Charles T. Davis lecture, "The Art of the Slave Narrative," at the University of Iowa, June 19, 1974
Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 19, 1974, as part of the Sixth Annual Institute on Afro-American culture held at the University of Iowa. Speaking on the art of the slave narrative is Professor Charles T. Davis, Professor of English and chairman of Afro American Studies at Yale University. Making the introduction is Professor Darwin Turner, chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Iowa.
Darwin Turner: It is my pleasure... It is my pleasure to welcome you to this evening session in the Sixth Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa. Some individuals are gifted with charm, and with eloquence, enabling them to excel in the art of delivering introductions. Such an individual is our guest speaker for this evening. Professor Charles Davis. I once had the honor to be introduced by Dr. Davis. As he continued with the introduction, I became so excited that I rushed into the audience to be able to get a better look at the marvelous individual he was presenting. It's Dr. Davis's misfortune tonight that he has only made to introduce him.
Darwin Turner: He graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, where he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. After receiving his Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago, he earned a PhD in English from New York University. In addition to regular faculty appointment setting New York University, Princeton and Pennsylvania State University, he has had visiting appointments at Bryn Mawr, Rutgers, Harvard, and in universities in Italy and in India.
Darwin Turner: When I joined the faculty at Iowa, Charles Davis was professor of English and chairman of Afro American Studies and served as co-director of this annual Institute. Then the nefarious Eastern establishment lured him to Yale, where he is currently professor of English, chairman of Afro-American Studies, and Master of Calhoun College, always a busy individual. Professor Davis is editor of Walt Whitman's Poems, and of Selected Early Letters and Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson. He co-edited the anthology on Being Black, an anthology of literature by Afro Americans.
Darwin Turner: Professor Davis has published numerous essays on American poets, both black and white, and is presently working on a study of the Harlem Renaissance. It is especially appropriate that Professor Davis is speaking with us this evening on the subject of slave narratives. For while he was still at Iowa, he conceived the desire for an institute based on this important body of material. This evening he will discuss the art of slave narratives. Ladies and gentlemen, to use a favorite phrase of Arthur Davis, Professor Davis's distinguished uncle, it gives me great pleasure to present Professor Charles T. Davis, a scholar and a gentleman.
Charles Davis: I have wondered really what I should say at this moment. I can only say that I'm delighted to be invited to return. I wasn't absolutely sure that I would be, ever. But I'm glad that Darwin did muster enough courage to do so. I must say further that I also regret the fact that my wife is not here with me because we so much enjoyed our years in Iowa. And as she wanted very much to come, but couldn't obviously this time. I've taught, as Darwin Turner has indicated, many places. I suppose the age of the wandering minstrel has been succeeded, obviously, by the age of the wandering scholar and the wandering professor.
Charles Davis: And there are few places I sometimes think where I have not taught. And as you look over all of these places, you have the desire at times to think of one or two of them as being home. And this is the one that I consider often as my home. And despite the fact that I am an alien in New Haven still, we still have fond memories of Iowa. And still always both of us like to return to Iowa.
Charles Davis: I'm particularly delighted to return to this institute because this was my introduction to Iowa. At that first Institute on the Harlem Renaissance in 1970. And so to signal indeed my return, I am delighted to be back here to talk about the slave narrative. There is a kind of cycle involved. Some people have notions of history that depend upon cycles, I don't believe in such things. But I'm persuaded now, that obviously, even in so medieval notion, there may be some merit.
Charles Davis: And to talk this evening on the art of the slave narrative. Now, much has been written about the American slave narratives. But seldom ever has the discussion turn to the narratives as art. And it may be brash to do so as to little like discussing the many possibilities of hamburger on the pages of Gourmet Magazine. But this approach has the value of supplying a new perspective for an object grown too familiar in many ways. Now, what has the discussion concerned itself with largely and I ask this question with some hesitancy because I realize that the institute has been talking about, this and nothing else, you understand for a week and a half. Now, what has the discussion concerned itself with largely?
Charles Davis: We've heard much about the truth of the tales, whether or not credibility can be given to them. And a good deal has been done to attempt to identify the authors of the narratives whether they have been ex-slave or their sponsors or editors, who happened to be various men and women of letters living in New England. Or whether the narrative For cooperative ventures involving willing partners from both groups, the kind of cooperative venture that we're used to these days in the memoirs you understand of generals and sports figures and prize fighters and people of that kind.
Charles Davis: Now, the second problem is concerned itself with the usefulness of the narrative has historical evidence. And I realized that this is another question altogether. One that has to do with the uniqueness of the experience that has been recorded, its range of application as well as accuracy or truth. And biographers have been concerned with what the tales reveal about their authors about the religious attitudes of the writers their level of militancy, perhaps, their education, or their sense of family or community life. And the fourth concern has been with the source of some of these special materials in the narratives. Whether or not the tales present authentic black folk materials. And the final problem has to do with the effect of narratives. They constituted of course the most successful and most useful propaganda instruments available to the abolitionists.
Charles Davis: Evidence points to the fact that circulation was widespread, and that the narratives were available at a low price distributed often in paper bound pamphlets costing only 25 cents. Now, only the last point, which I have mentioned, comes close to the problem of art and only if one probes more deeply than to offer the statistical data which is readily available. The real question is rather different one actually. Why did these stories move Americans so deeply? Or why did they irritate Americans so much?
Charles Davis: Now, ours is a particularly appropriate time for this kind of investigation. Since once again, the confusion of fiction and fact, is a common characteristic of much modern writing. Norman Mailer wrote a few years ago The Armies of the Night, a work which is not fiction exactly, or merely reporting exactly, but a hybrid creature having many of the structural characteristics of both. And elsewhere short shrift has been given the hallowed principle of authorial detachment, the precious distance separating the author from his materials. And we can think of many people, perhaps of William Denby, the author, who becomes the leading character in his own novel, one published not too long ago called The Catacombs. Now Against this background, the problems of the anti slavery narrative seem less formidable but they are by no means inconsequential.
Charles Davis: What has held in common is this slippery allegiance to genre. With the anti slavery narratives, we discover that fiction passes at time for autobiography and accurate reporting. Archie Moore, for example, never existed except in the mind of the historian Richard Hildreth. At the same time, biography and factual reporting pass for fiction. And there are moments indeed when both William Wells Brown and Martin Delaney offered evidence from their own experience to give credibility to actions in Clotel and in Blake as if fictional probability were not sufficient.
Charles Davis: And the apparently straightforward biography of an ex-slave may be something far less simple, rather a patchwork quilt of tales heard or tales invented. And this is apparently the case with the narrative of James Williams, edited or recorded by John Greenleaf William [Whittier ], whose Quaker integrity was unquestionably formidable. For the critical form, these distinctions do not matter. The slave or the memoirs of Archie Moore, if anything, as more important because it is pure fiction, and provides an insight into the kind of imagination that discovered the trials of slavery and the dangers of escape from it to be attractive.
Charles Davis: Now, the reason for the appearance of the flood of narratives beginning in the 1830s is very clearly a change in political climate. The old style reformer of the gradualist school, with membership in the local society promoting colonization, gave way to a new breed of radical reform. David Walker's appeal, issued in 1829 and the Nat Turner insurrection in the summer of 1833 tended to eliminate a middle ground of polite discourse and the largely church centered debate on the problems of the removal of free blacks to Liberia. Not to mention the sober consideration of slavery in state legislatures and conventions.
Charles Davis: The critical date here seem to be 1831. Well, William Lloyd Garrison launched the Liberator. And two years later in Philadelphia 1833 when the American Anti Slavery Society was formed, this new breed of reformer stood for immediate unconditional emancipation. And though these reformers were religious men, the movement of they we were apart, was not church centered. It had a grassroots base, and that base itself as a matter of considerable importance. What came into being at this time was the use of more forceful propaganda instruments. Employing of course what was at hand and most visible was the ex-slave himself with the memories of despised existence in the south. But less visible and no less important were the traditions in popular literature that had a marked influence upon the form of the rhetoric.
Charles Davis: Now, these traditions have been little discussed largely because they are popular rather than intellectual ones. And they do not reflect an admirably refined taste or evidences of high culture. And it is not Emerson who was important here. But names which may not be familiar with familiar to you, Susanna Rowson, Catherine Sedgwick, Lucy Larcom and a whole set of scribbling females will triple barrel names like Lydia Sigourney, the middle name which I forget Lydia Maria Child, etc.
Charles Davis: Before dealing with the problem of contributing traditions, we will face the fact of the existence of a continuity in the slave narrative itself. If we accept the evidence from Charles Nichol's study, many thousands gone, the genre, if we can call it that with John Saffin's Adam Negro's Trial published in 1703, and written in response to Samuel Sewall's anti-slavery tract, the Selling of Joseph. The most significant achievement of the 18th century was easily the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which first appeared in 1789. And as Paul Edwards, Vassa's editor, has pointed out, the Interesting Narrative what was widely read when it was first published, and went through a large number of additions in England and in America. One edition appeared in 1837, just at the time of the development of American interest in the genre. Now, despite this, we see no substantial evidence of impact upon the new works of the 30s.
Charles Davis: And there are reasons for this break in what seems to be otherwise a logical sequence. Though the Interesting Narrative as a literary achievement is far superior to much that succeeded it is separated from the narratives of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown by something other than time. Vassa's work was decidedly a creation to the 18th century. Edwards has commented that the hero resembled Gulliver as he desperately sought to adjust himself to the enlarged perspective in Brobdingnag, and that he has something in common with Robinson Crusoe, in his preoccupation with economic and moral survival. And Equiano's desert island, indeed might be the world of slavery and appealing thought no doubt.
Charles Davis: And though Vassa was a committed Calvinist, his narrative is free of pervasive references to Christianity. The 19th century narratives on the other hand, were reactions to more immediate circumstances, to traditions and events rather closer at hand. Now we learn something of what these were by examining the narratives of Archie Moore and James Williams. The though passion that moved Hildreth was undoubtedly the hatred of slavery the raw matter of the tale came from the sentimental fiction of his day. The novel, despite its impressive documentation of the declining state of the plantation economy is essentially a story of frustrated love. Archie and Cassie, notwithstanding their slave origins, are acceptable figures in romance because they are creatures of sensitivity, honor and high breeding. They meet, fall in love, marry, and give birth to a son. They see, well on the way to enjoying the blessings of a happy home even within restrictions of the slave system when disruption occurs.
Charles Davis: The arch villain of the piece is their common father, Colonel Moore, a distinguished Virginia aristocrat who displays an unnatural lust or his lovely daughter, Cassie. And though there seems to be no objection in the novel, to a blooming infertile love joining a half brother and half sister, various understandably much expressed horror at the Colonel's intention to make his daughter his mistress by force if necessary. And Cassie defends her honor with all the strength of Tarzan's Jane and all the guile of Richardson's Pamela, and emerges at last report unscathed. But Archie unfortunately, his soul to drift from one plantation to another until he makes his leap of freedom. There is one happy reunion which is all to brief, the villain enforcing the separation is not a person, not even a lecherous plantation owner with Colonel Moore's taste, but the institution of slavery itself.
Charles Davis: Hildreth demonstrates that the southern plantation aside from an exception here and there is an unprofitable economic venture, condemning the slave to a precarious existence, no matter what good intentions have been expressed by masters and mistresses. Now, Hildreth extracted matter from the tradition of sentimental fiction, and contributed something to it. The sentimental novel, as it progressed sedately, how could it be otherwise from Mrs. Rowson's Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, published in 1802, to Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, appearing exactly 50 years later, underwent an important transition. True enough, as [Ola] Winslow has noted, the faithless maiden still dropped dead at the altar because she removed her ring she had swore never to remove. And the faithful maiden still dropped dead under difficult circumstances, when a messenger gallops up just in time to save her from the perfectly evil, worthless bridegroom.
Charles Davis: Yet beyond the set of heroines named Marietta, Kathleen and Rowena and heroes, Algernon, Perceval and Gerald, something has happened. It might be called the domestication of the genre. More and more documentation of background came from the facts of common life, from the mills, the farms, the home and indeed from the plantation. And Kathleen and Rowena gave way at times to Effie or [Emmi], who hired out as a seamstress, a governance or a housemaid, while she waited for her virtues to be rewarded by the attention of the son of a local millionaire.
Charles Davis: Now the same impulse led Lucy Larcom them to construct lyrics and a romantic narrative about life in the textile mills at Lowell, Massachusetts. Nowhere is this trend more clearly perceived then in the pages of Godey's Lady's Book where Sarah Josepha Hale sporting of course, one of those triple barrel names supervise the gradual stripping away of layer after layer of romance and moonlight, from the literature of the average woman reader. With the assumption that benefit comes from solid contact with American earth.
Charles Davis: Now, one function of this transformation in the romantic novel was to give a reinforced value to certain aspects of common life. Home For example. Tribute was paid to family contentment to the virtues of togetherness, something which some of us thought was an invention of the Eisenhower administration. The virtuous of a togetherness involving parents and children, rather than to transcendent love, demanding the sacrifice of all else. It is easy to see why the glorification of the more modest values of domesticity might appeal to the writers of the slave narratives. Since the institution of slavery gave scant recognition to marriages contracted in slavery.
Charles Davis: One of the important elements contributed by sentimental fiction was the general pattern for action. We find invariably in a typical novel a period of early happiness, usually domestic, which is followed by an unforeseen catastrophic disruption and brave attempts to recover the Eden that has been lost. In terms of the somewhat different objectives of the slave narrative, readjustment is what's required. Early bliss is often childhood or marriage within the pleasant surroundings of a plantation in a border state, usually Virginia or Kentucky, and under the sponsorship of a benign master or mistress.
Charles Davis: Disruption comes from some excess in the slave system, the lust or the cruelty or the indifference of a master or a mistress, or the collapse in the economy of the plantation. Disruption is inevitably accompanied by the sale of the slave to an owner in the deep south in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana, where conditions are hard and life cheap. Memories of lost happiness move the efforts to secure freedom. And though these are ultimately successful, the full pattern of original delight is never completely recovered. Archie at the end of his story, a free man of wealth and cultivation, searches in vain for Cassie and his son. Henry Bibb must accept after an interval much more than decent a northern substitute for his loss Melinda though there is no replacement for the daughter who must leave also in slavery.
Charles Davis: Now the sentimental love novel explains much in Archie's story, but very little in the narrative of James Williams, in American Slave. Here we encounter a religious rather than a secular tradition. America in the 1830s had not recovered fully from the convulsive emotional upheaval that had erupted shortly after the turn of the century. A wave of in evangelism called often the Second Great Awakening, vestiges remain. One was the widespread belief that the world was shortly coming to an end. And the disposition to discover signs affirming this fact. A disastrous fire in Richmond, Virginia, a steamboat explosion in the Mississippi and earthquake in the valley itself, marking the sure movement toward the moment of divine decision.
Charles Davis: Small wonder that David Walker's appeal with its apocalyptic overtones, spread terror in the South, and that Nat Turner's insurrection, despite its limited scope, caused a fright wholly incommensurate with the amount of actual destruction caused. And a million Americans it is rumored donned ascension robes in 1833 in preparation for the descent of the sword of an angry God. Fortunately, this act was postponed. A second belief, also widespread was that salvation rested with the meeting of the faithful in small groups where they would pray, testify and listen to the testimony of others. In this way, they sought to renew their faith, always in danger of corruption and beyond this to create a force that will purge the land.
Charles Davis: The abolitionist societies of the 1830s were religious groups of this kind. At the conclusion of Williams' story, we are asked to supply the context offered by the presence of such a group. The narrative then, is a lengthy testimonial given by a former slave of his own exposure to the hardships and the cruelty of the peculiar institution. Williams' last statement makes a little practical sense when we remove from it... When we remove it from this sympathetic religious circle. Williams can say, after telling a tale literally crammed with references to beatings and murders, caused by the slightest sign of resistance, detected in the hapless slave, "Oh, if the miserable men and women now toiling on the plantations of Alabama, could know that thousands in the free states are praying and striving for their deliverance how would the glad tidings be whispered from cabin to cabin? And how would the slave mother as she watches over her infant bless God on her knees, for the hope that this child of her day of sorrow might never realize in strife and toil and grief unspeakable, what it is to be a slave."
Charles Davis: Now there are practical advantages to tell the tale this way, but they concern the art of the story rather than any prospect of immediate change in the system that might affect the Larrimores and the Hucksteps of the South, the masters and the overseers of the slave society. The strength of a testimonial depends upon the sense of authenticity, which a narrative projects. The speaker demands from his audience, its complete belief, its total confidence, the voice of the narrator has to be consistent. It must be accounted for directly in terms of experience. Williams indeed should have just the amount of knowledge that is appropriate for a house slave on a well to do plantation owned by a Virginia family of some cultivation and distinction.
Charles Davis: The style therefore, is simple and direct, with a tendency to emphasize facts and details of action, rather than sentiments or observations that are intellectual or general in nature. A comparison with the Adventures of Archie Moore is sufficient to point out the difference in this respect in narrative method. Moreover, in the Williams tale time is rigorously accounted for. We know when James was born, 1805 when he was married, 1822, when he was sent to Alabama as a slave driver, 1833, when he made the break for freedom, 1837, and when he arrived in New York City on January 1, 1838. Moreover the time periods are broken down frequently into references to months and days, and even more convincingly, in terms of the functions of the season, hoeing time, time weeding done.
Charles Davis: Now, the concern for authenticity resulted in the kind of internal documentation which became almost a stylistic tick in the slave narratives. This is true, we have seen, of the narrative of James Williams, even though subsequent evidence indicated that Williams was not all that he claimed to be. External documentation, letters from respected people, and recovery claims issued by irate slave owners became important when the narratives were published and given a wider circulation. The point then, was to win converts to the abolitionist cause, and amount a successful crusade to save America, if not the whole of America, the north east, with its cherished traditions of freedom and religious piety.
Charles Davis: So documentation was a constant element to these accounts, at times an annoying or distracting one. It had less importance in moving audiences than the authority and the integrity of the voice of the narrator. Of value here is understanding the usual pattern of composition of a narrative. Ex-slaves often describe their experiences from anti slavery platforms many times before recording them. For example, Lewis Clarke total history over a period of three years in eight states before dictating his narrative. Frederick Douglass first roles to speak of his life in halting, emotion packed sentences in August 1841, an abolitionist meeting at Nantucket. And after this memorable initiation, he was engaged by the Massachusetts anti-slavery society to travel the reform circuit with the great men of the movement, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. He had the experience then of telling his story over a period of four years before the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845.
Charles Davis: Now one final literary tradition touch the slave narratives. Not so much has a factor in their composition, perhaps but in their use. This is a body of tales that came from the experience of Indian captivity. Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence, a book, recently published in 1973, has noted that The Sovereignty and Goodness of God together with the faithfulness of his promises displayed Being A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, originally published in 1682, was popular for a century and a half, undergoing reissue in Boston and elsewhere well into the 19th century. Though badly printed, John Williams, the Redeemed Captive, an Account of Captivity among the French Indians in Canada, was published in Boston in 1706 by Cotton Mather, in order to meet the pressing demand for it. Slotkin states, "That of the four narrative works that became bestsellers in the early 18th century three were captivity narratives." "The fourth, you could predict this, was Pilgrims' Progress." He adds in a digression of some importance to us that not until the 19th century did a novel gain similar popularity.
Charles Davis: Slotkin discovers in the captivity tale a form of symbolic drama, a representation of the Puritan view of colonization and settlement in New England. The earliest narratives were first person accounts recording the ordeal of a single individual, often a woman, undergoing passively exposure to temptation, brutality, and even practices while waiting for the intervention of God's grace. The essential meaning of the experience for the Puritan rested according Slotkin upon this simple analogy, this simple analogy. The sufferer represents the whole chastened body of Puritan society. And the temporary bondage of the captive to the Indian is dual paradigm of the bondage of the soul to the flesh, and to the temptations arising from original sin and of the self exile of the English Israel.
Charles Davis: The Captive's ultimate redemption by the grace of Christ and the efforts of the Puritan magistrates is likened to the regeneration of the soul and conversion. Now Puritan ministers, intellectuals and men of letters seize this new matter eagerly for their own purposes, for use in revival sermons, to supply evidence for philosophical and theological demonstrations, and to furnish models for literary entertainment, of a sober kind, of course. Typical in many ways, was Cotton Mather's employment of the narrative of Hannah Duston's escape from captivity as the basis for a series of revival sermons delivered in 1694. Even later, well into the 18th century, Jonathan Edwards, relied upon imagery derived from the Indian captivity tales to give dramatic power to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God of all revival sermons, the most disturbing. Captivity narratives continue to be written during the 18th century. The new accounts by Robert Eastman, Henry Timberlake and James Adair products of the last half of the century were less clear demonstrations of the symbolic drama of the Puritans.
Charles Davis: Indeed, captivity involved such things as provisional tribal membership, and relationships with Indians other than those of a victim or of a committed Christian missionary. Also the narratives seem to be responding to attempts to satisfy new desires in the reading public with an appetite for contemporary fiction. Side by side then, with an older tradition in which the Indian had a clear symbolic function, a new one emerged, in which that function was blurred, sometimes authored to the extent that the Indian at times appeared as a brother or as an agent of initiation into a different world. Now it is the earlier use of the Indian captivity tales that became a model for the descendants of Mather and Edwards. Garrison and his colleagues saw the break for freedom on the part of the slave as the operation of God's grace.
Charles Davis: It was the sure sign that freedom would come in time to all of the suffering slaves of the south. Garrison responded to the news of the Nat Turner insurrection with the cry of triumph. "What we have long predicted," Garrison said, "Has commenced. Its fulfillment, the first step of the earthquake, which is ultimately to shake down the fabric of oppression, leaving not one stone upon another." One of the important functions of the abolitionists was publicizing the description of the life in slavery and the escape from it to demonstrate with their evidence that our general liberation was at hand. They had Mary Rowlandson's confidence that God had never deserted her, and that he imposed trials upon his Black victims to point out the necessity for redeeming America.
Charles Davis: Now, the ex-slaves themselves so frequently pious and religious men, who were moved often to make public professions of their faith, were less sure in their accounts of the continued presence of God. Slavery in the narratives of James Williams in William Wells Brown becomes an unrelieved hell that is controlled by lust, caprice and cruelty of depraved whites. Huckstep, in Williams' narrative, staggers from one drunken scene to another, whipping every Black slave within rage. Brown finds the whole problem more difficult because of the corruption and the hypocrisy of Southern Christians. Douglass attacks the whole structure of Christianity in the south, and writes at the end of his narrative, an addendum, indicating very carefully that his strictures apply only to slaveholding religion in this land, with no possible reference to Christianity proper.
Charles Davis: It was an uneasy analog the Garrison maintain, even given the apocalyptic temper of the time. He lacked perhaps, the well trained audience that Cotton Mather possessed with its memory of the common sacrifice required to build the New Jerusalem. Now the two traditions that are important in understanding the background for the slave narratives written in the 40s in the 50s are those attached to the sentimental novel and the religious testimonial. It should be understood that an author's adjustment to a tradition has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of his tale. The adjustment has everything to do with how life is perceived, recollected, and ordered. We can say that the narratives of Henry Bibb and Solomon Northup acquire much from sentimental fiction. In the value systems that are applied, the sentiments that are expressed by the narrator's and the general shape given to the action.
Charles Davis: On the other hand, we can maintain on the basis of analysis, that the narratives of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown tend more to rely upon the characteristics of the religious testimonial. So these stories are not without echoes from the sentimental novel. In this connection, we should recall from the record of Douglass's life, the movements of higher rhetoric, revealing the narrator's inner feelings, the insertion of poems by John Greenleaf Whittier, and the reconstruction of certain dramatic scenes, especially the one presenting the portrayal.
Charles Davis: The evidence of the touch of the sentimental tradition in Brown's narrative is somewhat different. It is found in the careful balance established between the old life in slavery and the new life in freedom. The account of birth is countered by the record of baptism by the Quaker Wells Brown whose name is assumed. The memory of assisting a ruthless driver collect and transport slaves South is expurgated by extending help to Black fugitives on their way to Canada and freedom. The old necessity felt in the south to contribute to the abuse of Black women and the corruption of Black men is balanced now by the new commitment to women's rights into the cause of temperance.
Charles Davis: The equilibrium here reflects the kind of careful weighing that we are accustomed to in fiction, seldom in the crude matter of life. And the sentimental finish enriches rather than spoils these tales, the two greatest achievements in the genre, though we must look for the main source of their strength elsewhere. Like the stories of Indian captivity, the anti-slavery narratives can be reduced to a formula, consisting of predictable actions and predictable sentiments. It is the inevitable, apparently inflexible working out of the formula that arouse the suspicions of some white Americans, not all located below the Mason Dixon line. That they were being taken in by fabrications. Yet the power of these narratives depended upon something other than the simple repetition, which is likely to produce boredom, perhaps indifference.
Charles Davis: If it were not, for one overwhelming fact. Slavery existed as a festering sore in the south. And each story, though very much like the one published a few days before, revealed something more about conditions of life about which Northerners were generally abysmally ignorant. We might say deliberately ignorant since most northerners prefer to think about other things. But the increase in sectional tensions and the stiffening of the attitudes of slaveholders after 1830 forced open a Pandora's box which could not be closed. Each new recollection, published by an escaped slave, was a little like each new revelation from Watergate. "We are appalled by what we read, and though the limits of credibility would seem to be reached, we are perfectly prepared for the news of another outrageous action tomorrow. Indeed, we fully expect it." The repetition in short breeds anticipation.
Charles Davis: Now, what could a reader in Boston or Philadelphia expect to discover in an anti-slavery narrative in the 1840s? He would find invariably a report of certain actions appearing in an order that would differ somewhat from account to account. There was a birth of a slave child on a day that is not remembered. Partly, because no record is kept of the blessed event, or no precise memory of it is retained by other members of the slave family. The slave experiences early in life many forms of deprivation, the absence of a father who if White never approaches the slave cabin, and if Black is usually hard at work on neighboring plantations. The absence of a mother whose primary duty might be working in the field cooking in the Masters house, some distance from the camp. The awareness of being constantly hungry, though [Fogle] indeed disputes this point, from too little food and that frequently have the wrong kind. The dangers of exposure to the elements because of inadequate clothing.
Charles Davis: He is frustrated when he wishes to secure education either secular or religious because instruction in any form is against the law. He works from dawn to dark, weekdays and during planting or harvesting seasons on weekends too. He is beaten brutally for any lapse in his efficiency as a worker, and he observes that women and men are flogged equally without any sentimental differentiation in terms of sex. The emotion that inadequately passes for sentiment is lust. That leads to the violation of Black women without regard for blood relationships, or attachments formed in slave marriages. He is parted from his wife or his mother if the slave owner can arrange for a sale at a good price. When he is hired out to work in a jute mill or a shipyard or a printing shop, he brings money to the master, but secures nothing for himself.
Charles Davis: If he seeks to escape he is more than likely betrayed, informed on by Blacks and deceived by whites. And when he does escape, he is chased by white men with guns and set upon by bloodhounds. If he manages to attain the security of a benign swamp, and desires still to go on to Beulah Land, above the Chesapeake Bay or across the Ohio River, he travels by night, sighting the North Star and slips by day foraging for food and discovering shelter in any way he can. These are the elements of action, all exciting enough in themselves. But the reader feels the most intense engagement, I suspect, when he's caught up in the account of the escape.
Charles Davis: Now beyond action, there are the predictable sentiments expressed in the narratives. We discover the groans of exhaustion as a consequence of the unending round of back breaking labor, the expression of despair because of the hypocrisy of slave masters, who pretend to be Christians, or the deception of masters who failed to keep their promises, the cry of anguish, when members of the family are separated. Then there is the yearning for freedom expressed usually only in moments of solitary meditation. And if the yearning is succeeded by the fact of liberation, we share with the ex-slave his joy of discovery of sympathetic and compassionate whites and his pleasure in the new experience of living and working as a free man. Such a question summary of elements may not do justice to all of the narratives. But it does suggest what is available in the way of raw matter for the maker of the tale. Any pattern of these elements produces art of some kind. The level of a art depends upon the principle of order imposed upon these crude materials.
Charles Davis: Both its claim the sophistication and the thoroughness and the consistency of its application. The greatness of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, coming from the kind of development which the narrator gives to the authentic voice that is inherited from the religious testimonial. The triumph of the work is the attachment of the voice to our mind. What acts as a governing principle, imposing a tight progression upon act and sentiment is the sense of broadening intelligence. The slave Frederick is initially concerned only with physical survival, an achievement not easily accomplished when one has dignity and a feeling of pride in his work.
Charles Davis: Intellectual exposure occurs, learning the alphabet from Mrs. Auld, reading a dialogue between the master and the slave in the Colombian Orator. Struggling to write by following the lines of letters and Master Thomas's copybook. The only form of schooling is a brief period of attendance at a Sabbath School at St. Michael's, one quickly shut down. The ambitious student, Douglass, becomes shortly the teacher, one who organizes another Sabbath school without the benefit of official sanction, and who commits himself to instructing fellow slaves how to read. The growth in knowledge is accompanied by an expansion in the slave sense of responsibility.
Charles Davis: Frederick develops an amount of identification with other slaves and undertakes to explain their actions to his reading audience. He assumes leadership of an ill fated escape project and experiences the bitterness of betrayal. Life in Baltimore, where he is hired out offers comparative independence. We have the sense that freedom of movement and freedom of mind go together. And it is in Baltimore that Frederick makes the observation that an improvement in the condition of his life acted to increase the desire for freedom. The pressure that we observe mounting in Frederick is essentially psychological. And the inevitable break for freedom comes from internal necessity, not from harsh external circumstances.
Charles Davis: In New Bedford the end of the journey of a fugitive, the ex-slave finds a safe harbor. He has his freedom at last, he becomes an independent worker with a vocation. And after reading a copy of Garrison's Liberator, he joins the anti slavery movement. There has been in the narrative a delicate coordination of physical and intellectual liberation, and the progression toward both has been negotiated in steps that have been gradual and believable. At the end of the story, when Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, the slave name, or when Stanley or Frederick Johnson the assumed names to escape detection, becomes Frederick Douglass, we have the impression that a man has been made a transformation completed from a slave to a person in the full sense.
Charles Davis: And the name Douglass has an especial value for those of us familiar with the literary traditions contributing to the shape of the slave narrative since Douglass comes from the sentimental tradition, so deeply rooted in popular American literature, indeed, from a reading by a New Bedford friend of the Lady of the Lake, by Sir Walter Scott. The narrative of William Wells Brown has different claims to excellence. Though we are aware of the fact once again that we are listening to an authentic voice. We do not have the same sense of a developing intelligence, of an expanding consciousness, which is the great achievement the Douglass's narrative. The organizing principle for the tale is the gradual growth of the desire to escape. But that impulse depends less upon an increase in Brown's confidence then it does upon the discovery that the world of slavery is an unrelieved hell that is unique in human history.
Charles Davis: Nowhere else in the narratives are we exposed to a picture of such total corruption. At the very beginning of the autobiography, Brown admits that his hope for liberty has been tempered somewhat by a sense of obligation to his family, especially to his mother and to his sister. But his duty here vanishes quickly since his sister is sold, and then not long afterwards, his mother. It is his mother who implores him to flee without regard for natural attachments of sentiment. Now what follows after the dissolution of this fragile family, is a comprehensive description of the system of slavery in the south. There is a careful unveiling of one facet after another of the business of selling and owning blacks from St. Louis to New Orleans. And the picture presented is an ugly one.
Charles Davis: We discover that ties of blood do not prevent exploitation for profit. It is not so much a question frequently of economic necessity that moves the inhuman attack upon the family as it is indifferent or convenience. Brown records the separation of a small child from its mother simply because the child's crying irritated the driver, shepherding his slaves on to the market. The system encourages the satisfaction of the lowest of emotions and the dominant white, lust, as exhibited by the slave driver intent upon seducing the quadroon girl in his charge, sadism in the outraged man who buys a slave whose carriage has splashed mud on him simply to inflict exorbitant excessive punishment upon his victim. Duplicity as displayed by the master who sells the slave boy down river and informs the anxious family subsequently that the boy has died of yellow fever.
Charles Davis: There is no protection for Blacks in the system, in Brown's narrative. Spiritual fortitude, integrity and Christian virtue are of no help save to bring a few more dollars at the auction block. Innocence cannot survive, the status of female hearts cannot withstand seduction, Archie's Cassie notwithstanding. Nor is there protection in physical strength. As the story of the breaking of the mighty slave Randall demonstrates all too clearly. If we judge from Brown's account, Frederick Douglass was lucky to emerge unscathed from his defiance of the overseer, Covey.
Charles Davis: No part of the South according to Brown is untouched by the diabolical system. From Senator Benton and the doctor of divinity down to the poor white scratching out a living on the sandy hills. No white man in Missouri can be called a good Master, a flat denial of a possibility projected in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and no one white or Black within the system can be trusted. One of the most touching episodes in the narrative is Brown's description of his own corruption. Of how he paid an unsuspecting fellow slave 50 cents, I believe, to receive a whipping which was intended to be his own punishment. There is really no precedent for Brown's world of total depravity. We arise from his story convinced that slavery corrupts the whole south and corrupts totally every person involved in the vicious system.
Charles Davis: We are introduced into an archipelago inhabited by subhuman BlacksB whose promontories extend into every phase of Southern society. We cannot believe in the possibility of escape from such a trap. But the chance comes finally to Brown and he seizes it. He encounters in the process, the only good man in the narrative, a Quaker named Wells Brown, whose name he promptly takes. If we look at naming in Douglass's autobiography, as the final mark of self transformation, we must evaluate differently naming in Brown's story. It is the sign rather of salvation, of the miraculous, and we come closer to the 17th century world of Mary Rowlandson than we may care to admit.
Charles Davis: My purpose has been this evening to secure an appreciation for the slave narratives as works of art in themselves without apology or condescending reservations. To do so, I have described the literary traditions that stand behind them and the methods of composition employed to reduce them. And I have demonstrated, I hope, with two examples the narrative achieves the level of high art. I have not commented on what the autobiographies lead to. For that is another exploration and not for this evening. It will be sufficient to say that Brown in Clotel extends his archipelago to include the White House itself and asserts openly the claim widely whispered before, that Fawn Brodie so shrewdly supports her critical biography of Thomas Jefferson.
Charles Davis: Mrs. Stowe, building on the narratives of Henson and others, suggests a revolutionary potential existing in the life among the lowly. A subtitle by the way, which he takes very seriously. And Blake; or The Huts of America by Martin Delaney moves from the matter of the slave narrative, to the description of an international conspiracy to destroy the slave societies everywhere, a plan which is not fulfilled unhappily by the last published page in that unfinished work.
Charles Davis: What seems to be the great difference between fact and fiction, between the narrative and the novel is not so much the chance to develop multiple plots, or the possibility for richer, deeper characterization. But the desire really to extend the rhetoric, to explore more fully the disgraceful reality of slavery itself. I should like to think that the nightmare of a Black man on the right has disappeared forever from our consciousness, but I meet it still in modern works by Black authors, in Black Boy and in Invisible Man, where an American society still haunts the victimized Black, who seeks to protect his humanity and to acquire status as a creative individual. I should like to think now, though the chase continues that there are in 1974 many more Quaker refuges holding compassion and comfort, many more New Bedford's where physical and spiritual freedom can be simultaneously enjoyed. Thank you.