[In the following essay, Hedin concentrates on the new literary strategies of nineteenth-century slave narratives which grafted morality, political awareness, and irony to the simpler, eighteenth-century picaresque narrative tradition.]

If “well begun is half-done,” a bad start can also mean a bad finish. Beginnings establish a momentum that later stages tend to continue or at least need to confront. Hence the appropriate fascination of scholars with origins—of culture, political movements, personality development. Our sense of beginnings is always colored by our sense of the ending, or of the middle if no end has been reached yet. Neither terminal point exists without the other; if the child is father of the man, our sense of the man shapes our view of his childhood. Nowhere is this reflexive relationship more evident nor more complex than in the study of black American culture. Did that culture begin in slavery's negation of African culture, so that the black American can only be understood by reference to an identity he has lost and knows he no longer has? Or did it begin in some creative interplay between cultures, so that the black American is truly an Afro-American, not deprived of culture but endowed through his painful experience with a rich amalgam of his old and new worlds? The relatively negative explanations of these origins, from Ulrich Phillips down through Stanley Elkins and beyond, have grown out of a relatively bleak sense of the black American's current state, just as the more positive interpretations of the 1960s and 1970s—Genovese's, Gutman's, and Levine's,¹ to name just a few—owe a good deal to a different view of black Americans today.

Most studies of black American culture have concentrated on its oral aspects—folk tale, music, religion—because they have seemed most distinctive. But the question of the origin of written expression among black Americans is equally interesting and complex. Is there in fact a black American literary culture at all? Or has the history of words written by blacks in this country been simply a history of operating on alien ground, of imitating—willingly or not—the forms, techniques, even attitudes of an overwhelmingly dominant “white” literary tradition? Those who propose the latter view, such as Addison Gayle, often go on to call for a distinctively “black esthetic” to remedy the situation; their sense of a negative literary history among blacks grows out of their conviction that literary independence is still to be achieved, or at best is just beginning. In The Way of the New World, his full-length study of the black American novel, Gayle asserts that, at least up to the present day, the written word has been corrupted for black writers by the extent to which it has a long history of being used to keep blacks in their place:

Whether the vehicle for the dissemination of such images was poetry, prose, or fiction, the [written] word was used to distort truth to an alarming and dangerous degree. In part, this was due to the inability of the black writer to retaliate in kind, to use the weapons of the oppressor in his own defense. Stripped of his language, the symbols, images, and metaphors which had sustained him in the faraway home, he was forced, like a man come naked into the world, to measure himself by yardsticks fashioned by others and to face the wilderness without the most elemental of defenses—the capacity to utilize language to define his own experiences.²

Much of what Gayle says would be hard to dispute. But he does the black American literary tradition a disservice by not taking it back to its real origins, the slave narrative, the first distinctive literary form that black Americans produced. The slave narrative itself was a heavily influenced form, to be sure. In order to have their desired effect of discrediting slavery and of moving their readers to abolish it, the ex-slaves who wrote narratives of their former lives needed to use arguments the predominantly white audience would find compelling and to shift their emphasis as readers shifted pre-occupations. Thus began a history of writing not so much for themselves as for the larger society. Further, they had to contend with northern editors, who suppressed certain unmentionables and no doubt suggested appropriate lines of thought.³ But to be influenced is not necessarily to be usurped. Most of the ex-slaves wrote their narratives relatively unaided, so far as we can tell. To use arguments suitable to one's particular audience is the mark of a skillful writer, not of a toady. And, most importantly, the slave narrator was much more than a passive assimilator of another culture's literary traditions. It is true that the nature of the slave narrator's audience in the three decades leading up to the Civil War—the slave narrative's peak period—did not allow him to make use of images and tales from his African past. But in his cunning, strategic manipulation of already existing arguments and narrative modes, the slave narrator demonstrated that, far from being deprived of his old trickster skills, he had simply found new territory in which to use them. I offer the following thoughts on the slave narrator's relationship to and use of the picaresque tradition to suggest that he was able to find ways to use the written word and existing literary traditions not to imitate “Ole Massa” but to subvert him.

It is important to remember that throughout the eighteenth century American slave narratives were free of outside influence; pressures and corresponding strategies came later. The first slave narrative, Adam Negro's Tryall, was published in 1703, two years after the first abolitionist pamphlet in America, Samuel Sewall's The Selling of Joseph. As this conjunction suggests, the slave narrative in this country was related from the beginning to the anti-slavery movement.⁴ But that movement was not so well-defined nor intense in the eighteenth century as it would become. For that reason, because slavery had not yet settled into an established “life,” in Ulrich Phillips' terms, and because a higher percentage of narrators in this early period came directly from Africa and had not yet modified their style to fit their new status, the eighteenth-century narratives varied in voice and emphasis. They include, for instance, Briton Hammon (1760), who survives pirates and cannibals, shipwrecks and incarcerations in a series of adventures after he escapes from his master; Arthur (1768), an unrepentant criminal who began his career at age fourteen and was executed at age twenty-one; John Marrant (1785), who makes no mention of race and very little of slavery as he wanders in the wilderness, converting Indians; Gustavus Vassa (1789), as much an adventurer, traveller, and proto-capitalist as he was an anti-slavery agitator; and Venture (1798), who became a Bunyanesque legend among both black and white more for his reputed six-foot girth and feats of strength than for anything he said or did about slavery.⁵

These narratives suggest the traditional picaresque in a number of ways, but the resemblance resulted more from a natural fit of the picaresque mode with the slaves' own experience than from a need the narrators felt to shape the description of their lives for a literary purpose. The slaves who became narrators in this period led surprisingly autonomous, or at least semi-autonomous, lives. Like the picaro, they were often adventurous, not just in the act of escape (as later narrators would be) but throughout their lives. Confronted by a hard world without institutions to offer them shelter—not even a plantation in many cases—some of them converted to Christianity. Most of them hardened themselves and acted as individualistically and asocially as circumstances would allow. In short, their narratives were picaresque because their lives were picaresque. Neither were they burdened, if that is the right word, by overriding social purposes. Though anti-slavery elements appear in them, they do not dominate. The narrators seem to feel free to follow their interests or observations wherever they lead. It seems not to dawn on them to focus narratives entirely on the slavery issue, perhaps because slavery had not defined them either in their rather mobile lives nor in their own minds.

A few generations later, by the 1820s and 1830s, however, most slave narratives came to be written by men and women who had been born slaves, of slave parents, on established farms and plantations. For them the conditions of slavery had become physically and psychologically unavoidable in ways not true for eighteenth-century narrators. Thus, when they wrote, they were inclined to direct their energies toward one overriding goal, the destruction of an institution that surrounded and influenced every area of their lives. The range of observation, like the choice of narrative mode, now became weighted; both had to be appropriate to the purpose of discrediting slavery.

The slave narrators now began to write under a form of purpose not felt before. There is no reason to believe that this pressure of purpose was primarily external, from abolitionist sponsors; for the ex-slave had his own stake in finding ways to write that would serve the cause of abolition. But the social and political context of the slavery debate did go a long way toward establishing what indeed was appropriate. And, because that context became increasingly moralistic, the slave narrators had to fall in step.

A brief outline will suggest the extent to which morality became a crucial factor in the slavery debate during the 1830s, when that debate became the dominant national issue. Thomas R. Dew's 1832 Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 set the tone for the pro-slavery forces by providing the first public, coherent, unabashed defense of slavery as a positive social and moral good. His arguments were reinforced by southern plantation novels such as John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832), Nathaniel Beverley Tucker's George Balcombe (1836), and a good many others. At the same time, the anti-slavery forces were making it abundantly clear that righteousness was on their side of the question. “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice,” Garrison wrote in the opening issue of the Liberator on New Year's Day in 1831; and although Garrison's was by no means the only voice of note, abolitionist rhetoric tended increasingly to follow his absolutist lead. In the 1830s and 1840s, slavery became not just a crime but a sin, “a national sin,”⁶ an evil “offending the heavens with its atrocity.”⁷ And as slavery became, in Frederick Douglass's words, “one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death,”⁸ any argument that blurred the distinction between the forces of light and the forces of darkness stood outside the pale.

While slave narrators tended ever the more to write anti-slavery documents, the guidelines within which their narratives might be acceptable to that end also became increasingly clear. In the moral rather than the political sense, they must show “no compromise with slavery, no union with slaveholders.” It was no accident that Garrison concluded his preface to the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with this “religious and political motto,”⁹ as he put it.

The mandate of clear-cut morality exerted several effects on slave narratives of the period. One was to move the narrators toward emphasizing that slavery was an impersonal system, and that the system was an unmitigated evil because it worked by a corrupt, internal logic regardless of the particular moral state of a given slaveowner as person. Douglass makes it clear that even morally good whites became corrupted by the mere act of becoming slaveowners. When the benign and gentle Sophia Auld unwittingly drank “the fatal poison of irresponsible power” by marrying a slaveowner and therefore became one herself, her “cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage … and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.”¹⁰ J. W. C. Pennington's 1849 narrative explicitly articulates the underlying logic of slavery: “Talk not then about kind and christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them. …”¹¹ The slaveowners, writes Solomon Northup in 1853, “cannot withstand the influence of habit and associations that surround them.”¹² Hence the slave narrators maintain a subtle and compassionate stance as well as an absolute moral distinction; it is not that they see evil everywhere, it is that the system produces evil everywhere.

But the need to maintain a moral dichotomy involved the narrator's depiction of the slave as well as of slavery. The effect was to eliminate the out-and-out rogue as an acceptable narrator. The individualistic, self-concerned, partly asocial adventurers who glided rather lightly through some of the eighteenth-century narratives were much less evident once the absolutism of the anti-slavery cause began to demand that the victims of slavery be as righteous as the cause of freedom itself. But—and herein lies the dilemma—the picaro could not disappear entirely because the survival techniques of the picaro were becoming even more important to the slave than they had been before. During the 1830s, southern prickliness in reaction to the abolitionist onslaught, together with an intensified fear of rebellion engendered by Nat Turner's 1831 revolt, accelerated the tightening of formal and informal slave codes throughout the South. As a result, slaves had even fewer rights and less legal recourse than before. The new restrictions intensified their sense of being victims in a pervasive system; it had the corresponding effect, as Marion Starling points out, of driving increasing numbers of them to flight.¹³ The escape became more prominent in slave narratives, often comprising an entire work. Escape of necessity involved the slave in a good deal of cunning, deceit, and even violence. Thus actions traditionally defined as questionable if not immoral increased in the narratives at precisely the same time when the slaves' devotion to morality became essential to the purity of the anti-slavery argument. The earlier, natural fit of the slave narrative with the picaresque now became an uneasy fit, and the narrator had to find strategies for turning to his own advantage the tradition that he was, in a sense, trapped in.

The dilemma now of the slave narrator—to keep himself clearly on the side of morality while depicting actions often hardly moral at all—was complicated by the arguments that southern apologists began to advance during the 1830s to support the notion that slavery was a positive good. It was then, as George Fredrickson has shown, that previously tacit racist assumptions were articulated as formal racist ideology.¹⁴ The pro-slavery argument took to asserting openly that blacks were subhuman, biologically inferior, hence naturally and rightly subordinate to whites. Beginning with Richard Colfax's 1833 pamphlet, Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists, Consisting of Physical and Moral Proofs of the Natural Inferiority of the Negroes, and culminating in the famous “Cornerstone Speech” of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in 1861, slavery's spokesmen claimed that blacks, as Colfax put it, “whether physically or morally considered, are so inferior as to resemble the brute creation as nearly as they do the white species.”¹⁵

The theory that blacks were subhuman had northern adherents, even among some abolitionists, who simply denied that it justified enslavement. Both emotionally and geographically, however, this argument cut two ways: what was set forth originally to salve the slaveowner's conscience ended up evoking fear in both North and South that brutish slaves, once released, might have neither the capacity nor inclination to keep their pent-up energies within ethical restraints. The violence of the Santo Domingo rebellion and of Nat Turner's revolt did not go unnoticed. As William Drayton argued in 1836,

the madness which a sudden freedom from restraint begets—the overpowering burst of long-buried passion, the wild frenzy of revenge, and the savage lust for blood, all unite to give to the warfare of liberated slaves, traits of cruelty and crime which nothing earthly can equal.¹⁶

In such a context, the escape sections of slave narratives became crucial. They revealed how slaves really acted once they were out from under the “civilizing” restraints of the plantation for the first time. Much was at stake; for if freedom were thought to mean the unleashing of an id-dominated beast, a moral primitive, then the cause of freedom would lose support. The slave narrator had not only to defend his morality but his humanity (read “rationality”), all the while describing how he lied, stole, and even fought and killed his way to freedom.

All of this helps explain the consistent, self-conscious attempts of slave narrators at this time to purify the picaro, to bring within the pale what they dared not consign to outer darkness. The narrators are acutely aware of even minor offences—the plucking of chickens, the taking of the master's money, the telling of lies and the wearing of disguises. The main tactic they adopt is to deflect responsibility back onto slavery itself. The view of slavery as a pervasive system provided them a standpoint from which to argue that there was no other recourse within such a system. As Henry Bibb writes, “the only weapon of self-defence that I could use successfully, was that of deception. It is useless for a poor helpless slave, to resist a white man in a slaveholding State.”¹⁷ Bibb proves a master at subverting the logic of slavery in matters of morality. Accused of stealing a jackass, he defends himself with a fine picaresque rationale:

But I well knew that I was regarded as property, and so was the ass; and I thought if one piece of property took off another, there could be no law violated in the act; no more sin committed in this than if one jackass had rode off another.¹⁸

A more common defense, if less whimsical, was to argue that the corrupting effects of the system were as unavoidable for the slave as they were the master. “Slavery,” writes William Wells Brown in full awareness of the issue, “makes its victims lying and mean; for which vices it afterwards reproaches them, and uses them as arguments to prove that they deserve no better fate.”¹⁹ The slave narrators likewise turn the argument around, using slave “immorality” as further evidence against the absurdity and immorality of the slavery system and in support of abolition. It is not that slaves are beasts, they suggest: slavery bestializes. “The dark night of slavery closed in upon me,” Frederick Douglass writes, “and behold a man transformed into a brute!”²⁰ In a reversal of image as well as argument, the slavery system becomes the monster. J. W. C. Pennington suggests that slavery does everything it can to prevent the slave from developing his innate humanity:

I shall have to go to my last account with this charge against the system of slavery, “Vile monster! thou hast hindered my usefulness, by robbing me of my early education!”²¹

Such examples make it clear that if the slave narrators accepted certain ground rules and worked within them, they quickly found ways to turn those rules to advantage.

The same issues of morality and humanity arose in the narrators' depiction of violence done during escapes; and here too they found ways to turn the issues around. Since violence is both the most conventionally immoral of actions and the most unsettling to readers anxious about the nature of the unchained slave, the narrators are careful how they describe it. With an eye toward decorum and morals, they nearly always present violent acts as defensive, unavoidable, and necessary to their escape, much as they defend less serious misdeeds. But in reply to charges that they are mere brutes, they work skillfully to show that even their most violent actions rested upon ineluctable, rational choice. For, though the admission that slaves have been bestialized into violence by slavery might serve to condemn slavery, it could not reassure readers who feared that freedom might bring carnage.

Pennington provides a representative example of the narrator determined to preserve morals and rationality. He is emphatic in asserting that no malice or vengefulness motivated what violence his escape necessitated:

If you ask me whether I had expected before I left home, to gain my liberty by shedding men's blood, or breaking their limbs? I answer, no! and as evidence of this, I had provided no weapon whatever; not so much as a penknife—it never once entered my mind.²²

But when violence does loom ahead, he shows himself responding thoughtfully, not instinctively:

We had a hill to rise, and during the ascent he gained on me. Once more I thought of self-defence. I am trying to escape peaceably, but this man is determined that I shall not.

My case was now desperate; and I took this desperate thought: “I will run him a little farther from his coadjutor; I will then suddenly catch a stone, and wound him in the breast.” This was my fixed purpose.²³

The quoting of his own thoughts during the crisis is shrewd; the point is not just that violence was rational under the circumstances but that Pennington thought tactically. Danger activates in him combat strategy, not rage.

A like emphasis on rational control appears in Solomon Northup's description of the violent confrontation that set off his attempt to escape. The overseer Tibeats, impatient with Northup's work, rushes him with a weapon:

It was a moment of life or death. The sharp, bright blade of the hatchet glittered in the sun. In another instant it would be buried in my brain, and yet in that instant—so quick will a man's thoughts come to him in such a fearful strait—I reasoned with myself. If I stood still, my doom was certain; if I fled, ten chances to one the hatchet, flying from his hand with a too-deadly and unerring aim, would strike me in the back. There was but one course to take. Springing towards him with all my power, and meeting him full half-way, before he could bring down the blow, with one hand I caught his uplifted arm, with the other seized him by the throat.²⁴

By the time of Northup's narrative (1853) and even before, slave narrators had hit upon an obvious argument to justify even violence. They drew on the precedent of the American Revolution. The slave Andrew Jackson, for instance, explicitly appeals to a rationale for resistance that his namesake would have been proud of:

Some may think I did wrong in this, and I am very sure it was very hazardous, for the penalty is very severe upon slaves who strike a white man, but I was after a prize, for which I was willing to risk my life. And I doubt not, any one who reads this, would have done the same. And if it was right for the revolutionary patriots to fight for liberty, it was right for me, and it is right for any other slave to do the same. And were I now a slave, I would risk my life for freedom. “Give me liberty or give me death,” would be my deliberate conclusion.²⁵

A shift toward more political awareness in the slave narratives naturally coincided with the general abolitionist shift during the 1840s and 1850s toward political in place of primarily religious arguments. Nat Turner's claim in 1831 that “my wisdom came from God”²⁶ gave place in the following decades to the assertion of many slave narrators that their wisdom rested upon the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the European revolutions of 1848. Some scholars have suggested that every such political argument in the narratives must therefore be seen as the work of northern editors, not as the ex-slaves' own ideas.²⁷ The question may always remain moot unless unknown galley sheets come to light. But there is no inherent reason why many of the narrators should not have known enough about American history and its ironies by the time they wrote to make such arguments themselves. Once they escaped, after all, education became a first priority. Moreover, the narrators did not abandon their emphasis on rational morality in favor of political argumentation, though many abolitionists did. They reinforced one with the other. What American could argue against Jackson's suggestion that “Give me liberty or give me death” was both a “deliberate conclusion” and moral? Or against Pennington's analogy between the desire of slaves for freedom and the desires of “our white brethren” in Europe who have been justifiably “reaching out their hands to grasp more freedom … so tenacious are they of their own liberties”?²⁸ With that context established in the public mind, Northup, for instance, could afford to assert the morality of his violent resistance so long as he took care to demonstrate its necessity and his rationality throughout.

In fact, in beginning to suggest that previously unpleasant forms of resistance were not merely the unfortunate result of slavery's corrupting power, but were, by analogy to just revolutions, a positive good, the slave narrators carried to its ultimate conclusion the logic of their earlier concern with morality. If the cause of freedom had initially imposed on them an absolute morality, that was because freedom came to be seen as an absolute good by both abolitionists and slaves, a conclusion the dawn of literary romanticism did nothing to undercut. In consequence of that conviction, to obtain freedom became not just a right but a duty, the highest duty in fact, to which every other consideration became subordinate. Many male narrators, for instance, describe the pain of leaving their families behind in order to escape as a pain they can bear only because the duty to escape bondage is even stronger. Hence taking to the road came to seem less a picaro's antiromantic wandering and more the romantic fulfillment of a hero's quest, a quest with social, moral, and ideal justification. And the morality of the road, questionable were it only self-interested, became noble. The slave narrator turned himself from a picaro into a romantic and a revolutionary hero.

Such developments were of course neither simple nor universal. Many a slave narrator remained hesitant and defensive about morality and violence. But overall, the inherent logic of the slaves' stance turned the tone of the slave narrative around. In the long run they stood the imposed requirement of absolute morality on its head, using it to validate actions it had originally seemed to bring into question; the restrictions of mores were transcended by the mandates of a higher morality. The picaro became “justified.”

A prime example of how confident and effective the justified picaresque could be in these contexts appears in the 1860 narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, in which William and Ellen Craft detail their escape from slavery twelve years earlier. There are striking similarities between the rationale offered for their actions and the arguments used by the American colonies against Britain to justify the Revolution. Writing on the eve of the Civil War, the Crafts take pains in their opening chapter to convey “some idea of the legal as well as the social tyranny from which we fled.”²⁹ After quoting verbatim from the laws of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia which rendered slaves utterly defenseless, they go on to assert that “the practical working of slavery is worse than the odious laws by which it is governed.”³⁰ Hence one context for their narrative is the conviction that there is no recourse for the slave within the tightening system of slavery; the other is their awareness of the Revolution and what it demanded under similar circumstances:

Having heard while in Slavery that “God made of one blood all nations of men,” and also that the American Declaration of Independence says, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; we could not understand by what right we were held as “chattels.” Therefore, we felt perfectly justified in undertaking the dangerous and exciting task of “running a thousand miles” in order to obtain those rights which are so vividly set forth in the Declaration.³¹

Flight and its techniques, whatever they need be, therefore, have the strongest sanction imaginable. A bit of initial reluctance is useful, but at this late date the Crafts are uneasy only about tactics; they are perfectly confident of their ethics:

My wife had no ambition whatever to assume this disguise, and would not have done so had it been possible to have obtained our liberty by more simple means; but we knew it was not customary in the South for ladies to travel with male servants; and therefore, notwithstanding my wife's fair complexion, it would have been a very difficult task for her to have come off as a free white lady, with me as her slave; in fact, her not being able to write would have made this quite impossible.³²

The rest of the narrative combines complete ethical confidence with the pleasures of deceit that such justification permits. If eighteenth-century slave narrators wrote before apology was required, the Crafts now write when it is no longer necessary. The light-skinned Ellen disguises herself as an aristocratic, male slave owner, William poses as her loyal slave, and together they bluff their way from Macon, Georgia to Philadelphia. They are nervous throughout the adventure, but in the writing of the narrative they revel openly in the dramatic ironies their ruse makes possible. (“The gentleman said my master could obtain the very best advice in Philadelphia. Which turned out to be quite correct. …”³³ When a train conductor asks William if he would like to be free, he replies, “Yes, sir, but I shall never run away from such a good master as I have at present.”)³⁴

But the irony of the narrative extends beyond the local, for the Crafts predicate their escape on the accuracy of their hard-won sense of southern society. They know all too well the kinds of deference granted southern “gentlemen,” the latitude of behavior allowed them; and they exploit that knowledge fully, manipulating southern manners with great skill in order to escape the system of slavery on which those manners were built. When Ellen feigns deafness to avoid being recognized by a Mr. Cray, an old friend of her master, Cray defers to her (his) state, saying “I shall not trouble that fellow any more,”³⁵ and retreats to a respectful distance. Later, when Ellen's bandaged hand does not prevent an official from demanding that she register her name, southern chivalry prevents her illiteracy—and their ruse—from being detected:

Just then the young military officer with whom my master travelled and conversed on the steamer from Savannah stepped in, somewhat the worse for brandy; he shook hands with my master, and pretended to know all about him. He said, “I know his kin (friends) like a book”; and as the officer was known in Charleston, and was going to stop there with friends, the recognition was very much in my master's favor.³⁶

Instances such as these abound and make it clear that the “representative” role thrust on slave narrators in the decades preceding the Civil War now serves less to restrict the Crafts' narrative than to broaden the significance of their triumph. It is as if everything slavery taught the slave about the nature of the master and his world now rose up to mock those masters and that world. And by playing skillfully not only on their knowledge of the master but on the master's assumptions about the slave, the Crafts reveal a good deal about the strategies of survival that slaves drew on within slavery as well as in the act of escaping it. By using William's extreme loyalty to his “master” to allay suspicions that he might escape, the Crafts deliberately and self-consciously exploit the “Sambo” behavior, the identification with the master, that has since become subject of much debate. The Crafts reveal in full splendor just how cunning such behavior could be, just how scornful of “Massa” the man behind the mask of docility could be.

With the Crafts, then, the slave narrative picaresque has come full circle, from an unselfconscious, individualistic mode to a defensive strategy to a positive weapon. Eighteenth-century narrators in many ways assimilated, genuinely “put on” the behavior and ethic of the slaveowner's world to survive in that world, and even to thrive in it. Now the Crafts “put on” the master himself—and his loyal slave—but ironically and as a ruse, from the base of ethical security from which they can not only escape the world of the slaveowner but satirize that world and heap scorn on it. The picaresque has led to the nonfictional novel of manners. The nineteenth-century slave narrator who began by working within limits ended up learning how to transcend those limits by making them serve his ends. Both the necessity of accepting limits and the ability to transcend them were constant elements in slave culture; they would prove to be among the most interesting and long-lasting legacies of the slave narrative to the post-emancipation black writer.

Notes

1. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York: D. Appleton, 1918); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: Random House, 1974); Herbert C. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977).

2. Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the New World (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), p. 2.

3. For the best single essay on the relationship between northern editors and slave narrators, see John W. Blassingame's “Introduction” to his Slave Testimony (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp. xvii-xlii.

4. Marion Starling, “The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American Literary History,” Diss. New York Univ. 1946, p. 1.

5. Briton Hammon, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon (Boston, 1760); Arthur, The Life and Dying Speech of Arthur (Boston, 1768); John Marrant, A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black, Taken Down from His Own Relation by the Rev. Mr. Aldridge (London, 1785); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (London, 1789); Venture (Smith), A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident about Sixty Years in the United States of America (New London, 1798).

6. Angelina Grimké, Letters to Catherine E. Beecher in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A. E. Grimké (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), p. 7.

7. Leonard Bacon, Slavery Discussed in Occasional Essays, from 1833 to 1846 (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1846), p. 55.

8. American Slavery, Report of a Meeting Held at Finsburg Chapel, Moorfields, to Receive Frederick Douglass, the American Slave (London, 1846), p. 17.

9. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), p. xii.

10. Douglass, Narrative, pp. 32-33.

11. James W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith, 2nd ed. (London: Charles Gilpin, 1849), p. vii.

12. Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn: Derby and Miller; Buffalo: Derby, Orton and Mulligan; and Cincinnati: Henry W. Derby, 1853), p. 206.

13. Starling, p. 40.

14. The Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), esp. pp. 43-96.

15. Quoted by Fredrickson, p. 50.

16. The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists (Philadelphia: H. Manly, 1836), p. 246.

17. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, 3rd ed. (New York: Published by the Author, 1850), p. 17.

18. Bibb, p. 122.

19. Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), p. 57.

20. Douglass, Narrative, p. 63. For a detailed analysis of Douglass' strategy in depicting himself as temporarily bestialized, see H. Bruce Franklin, The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 3-30.

21. Pennington, p. 57.

22. Pennington, pp. 29-30.

23. Pennington, p. 23.

24. Northup, p. 133.

25. Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky (Syracuse: Daily and Weekly Star Office, 1847), p. 14.

26. Nat Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. As fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray (Baltimore: Thomas R. Gray, 1831), p. 9.

27. Blassingame, for instance, p. xxviii.

28. Pennington, p. xi.

29. William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (London: William Tweedie, 1860), p. 13.

30. Craft, p. 15.

31. Craft, p. iii.

32. Craft, pp. 35-36.

33. Craft, p. 59.

34. Craft, p. 78.

35. Craft, p. 44.

36. Craft, pp. 56-57.