Even though I’d originally planned to write four posts about slavery this year (here are the first, second, and third), I’ve found an abundance of reading selections, so I’m sneaking in a half-step for this project.
For many readers, the contemporary author who comes to mind first, on the subject of slavery, is Toni Morrison.
“So it’s like this big sort of absence,” she explains. In The Last Interview, edited by Nikki Giovanni.
”Not in the history but certainly in the art, of what was actually really going on. You know, when you read slave narratives, as I did, and you can hear the gaps and misinformation there in talking to somebody. ‘It was terrible, it was terrible. But my master, he was fine!’ They don’t want to be penalized, you know?”
This fit with a longtime resident of my stack in 2021: Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition (2021)—a collection edited by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
There are complete articles as well as excerpts from primary sources; all of them were new to me, with two exceptions: Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s excerpt from “A Plea for Emigration, or Notes of Caanda West” (1852) and Benjamin Drew’s story which was reprinted in A North-Side View of Slavery, The Refugee; or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Related by Themselves (1856).
Some pieces I selected out of simple curiosity, like The Anti-Slavery Alphabet (1847), a children’s book by Hannah and Mary Townsend (yes, for real) but mostly I selected pieces to complement my reading of Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014).
How did Baptist’s book land on my TBR? I think it was a recommendation by Ibram X. Kendi. Its scope and the blend of content brought Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Sons to mind. Wilkerson’s book, though, read much more quickly for me. Both authors write in an accessible style and structure their narrative to include charts alongside personal reminiscences, photographs and succinct summaries of complex subjects. Both make each letter in the word t-h-r-o-u-g-h feel distinct.
Both books, however, feel readable too, in a way that the thickness of their spines and endnote sections belie. For me, however, even some of the basics are unclear prior to the 20th century. (I can never properly place Kentucky in my mind, for instance, and the American presidents prior to the World Wars are a blur, all vaguely historical and their political slant a mystery.)
Baptist’s insistence on the significance of the personal reminiscences, collected in the 1930s (which some historians eschew) suits me fine though, and these elements undoubtedly maintained my interest throughout. The degree of my engagement waxed and waned, but whenever I considered whether to finish, I carried on.
So, I did not absorb as much of this history as I did from Wilkinson’s book. Nonetheless, maybe a dozen pages at a time—every few days, for weeks—despite the consistent sense that I wasn’t taking it all in, I still felt like I was learning. (In contrast, I read Wilkinson very quickly, but perhaps that was simply a matter of good timing.)
Often I would reread a paragraph in Baptist’s book, not only because I was conscious of having missed a few details, but because I wanted to feel them all land. There are aspects of individuals’ experiences here which truly brought home some ordinary aspects of plantation existence.
Perhaps more than anything, what the book provided me with was context (albeit context that I couldn’t always fully appreciate). Take this passage, from “Feet”, for instance—the book begins with “The Heart” and ends with “The Corpse”:
“In the meantime, the men were the propellant for the coffle-chain, which was more than a tool, more than mere metal. It was a machine. Its iron links and bands forced the black people inside them to do exactly what entrepreneurial enslavers, and investors far distant from slavery’s frontier, needed them to do in order to turn a $300 Maryland or Virginia purchase into a $600 Georgia sale.”
(Ah, see, Virginia—that’s another state I could never properly place, but I think I have that one now. Thanks to the 2020 election map, I’ve got Georgia settled, too.)
If you’ve read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, you will know why this passage resonated so strongly for me (and if you haven’t, at least you can now watch the series). That’s the kind of Aha feeling that I had through much of Baptist’s book. Some of the gaps in my knowledge were made smaller.
And as for more firmly rooting Kentucky in my mind, Karolyn Smardz Frost’s Steal Away Home (2017) and Brad Asher’s Cecelia and Fanny (2011) provided tissue around the bare bones of my geographical understanding. (Thanks to Naomi, for reminding me about Frost’s book earlier this year.)
Both books explore the complex relationships that Asher describes here: “Because slavery was not just about the master and the slave but about the master’s family and the slave’s family, the chains of bondage always consisted of more than just a single strand.”
Cecelia was bought and “given” to Fanny when both were girls; when Fanny was fifteen, she travelled with the family to the border between New York State and Niagara Falls, and she fled across the river to escape enslavement and live more freely.
In later years, however, the women exchanged letters, because Fanny sought to gain her mother’s freedom as well; Cecilia’s family continued to own and house enslaved people (but not Fanny’s mother) and had some information about how various enslaved families had been fractured and re-dispersed.
Asher’s style is more formal but he also includes details from different sources that humanize the key figures, which balances the academic tone. Frost’s chapters begin with epigraphs, which further situate Cecelia’s story in an historical context, and there are lengthier excerpts from primary sources within the text too; perhaps it only feels less formal, with the wider margins, larger font, and remarkably substantial endnotes to segregate some of the content and allow the narrative to flow more easily.
As a Toronto resident, I appreciated Frost’s additional focus on the time that Cecilia (with husband and daughter) spent living in a familiar neighbourhood of the city, but the bulk of the story is preoccupied with how she travels across the border, moving from south to north and back again, delicately balancing her personal freedom with her desire to protect her mother’s interests, in a time of rapidly shifting legalities.
Speaking of connections between books, one of the aspects of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man (1997; Trans. Linda Coverdale) that excited me was the fact that he includes a character from one of Edouard Glissant’s novels in his narrative.
This novel was recommended by Andrew, who commented on its lyrical and intricate construction. It’s the kind of novel you can read in a couple of hours; also, you could sit with the endnotes and supplementary materials for another couple of days.
In particular, the richness of the relationship between Creole and Kreyol, the relationship between French and French Creole—so much to think about. Or, not. “My eyes on alert watched in every direction. I ran to shelter beneath a different pied-bois to better cover the surrounding area. Peace. Shade, sunniess, leafiness. Nothing else. So then I listened. Ears pricked up.”
The story is structured around a chase, so you don’t have to think about language or culture, enslavement or exploitation—you can simply follow Slave Old Man’s route across the page. You can marvel at the fact that the story you believed you were reading doesn’t travel a familiar path.
My bookmark is well past the halfway point in Alex Haley’s Roots this week (read in company with Liz and Bill for the upcoming Club hosted by Karen and Simon) and that’s proving to not only be a great fit with this project but a terrific reading experience.
Do you have a reading memory of the first book you read about slavery?
I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but Roots is the first book about slavery that I remember reading, and I loved it! In fact, I really wanted to try and read it again along with your little group but I just couldn’t fit it in. I even found it and put it right on the coffee table. But maybe I will leave it lying around for the day that I do find those extra few minutes to get me going. Maybe when it’s not book award season!
I learned a lot about Kentucky in Steal Away Home, and a few of the other states as well. I also loved learning about the history of that section of Toronto – the layers of families who lived there over the years.
I know that feeling, troubling to locate a book for a read-a-long, and the vague sense that it’s going to be a struggle but I’m determined, and then the nagging feeling while it sits and sits and everyone else has already finished it but I’m still stuck on the idea of reading it again even so and it continues to sit and sit, like the event’s still suspended in time somehow. I’ve still got an Anne Tyler occupying that “space” too. (And it’s much shorter!)
The original mini-series and the follow-up “Generations” have been claiming all my viewing time since I finished reading, and now I’m set to watch the remake (from 2016). It might be a little faster to watch than reread?
Thanks for reminding me about Steal Away Home! I’d forgotten that you’d read this when you were visiting Toronto; I would have recommended touring the McKenzie house with the printing shop of the abolitionist paper in the back.
I’m not surprised you had to add in an intermediate post; there’s so much material on this topic that fitting all your reading into four installments was always going to be ambitious! It reminds me of when I do the Six Degrees meme and I have to add in a half-step to get me from one to the next.
I reviewed Slave Old Man for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette some time back. It was one of two Creole-filled historical novels on my stacks at the time, the other being Sugar Money by Jane Harris.
Did you access The Anti-Slavery Alphabet via the library? Was it a vintage edition?
Maybe I gathered up that concept by osmosis, the half-step! Oh, right: I forgot, that came up when Andrew recommended it. I can’t recall: did you enjoy it?
OOhhhh, no, I *wish*, but it’s actually included in Unsung. That’s the thing about anthologies like that, it could send you on a hundred more searches, especially when each author often has many other pieces/volumes. #niceproblemtohave
Originally, my plan was just to read 32 books, one for each percentage of the vote that thought retaining a lawful punishment of slavery was a wise idea. Somewhere along the line, that shifted, and now I want to explore more deliberately, exhaustively even…
Meh, I’d say admired rather than enjoyed.
Fair enough. Although I did love the way he ended it…
[…] and working from home (Roots review coming)Buried in Print (Roots review coming)Buried in Print, Slavery: Past and Present #280898 Reasons (3.5 of 4)The Australian Legend, Project 2022 – Reading North American Black & Native American […]
Ok so this is a random thing to bring up, but I just finished listening to a Brene Brown podcast (I don’t normally listen to it, but this particular episode was recommended to me) and she was interviewing a black American author, I can’t remember his name, who wrote about visiting a prison that was built onto the lands of an old plantation. This prison is notoriously brutal, one of the biggest and worst in the country, and the majority of its population is black men. The men are sent out into the fields every morning to work, and this prison has a gift shop featuring pictures of these men heading out to the fields to work. It’s horrific, and the interview with this author where he talks about it is just so emotional, it’s burned into my mind.
Anyway, perhaps it was you who recommended this podcast to me now? I honestly can’t remember, but in case it wasn’t you, it might be worth checking out 🙂
I think it might have been Laila who recommended the podcast to you? She’s always cluttering up my podcast stream, to no end! But I did definitely recommend Clint Smith’s book on Twitter at some point, so if you recognized his name when you were looking up that podcast, maybe it was something I said.
Either way, absolutely: Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed is amazing. So conversational, so authentic, so moving. And, along the way, so informative, in his own search for answers and new questions to explore. It’s likely to be one of my favourite books of this reading year. And it’s been an exceptionally great reading year.
What an amazing variety of books! I really don’t know what I first read about slavery, it would have been non-fiction rather than fiction, I would imagine.
There’s so much debate in the U.S. now about how/whether slavery is presented and discussed in classrooms, with students of all ages; how to discuss it is obviously important, but I think it’s interesting to note as a starting point, whether it *is* being discussed (i.e. at all).
I don’t know if it was the first book about slavery I read anymore, but an early one I read & an impressive one was the Olaudah Equiano slave narrative.
I suspect you’ve read it already but (in case) the other Smardz Frost book has a strong Toronto connection too: I’ve Got A Home in Glory. I thought it was pretty fascinating.
Glad there was a 3.5 step!
I’ve only read an excerpt, but that’s an excellent idea and I bet it has been an introduction for many readers and students.
Ohh, thank you; I had forgotten that. And there’s a Kentucky link. I’d better get to reading it soon, while I still have all those southern states in their proper places in my mind (setting aside the question that these are indigenous homelands with settler borders).
TY!
Looking forward to your thoughts on Roots – I remember the TV series from the 1970s being very high profile.
Back when everyone watched the same “broadcast events” unlike now when you have to figure out which streaming services people subscribe to before you determine what shows/viewing you have in common…
Growing up in very English 1950s Australia, my books were all of the Boys Own variety. I thought my first book about slavery (I’ve never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin) might have been called something like Diamond Head, BUT, I have on my shelf a book from The Children’s Press called Blackbird Patrol and Part II is labelled The Black Empire of Noah the Second, which I’m pretty sure, 60 years later, is/was Haiti. The theme is meant to be anti-slavery, but I’m now going to have to read it again.
Four or five years ago I reviewed a fictional life of the Quaker anti-slavery leader Sarah Grimke – The Invention of Wings, which was probably my starting point for looking at US slavery as a blogger. You know where I’m up to (I have a longish trip this weekend which should get me to the end of Roots). Basically, I’m over white-splaining, however well intentioned.
That would make for some very interesting rereading. I do have a couple of books here, lined up for rereading, for similar reasons, to see how I received things as a younger reader, compared to how I (might) view them differently now, with a broader historical and political understanding.
You’ve been ahead of me the whole time and still are, by the sounds of it, but I will catch up, this weekend if not before. I really thought this was Kunta’s story, which must have to do with the fact that I only watched the earliest part of the mini-series when it originally ran, so it’s interesting to realize that it’s a family story.