Slave narratives shed light on brutal legacy
Slave narratives tell in vivid detail of America's bitter legacy of brutality and inhumanity towards its black citizens, writes Sarah Churchwell
In 1825 a fugitive slave named William Grimes wrote an autobiography in order to earn US$500 to purchase freedom from his erstwhile master, who had discovered his whereabouts in Connecticut and was trying to remand Grimes back into slavery. At the end of his story the fugitive makes a memorable offer: "If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America."
Few literary images have more vividly evoked the hypocrisy of a nation that exalted freedom while legitimising slavery.
Life of William Grimes was the first book-length autobiography by a fugitive American slave, in effect launching a new literary genre, the slave narrative. Scholars have identified about 100 such narratives published between 1750 and 1865, with many more after the end of the US civil war. The most famous are those by Frederick Douglass (published in 1845) and Harriet Jacobs (1861), but the release of a new film has stirred interest in the account of a man named Solomon Northup. His book, Twelve Years a Slave, one of the longest and most detailed slave narratives, was a bestseller when it appeared in 1853.
Directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt and Benedict Cumberbatch, the film version has been hailed as an Oscars front-runner; it has already taken the Golden Globe for best drama.
This is the first major Hollywood film to be inspired by a slave's account of his suffering. America's vexed relationship with its legacy of slavery has always been reflected in its cinema: landmark films such as the racist The Birth of a Nation (1915), a silent film and the first ever screened at the White House, and the apologia for slavery that was Gone With the Wind (1939), whitewashed popular images of institutionalised slavery. Slave narratives are the most powerful corrective to such distortions and evasions, firsthand accounts from some of the people who suffered the atrocities of slavery.