, and agriculture. Prentiss and Brace include an extensive list of the names of flora and fauna in “the Bow-woo language,” a West African language that Brace believes derives from Hebrew. Trying, literally , to place Brace on the map, Prentiss was both aided and impeded by sources that were hazy, Eurocentric, and sometimes fantastical. He concludes that Brace’s homeland, the Kingdom of Bow-woo, is “situated between the 10th and 20th degrees of north latitude, and between the 6th and 10th of west longitude,” and that the Niger River runs through it. Contemporary maps, such as that in Jedidiah Morse’s 1802 New Gazetteer , thus place Bow-woo in the middle of West Africa, north of Guinea, west of Nigritia, and south of the Sahara or the Great Desert of Barbary in an area known as Benown, to use Morse’s descriptors. If Prentiss was correct , Brace came from the middle Niger valley, or the country that is now called Mali. This is a plausible scenario given the fact that from 1701 to 1810 nearly three-fifths of all African slaves were taken from West Africa (Rawley 430). As heard and spelled by Prentiss, Brace’s names for the people and places of his childhood are hard to trace in external documents. Historian Richard L. Roberts noted in 1987: “Since most Malian languages were until recently oral, the spelling has usually been filtered through French. For historians, this poses particular problems in the spelling of surnames and place names” (xi). However, several pieces of textual evidence con- firm the likelihood that Brace came from Mali.2 Brace’s “kingdom of Bowwoo ” bears phonetic resemblance to the “Bobo” ethnic group which, like Brace’s people, occupied lands near tributaries of the Niger River. The Dogon people, who have lived in this region since the Iron Age, practiced (and continue to practice) a religion similar to that described by Brace, 4 i n t r o d u c t i o n [18.117.186.92] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...