Antebellum Slave Culture Essay -- Analysis, The Slave Community

Since the late 1960s, ante-bellum slave narratives have experienced arenaissance as dozens of the thousands still extant have been reprinted and asscholars have published major works on the sources, art, and developmentof thenarratives the people who produced them and their on-going influence on laterwork. Drawing upon slave narratives as well among other sources, JohnBlassingames The knuckle down Community (1972), for example, drew attention to thecomplex social interactions developed in antebellum slave culture. Examiningthe milieu that spawned the narratives and their development, and providinginsights into what the narratives can tell about bondage as well as what they omit,Frances Smith Fosters Witnessing Slavery (1979) gave readers a book-length compend of the genre. Robert B. Steptos From Behind the Veil (1979) situatedslave narratives at the center of African-American written narrative. John Sekoraand Darwin Turners collection of essays, The Art of the Slave Narrative (19 82), rivet closer attention on how the narratives achieved their rhetorical effects.In The Slaves Narrative (1985), Charles T. Davis and henry Louis Gates, Jr.gathered excerpts from some of the best-known narratives and essays about thenarratives as bill and autobiographical literature. William L. Andrewss ToTell a Free Story (1987) examined the narratives as habitual autobiographies, atonce exploring and demanding freedom. Today, hardly a book is published onAmerican autobiography without a chapter on slave narratives. Not yet doscholars writing about African-American literature often push to the slave0026-3079/93/3502-073$ 1.50/0 7oSvn her babes, so dear, so young, The*e, evn these, were torn style And... ...ased unlike the narratives writtenby men, womens narratives do not emphasize this factor. darn male narratorsaccentuate the role of literacy, effeminates stress the grandness of relationships.Given the importance of relationships in the lives of most women, this is har dlysurprising. Through their narratives, both male and female fugitives and exslavesstrove to counter the racial stereotypes that bound them even in freesocieties. forbidding men and women, however, faced different stereotypes. Blackmen combated the stereotype that they were boys part black women contestedthe idea that they were either helpless victims or whores. For a male fugitive,public discourse served to claim his place among men for a female her relationshipsas a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and frienddemonstrated her womanlinessand her shared roles with women readers.