Slave Narratives

By: Mason I. Lowance

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Slave Narratives

Slave narratives written by women occupy a special place in the long history of antebellum slave narration because female slaves suffered additional burdens based on gender. As the emancipated slave Harriet Jacobs noted, those qualities of beauty and femininity long honored in all cultures became a special curse for the female slave, because these attributes often led to sexual abuse by slave owners and overseers and male slaves. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), this problem is examined in several episodes in which a vulnerable female slave is forced into sexual relationships with men. These incidents, related by Cassy in Chapter XXXIV, “The Quadroon's Story,” can be considered a slave narrative in microcosm, one that exhibits the essential characteristics of the slave narrative genre. And in Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (1845), a young and attractive female slave who is flogged mercilessly by her overseer and owner is also raped by him. Slave narratives written by women describe many similar episodes, highlighting the additional burdens that female slaves were forced to bear.

Added Burdens

In addition to the cruelties of the plantation owners and overseers, enslaved women were also frequently mistreated in their marriages and domestic relationships, being held responsible for the bearing, rearing, and feeding of any children born to them, whether through slave marriages, which were not recognized by law, or sired through illicit, forced relations with overseers, owners, or other male slaves. Female slaves were often coworkers with their male counterparts, serving as field hands as well as domestic servants. After a day's work in the field, the female slave was also required to return to a primitive dwelling where she would mend clothes for her family, prepare meals from scratch, and tend to her domestic chores before enjoying any rest or leisure. There are many records of such unequal treatment in antebellum slave literature, and not all of them appear in slave narratives written by women. Douglass was particularly sensitive to the plight of women in antebellum American culture, and he included several dramatic episodes of the brutal treatment of women, such as that concerning Hetty, the deformed female slave, in his three autobiographical accounts. Stowe's fictional Uncle Tom's Cabin seems so real that many of its episodes might well have been drawn from authentic accounts.

Annie Burton was born to a slave mother in Clayton, Alabama, in 1858; became a domestic servant in Boston after the Civil War; and in 1909 published a memoir of her childhood during slavery. She also wrote a short biography of Abraham Lincoln.

New York Public Library

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Similarly, the slave-narrator Olaudah Equiano incorporated dramatic episodes of the mistreatment of women slaves into his work as evidence of the especially brutal treatment they had endured.

"When I came into the room…I was very much affrighted at some things I saw, and the more so as I had seen a black woman slave as I came through the house, who was cooking the dinner, and the poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak; and could not eat nor drink. I was much astonished and shocked at this contrivance, which I afterwards learned was called the iron muzzle."

(Equiano, p. 764)

This slave, forced to wear the “bit,” even while working in the house or field, was unable to eat or drink. Most importantly, the device prevented speech and limited communication among the slaves, another form of dominance over the oppressed by the oppressor. The “bit” came to symbolize in slave literature the owner's objective to prevent the “property” from gaining identity as individual persons and to complicate the process of self-realization. (Toni Morrison cites the “bit” in Beloved, a novel that recuperates many of the conventions of the antebellum women's slave narrative. The “bit” also appears in the Diary of William Byrd of Westover.)

Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days, Annie Burton's memoir, title page. The book was published in Boston by Ross, 1909.

New York Public Library

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However, it is the female slave narrative itself that carries the most significant accounts of the perils of slave women. Some examples are Harriet Ann Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831); and the Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Coloured Woman (1863). These documents share a typology of slave narrative conventions, and they also have the double agenda of narrating the personal experience of a particular slave and citing the horrors and brutality of antebellum slavery so that the dominant white culture would be forced to grant emancipation. This “double vision” governs most slave narratives, and both male and female accounts utilized it.

Storytelling Devices

After the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, which granted freedom to the slaves, other female slave narratives appeared, notably From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom (1891) by Lucy A. Delaney; A Slave Girl's Story (1898) by Kate Drumgoold; Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days (1909) by Annie L. Burton, and The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866). Much like slave narratives written by men, these works employed a number of similar literary devices in their attempts to successfully and faithfully describe the experience of enforced servitude. The narratives share a typology of storytelling with varying degrees of emphasis. These rhetorical strategies were employed not to render all slave narratives alike; rather they were a formula for successful narration of the imprisoned slave's experience and the successful recuperation of that experience by writing the self into being. In most of the antebellum accounts, the following characteristics appear regularly:

While these characteristics are shared by many slave narratives by men and women, it would be politically and historically incorrect to argue that they were therefore written by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, or Lydia Maria Child, all of whom wrote introductions for slave narratives. Rather, all slave narratives shared the common objective of bringing an end to the institution of chattel slavery in the United States, and the narrators used whatever rhetorical strategies seemed to work with the reading public they sought to influence. Postbellum slave narratives by women may lack the immediacy and urgency of their antebellum counterparts, which were designed by their authors to crush the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery while simultaneously narrating a tale of horror from personal experience. But all slave narratives shared some common characteristics that became fundamental features of slave storytelling, whether orally transmitted or written and printed. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it,

"Literary works configure into a tradition not because of some mystical collective unconscious determined by the biology of race or gender, but because writers read other writers and based their representations of experience on models of language provided largely by other writers to whom they felt akin. It is through this mode of literary revision, amply evident in the texts themselves, in formal echoes, recast metaphors, even in parody, that a “tradition” emerges and defines itself."

(Andrews, Six Women's Slave Narratives, p. xviii)

Some specific examples of these conventions illustrate the formal and structural principles governing slave narrative literature.

Most slave narratives carry the providential metaphor as an informing structural principle. The guidance and salvation of many slaves were credited to God's Providence as much as to their own ingenuity. As literature, the slave narrative incorporated elements of earlier Puritan spiritual autobiographies, illustrating the experience of the narrator through parallels to the ancient Israelites, who were persecuted and enslaved by the Egyptians. Both groups looked forward to a better life in the next world. Negro spirituals, the folk songs of slave culture, were imbued with these biblical parallels. The Israelite deliverance from suffering in Egypt was perceived to be a foreshadowing of God's deliverance of the southern slaves from a more contemporary but equally merciless ordeal. “Crossing Over Jordan” or “We are Climbing Jacob's Ladder” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” reinforced the conviction that somehow God would provide deliverance and that the rewards of a better everlasting life would await the faithful believer. These antebellum slave narratives, authored primarily by men, flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century; after the Civil War and emancipation, accounts of slavery by men continued to appear, such as Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, but many slave narratives by women also made their way into print. Both groups of narratives shared the design of the New England spiritual autobiography in recording the life of a member of a tribal group that was ultimately guided by Providence. The “life” was usually expressed as a journey, that of a wayfarer from the earthly city of Babylon to the eternal city of Jerusalem, that “city upon a hill,” a teleology frequently associated with the gaining of freedom through escape to the Northern free states.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, in Representative Men, that “there is properly no history, only biography,” and Thomas Carlyle, whose English Calvinist background resembled Emerson's, asserted that “history is the essence of innumerable biographies” in Heroes and Hero Worship, they were making specific reference to the lives of eminent men. However, slave narratives, particularly those authored by women, are the life accounts of victims, tales of unendurable suffering and torment that alert the reader to a counterculture present in America even as Emerson was writing. David Reynolds's excellent studies, Beneath the American Renaissance and Walt Whitman's America, make clear how vital and important these voices were in establishing the identities of the soon-to-be emancipated slaves. Similar in structure and voice representation to Mary Rowlandson's The Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson (1682), an earlier Indian “captivity narrative,” the woman's slave narrative was structured as a metaphorical journey. Often, as in the Jacobs account, this was paralleled by a literal journey, in which the protagonist moved from enslavement to freedom or at least to a determination to achieve freedom. Each account focused on the experience of a protagonist, who speaks in the first person, and the protagonist's point of view is that of a freed person looking back on the experience of chattel slavery. This retrospective movement from slavery to freedom in the context afforded by hindsight gives each narrative a curiously ironic tone: the writer searches into the harsh reality of her personal past in order to establish the condition of slavery from which she has recently been blessedly delivered, either through emancipation or escape. Most women's slave narratives carried the additional elements of the antecedent spiritual autobiographies: the first-person account of survival and possibly deliverance from earthly peril by a guiding force; the journey motif, suggesting a linear migration governed by Providence toward a teleological end; and the essential, innate depravity of humankind and the hostility of the protagonist's surroundings, excepting the occasional kindness of a master or mistress who represent the possibility of redemption for depraved owners and overseers. Like the Puritans, the persecuted slaves identified with the ancient Israelites because they viewed themselves as “God's chosen people” whose experience they paralleled and whose destiny they recuperated.

Moreover, women and slaves were often conflated in the reform literature of the nineteenth century. And a female slave narrative, such as the Jacobs or Prince accounts, would intensify this rhetorical strategy to render a narrative specifically designed to appeal to Northern white women and mothers. Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wife of a prominent Southern politician, viewed marriage itself as slavery: “All married women, all children and girls who live in their father's house, are slaves.” The Jacobs and Prince slave narratives provide many examples that reinforce this critical observation. Stowe describes the status of women as slaves in sections of Uncle Tom's Cabin, especially Chapter IX, and she developed the character of Uncle Tom to exhibit those qualities of nurturing and strength associated with the slave mother. Stowe's novel clearly shows the redemptive power, integrity, and strength of the slave woman and feminized central character.

Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is a slave narrative written several years before its publication just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. It is technically a “sentimental novel,” with fictional names thinly disguising the real persons they represent. However, its powerful narrative voices (there are multiple voices in Jacobs's or Brent's account) clearly show the author's consistent dedication to the end of chattel slavery, especially the brutal treatment of female slaves, through the rhetorical strategy of combining the sermonic voice of direct address to the reader with the narrative structure of a sentimental novel. As in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa or Pamela or Charlotte Brönte's Jane Eyre, the sentimental theme of a young, attractive woman being intensely pursued by an older, lecherous male is developed within the context of a narrative of spiritual and moral growth. As with most slave narratives, male and female, the power of the slave mother is present both in the Prince and in the Jacobs accounts. As William Andrews observes,

"as early as Prince's story, female slave narrators portrayed the enslaved black woman as a person of near-indomitable dedication to the highest principles of human dignity and individual freedom …. Thus the slave mother, or some comparable black maternal figure, more than the female narrator herself, plays the hero's role in most early black women's autobiographies. The mother inspires within her daughter the hope of freedom and provides an example of a woman who will not give in to despair. Sometimes the mother furnishes material as well as moral assistance to her daughter when she strikes for freedom."

(Andrews, Six Women's Slave Narratives, p. xxx)

It is important to note that while the mother figure looms large in these women's accounts, the persona of the narrator herself is also heroic, and the horrors endured by the central characters often border on the unimaginable.

It was therefore critical for the women slave narrators to establish veracity in their narratives and to verify their personal authorship.

"The fact that both the narratives of Prince and Jackson were ghostwritten by persons sympathetic to the abolitionist cause requires us to remember that the power to write their own stories as they saw fit did not come to female slaves as early as it did to male slaves."

(Andrews, Six Women's Slave Narratives, p. xxxiv)

Moreover, “ghostwritten” as used here does not adequately state the case: Prince was introduced by Thomas Pringle (who also provided an appendix of sources to verify her testimony), just as Garrison and Phillips introduced the 1845 Narrative of Douglass, and Child introduced the 1861 account by Jacobs. Each of these introductions states clearly that the narrative was written by the subject-author, and each clarifies the editorial intrusion employed usually for stylistic purposes only. The credibility gap that emerged allowed some readers to discount the veracity of the materials presented; however, subsequent scholarly investigations into sources and methods of authentication leave no doubt that these slave narratives were primarily the work of the authors who used the subtitle “written by himself” or “written by herself.”

The two slave narratives that best exemplify both the voices of female protagonists in these documents are the Jacobs account, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and The History of Mary Prince, a West-Indian Slave Related by Herself (1831). The thirty years that separate these two documents do not erase the relation of common experience, one in the United States and the other in the West Indies. In standard autobiographies the primary characteristic or theme is that of self-definition. But in these two slave accounts, the definition of the persona is intrinsically linked to the narrator's impulse toward personal freedom. This conflation of the desire for freedom and the identity of the subject of the autobiography pervades all slave narratives; indeed, the power of this central theme governs one of the most complex paradoxes in all slave autobiography. The slave narrator is compelled to recall her former state, even a former self, just as she has reached the “promised land” of freedom and has achieved that purpose toward which the entire objective of his experience has been directed. As Annette Niemtzow has summarized in Six Women's Slave Narratives, “The slave, happily ceasing to be a slave, describes his or her slave self to preserve it just as it is about to cease to be a condition under which the self lives.” Thus the persona developed is very different from other contemporary autobiographical figures, such as the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin or The Education of Henry Adams. Rather than tracing the genealogy of often humble but noble forebears, as in Franklin's account, the slave narrator, such as Douglass, was often unable to know who his ancestors were. When known, as in the Prince narrative, it was the mother who was cited for heroism. Douglass observed that he had only four or five times in his youthful life even seen his mother, who lived on a neighboring plantation some twelve miles distant. But those few visits were made to his bedside following her full day's work in the field, and on foot, after which she was forced to return to her plantation. Douglass's reverence for his mother ennobled her to the status of sainthood. Similarly, Prince reveres her mother, who, as a household slave, had an easier work life than Douglass's mother.

"My mother was a household slave in the same family. I was under her own care, and my little brothers and sisters were my play-fellows and companions. My mother had several fine children after she came to Mrs. Williams,—three girls and two boys. The tasks given out to us children were light, and we used to play together with Miss Betsy [the master's daughter] with as much freedom almost as if she had been our sister."

(Andrews, Six Women's Slave Narratives, p. 231)

This seemingly idyllic beginning did not last long. Soon, the Prince family was divided by an auction, and Prince's account is memorable:

"At length the vendue master who was to offer us like sheep or cattle, arrived, and asked my mother which was the eldest …. He took me by the hand and led me out into the middle of the street, and, turning me slowing round, exposed me to the view of those who attended the vendue. I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase …. I was then put up for sale …. I then saw my sisters led forth, and sold to different owners; so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being partners in bondage. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, begging of us to keep up a good heart, and to do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing."

(Andrews, Six Women's Slave Narratives, p. 233)

Jacobs also recalls slave auctions where children were separated from their mothers:

"On one of these sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave-trader, and their mother was bought by a man in her own town. Before night, her children were all far away. She begged the trader to tell her where he intended to take them; this he refused to do. How could he, when he knew he would sell them, one by one, wherever he could command the highest price? I met that mother in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives today in my mind. She wrung her hands in anguish, and exclaimed, “Gone! All gone! Why don't God kill me?” I had no words wherewith to comfort her."

(Jacobs, p. 16)

The maternal figures in women's slave narratives serve the dual purpose of relating the horrors of slavery to free women readers; they also directly appeal to the mothers in the readership, who would naturally sympathize with the anguish of slave mothers as they lost their children at auctions.

Mr. and Mrs. L. P. Ray—Emma J. Ray (b. 1859) and Lloyd Ray (b. 1860)—as shown in the frontispiece to their autobiography. She was an activist for the Women's Christian Temperance Union and had been a slave in Missouri; he was a stonecutter.

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

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Both Jacobs and Prince also show how slavery violated the sacred bonds of family. Jacobs best exemplifies this practice in a chapter entitled “The Slave's New Year's Day,”

"Hiring-day at the south takes place on the lst of January. On the 2d, the slaves are expected to go to their new masters. On a farm, they work until the corn and cotton are laid. They then have two holidays. Some masters give them a good diner under the trees. This over, they work until Christmas eve …. Then comes New Year's eve; and they gather together their little alls, or more properly speaking, their little nothings, and wait anxiously for the dawning of day. At the appointed hour the grounds are thronged with men, women, and children, waiting, like criminals, to hear their doom pronounced."

(Jacobs, p. 15)

Master and Mistress

The narratives by Prince and Jacobs both contain scenes depicting the barbaric cruelty of white slave masters and overseers who took particular pleasure in the sadistic treatment of slave women. In Prince's account, seemingly continuous acts of cruelty are visited upon her by her masters and mistresses.

"The next morning my mistress set about instructing me in my tasks. She taught me to do all sorts of household work; to wash and bake, pick cotton and wool, and wash floors, and cook. And she taught me (how can I ever forget it!) more things than these; she caused me to know the exact difference between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin, when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand. And there was scarcely any punishment more dreadful than the blows I received on my face and head from her hard, heavy fist. She was a fearful woman, and a savage mistress to her slaves …. To strip me naked, to hang me up by the wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow-skin, was an ordinary punishment for even a slight offence. My mistress often robbed me too of the hours that belong to sleep. She used to sit up very late, frequently even until morning; and I had then to stand at a bench and wash during the greater part of the night, or pick wool and cotton; and often I have dropped down overcome by sleep and fatigue, till roused from a state of stupor by the whip, and forced to start up my tasks."

(Andrews, Six Women's Slave Narratives, pp. 6–7)

The Jacobs narrative also carries an account of cruelty to a female slave by a slave mistress:

"Mrs. Flint, like many Southern women, was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash. She was a member of the church; but partaking of the Lord's Supper did not seem to put her in a Christian frame of mind. If dinner was not served at the exact time on that particular Sunday, she would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was dished, then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used for cooking. She did this to prevent the cook and her children from eking out the meager fare with the remains of the gravy and other scrapings. The slaves could get nothing to eat except what she chose to give them."

(Jacobs, p. 12)

These “cruel mistress” figures, like Marie St. Claire in Uncle Tom's Cabin, are dramatic foils for the nurturing slave mothers in women's slave narratives.

Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed, title page of the Rays' book, published in Chicago c. 1926.

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

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The most brutal scenes in women's slave narratives, however, are the accounts of cruelty to female slaves by male overseers and masters. Possibly the most horrible of many similar instances is Prince's account of her own “Aunt Hetty,” which simultaneously showed the reader the horrors of the chattel slavery system and appealed strongly to the female readership.

"Poor Hetty, my fellow slave, was very kind to me, and I used to call her my Aunt. But she led a most miserable life, and her death was hastened (at least the slaves all believed and said so) by the dreadful chastisement she received from my master during her pregnancy. It happened as follows. One of the cows had dragged the rope away from the stake to which Hetty had fastened it, and got loose. My master flew into a terrible passion, and ordered the poor creature to be stripped quite naked, notwithstanding her pregnancy, and to be tied up to a tree in the yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and the cow-skin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested, and then beat her again and again. Her shrieks were terrible. The consequence was that poor Hetty was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labor of a dead child. She appeared to recover after her confinement, so far that she was repeatedly flogged by both master and mistress afterwards; but her former strength never returned to her. Ere long her body and limbs swelled to a great size; and she lay on a mat in the kitchen, till the water burst out of her body and she died. All the slaves said that death was a good thing for poor Hetty; but I cried very much for her death. The manner of it filled me with horror. I could not bear to think about it; yet it was always present to my mind For many a day."

(Andrews, Six Women's Slave Narratives, p. 7)

Both master and mistress play important roles as antagonists to the female slave's protagonist in these two accounts. In the Jacobs narrative, Mrs. Flint is set against her unfaithful husband, Dr. Flint, who literally chases the escaped Brent (Jacobs) into the North to satisfy his sexual obsession and to retrieve his lost property. Southern women like Mrs. Flint, a cruel and hypocritical Christian, also reveal a hostility to the institutional Christian church. This theme pervades all slave narrative literature because the antebellum Christian church failed to support the abolitionist movement and was, in some instances, demonstrably proslavery.

Structurally and stylistically, Incidents is a sentimental novel. However, Jacobs hastens to tell the reader

"Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall short of the facts. I have concealed the names and places, and given persons fictitious names. I have no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course."

(Jacobs, p. 1)

The Jacobs narrative dramatically interweaves the personal account of Brent's efforts to evade the sexual predator, Dr. Flint, with glimpses of the horrors of slavery. However, unlike the Equiano narrative with its graphic description of the Middle Passage, or the Douglass narrative with its dramatic account of the flogging of Hetty, or the Prince first-person relations of cruelties inflicted on herself and her fellow slave sisters, the Jacobs narrative does not attempt to shock its readers into a recognition of the horrors of slavery. That task is left to the sermonic voice of the narrator, who intrudes into the work at regular intervals to interpret and sermonize about the “peculiar institution.”

For example, Jacobs does give a few specific instances of the brutal horrors of slavery, but only in glimpses. In Chapter 9, “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders,” Jacobs describes an event in which a male slave was tied to the ground underneath a roasting pork, so that, as the meat cooked, “scalding drops of fat continually fell on the bare flesh.” She also describes an incident in which a runaway slave was captured and punished by his placement between the screws of a cotton gin for several grueling days, a prison that he does not escape alive. In another episode, Jacobs describes the experience of “hearing” a flogging from the adjoining room, vividly recalling each blow and scream.

Although Incidents contains these alarming accounts of physical abuse, Jacobs generally avoids the graphic details often presented in other slave narratives by women, such as Prince's account. One of the most important statements of her own experience makes this intention clear while exhibiting deep sympathy for her sisters in bondage.

"I was never cruelly overworked; I was never lacerated with the whip from head to foot. I was never so beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one side to the other; I never had my heel-strings cut to prevent my running away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about while I toiled in the fields from morning to night; I was never branded with a hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds …. But, though my life was comparatively devoid of hardships, God pity the woman who is compelled to lead such a life!"

(Jacobs, p. 207)

In this summary of cruelties visited on slave women and men, Jacobs reaches out to women readers just as she did in the accounts of auctions and floggings. Prince, Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and several other women slave narrators of the nineteenth century spoke for the many muted voices they represented. “And not many can more sensibly and more accurately tell the weight and the fret of the ‘long dull pain’ than the open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America.” These voices, primarily the first person narration of one who experienced the damaging effects or horrors of chattel slavery, arrived relatively late in the crusade to end the “peculiar institution,” the abolitionist movement led by Garrison, Phillips, Douglass, and Child. However, during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, the postbellum women slave narrators once again focused the nation's attention on the cruelties of slavery, and they drew specific attention to the plight of female slaves, who had been doubly burdened in antebellum America by being both slaves and women. These voices not only echo the call for the abolition of slavery, but they also cry out for the emancipation of women from the roles assigned to them in society, that “dual sphere” concept that left them without the franchise or the right to hold public office. They are unique in our literary history.

See also Autobiography; Fiction; and Slavery.

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