Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and Ellen Craft. (Reviews).

Foster, Frances Smith

Charles J. Heglar. Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and Ellen Craft. Westport: Greenwood P, 2001. 184 pp. $59.00.

It is high time that someone directly challenged us to rethink our assumptions about slave narratives. Early studies such as those by Marion Starling, Phyllis Klotman, and Charles Nichols were clear about the diversity and complexities of this genre. However, over the years, there has been an increasing tendency to present one or two authors of mid-nineteenth-century texts as representative of (or, even worse, as the benchmark for the more than 6,000 autobiographical writings published over at least two centuries. Moreover, as author Charles J. Heglar says, even our discussions of these "classic slave narratives" tend to favor certain tropes and themes while ignoring other aspects that would mitigate or complicate our pronouncements.

With his focus on the representation of marriage within the narratives of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft, Heglar makes at least two important interventions. He demonstrates that some narratives clearly and consistently include more concerns and subjects than those emblematized by the lone individual's flight from bondage in the South to freedom in the North. He shows also that reading within the best known antebellum fugitive slave narratives of tropes such as flight and literacy is both enhanced and challenged by reading them against and in the context of lesser known slave narratives. Furthermore, Heglar's study, by emphasizing textual exposition, becomes a useful beginning for more intense and theoretical consideration of these two heretofore underrated texts.

The book itself consists of a brief, fairly perfunctory introductory chapter that generalizes about earlier studies of the slave narrative genre. Chapter 2 declares a need to redefine classic from its current use as a value judgment to that of a period (1830-1860), a thematic focus (the individual in opposition to slavery), and a "means to distinguish book-length, sell-authored, antebellum slave narratives from those that precede or follow them." However, this noble purpose is mitigated a bit by the chapter's structure which discusses "The Critics and Douglass's 1845 Narrative," then lumps together Jacobs's Incidents and texts by Brown, Pennington, Bibb, and Craft as "Other Configurations of the 'Classic' Slave Narrative."

Chapter 3 reads Henry Bibb's text as a "narrative of recursion," a term employed to highlight the fact that, before settling in the North as a free man, Bibb returned south repeatedly to rescue his family. Chapter 4 presents William and Ellen Craft's work as a "narrative of collaboration," disputing those who are inclined to name William as author by emphasizing the many textual clues (and some extratextual evidence) that suggest Ellen's participation was sufficient to merit her co-authorial status.

Chapter 5, "Antebellum African American Fiction," seems an afterthought and a bit contradictory to the overall enterprise of enlarging or diverting routine discourse about autobiographical and fictional literature by the formerly enslaved. This chapter examines Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave," the 1853 version of William Wells Brown's Clotel, Martin Delany's Blake, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first three are well-known examples of early African American fiction; however, they were all published within a relatively short amount of time (1853-1862) by men who worked and competed with one another. They are not the only nor are they typical of African American fiction during its beginnings. Using these texts as representative of antebellum African American fiction seems tantamount to thinking of Douglass's 1845 Narrative and Jacobs's Incidents as prototypes of slave narratives. Stowe is included, the author writes, to "question the assertions of a number of critics" that Uncle Tom's Cabin was "the model for antebellum black fiction about slave life." Chapter 5's introduction declares its purpose as exploring "the influence of slave narratives concerned with slave marriage and family on antebellum African American authors"; however, this section tends to focus more upon individual plot summary and thematic interpretation than upon intertextual marriage plots. In fact, the concluding chapter restates the purpose of Chapter 5 as an exploration of marriage and family as common themes in autobiographical and fictional accounts.

Rethinking the Slave Narrative is an ambitious book. It seeks to challenge the preeminence of the Douglass and Jacobs narratives, to introduce and to interpret two important and underrated antebellum slave narratives, to outline ways in which "slave narratives concerned with slave marriage and family" influenced antebellum African American authors, and to question ideas "of a number of critics" that Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was "the model" for antebellum black fiction about slave life. Unfortunately, such grand designs need more space and detail, more context and room for ambiguities than the 184 pages that this book affords. Perhaps this is the reason that the study often substitutes declaration for development, sometimes presents speculation as fact, and occasionally offers misleading generalizations and oversimplifications. For example, characterizing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and its plethora of scholarship as "reaction" to Douglass's 1845 Narrative and to a general "overempha sis on male accounts" in the literature of slavery trivializes Jacobs's work and the work of many Jacobs scholars. Stating that Briton Hammon's narrative was "composed in collaboration with an amanuensis" implies that this is an accepted fact. If the mysteries of Hammon's life and publication have been solved, at least an endnote would be appropriate. And declaring that "[Frederick] Douglass and [William Wells] Brown could change their last names with no ramifications because neither had any strong family ties left among the slaves" ignores the evidence that Douglass, at least, had relatives who later lived with him, and it underestimates the significance of names and naming rituals generally.

Rethinking the Slave Narrative sets out on a brave and worthy mission--to rescue the reputations of antebellum slave narratives and to redirect the erroneous attitudes that African American fiction developed from a few similarly constructed antebellum texts. It provides helpful, sometimes really perceptive readings of two important narratives. It is news to some and a timely reminder to others of what earlier scholars carefully denoted: The narratives of enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans are numerous and diverse and really quite worthy of reading, rereading, and rethinking.