Slavery, as Narrated by Black Women

Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2004 by Stewart, Rhonda

Slavery, as Narrated by Black Women

Harriet Jacobs: A Life By Jean Pagan Yelli (Basic Civitas Books, $27.50)

In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman's Narrative Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Mollis Robbins (Basic Civitas Books, $27.50)

Many of slavery's horrors - from beatings that carved latticework into Black skin to whole generations of families torn apart and eventually wiped out - come to life through narratives written by those who lived through them and risked telling their stories.

The slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington have been staples on many high school and college reading lists for decades, but their stories do little to illuminate the first-hand experiences of female slaves.

While the narrative of Harriet Jacobs has been included in the curricula of some women's and African American studies courses, the recent literary detective work of scholars such as Jean Pagan Yellin and Henry Louis Gates Jr. should further buoy the exploration of her story and that of another female slave.

Yellin has just published Harriet Jacobs: A Life, a biography of the woman whose book - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself- is praised as the first autobiography by a female slave. Writing under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs tells the harrowing story of how she escaped her master's lecherous advances and spent almost seven years hiding in the attic crawl space of her grandmother's North Carolina house until she could flee North.

For years after the book's release in 1861, the narrative was dismissed as a fake and its author was thought to be White abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Yellin, a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University, spent six years doggedly working to uncover who wrote Incidents and whether the narrative was fact or fiction. In 1987, she published an annotated edition of the narrative giving Jacobs her due as author and establishing her account's authenticity.

Harriet Jacobs: A Life fleshes out the story the former slave tells in Incidents by detailing Jacobs' life in the years after she escaped from slavery and the struggle to get her book published. In the process, Yellin delivers a biography that's deeply researched and compellingly written.

While Yellin has solved the mystery surrounding Incidents, questions remain about Henry Louis Gates' literary find. In 2001, at an auction at Swann Galleries in New York, Gates bought a manuscript considered to have been penned in the mid-180Os by a fugitive slave from North Carolina. The book was thought to be the first novel by a female slave and possibly the first novel by a Black woman. But, as was the case with Jacobs' book, there's ongoing debate about who actually wrote the narrative and whether it's fiction masquerading as fact.

Gates and Hollis Robbins, both of Harvard University, are editors of In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative. In the book, a series of noted academics weigh in with their interpretations on everything from the author's identity to the literary sources from which the narrative draws. This collection isn't as engaging as Yellin's book - it often reads like scholars writing for other scholars - but it is sure to add fresh fuel to the debate surrounding The Bondwoman's Narrative.

Ultimately, the Gates and Yellin books give readers a better understanding of slave narratives' contributions to American history and Black literature.

Rhonda Stewart is a reporter at The Boston Globe.