Unforgettable

Because we feel that by naming a thing we gain power over it, the desire to express in words the traumas we have experienced is often, after acknowledging that the event occurred in the first place, acute and pervasive. In this light, freedom narratives, typically detailing some if not all the traumas dealt the author by those they were once owned by, are in part meant to help the author come to grips with the terrible struggles they have survived. On a deeper, perhaps unconscious level, freedom narratives are meant to help the author gain power back over those who once controlled the author, and thus restore some kind of balance. As the author is the one who controls the narrative, rather than the individuals who appear in it, whether antagonistic or otherwise, the author has, through writing a freedom narrative, reclaimed that which was stolen from them.

Of course, the genre of this reclamation is important to consider, for with each genre of writing comes a set of rules, assumptions, and implications. Utilising prose, for example, gives the author the ability to go into greater length and explicit detail than with poetry. Poetry attempts to capture moments or ideals in a condensed state, and thus requires much unpacking on the part of the reader. Prose, however, allows the reader to know immediately what is going on, how the narrator feels, and how the scene is laid out. That is, the interaction the reader has with the subject matter of the text is more instantaneous and explicit, and thus is understood more immediately than a poem might be. Additionally, individual incidents may be further explored and explicated in prose than in poetry. In terms of artistic movements, poetry tends to be Baroque or Romantic. Baroque art, particularly in the stylings of Caravaggio or Artemisia Gentileschi, evokes focus on the subject matter by illumination. Light is used to reveal in the darkness (perhaps the darkness of space, of time) a moment that the painter has captured. Romantic artists, such as Delacroix or Turner, attempted to capture the emotions of a moment in their paintings. They used colour, lighting, and an almost hazy, wispy atmosphere in their works to instigate in the viewer complete and overwhelming feeling. Poetry uses subtle illumination to evoke various emotions in the reader. Prose, on the other hand, is more like High Renaissance art, or Neoclassicism. It strives to reveal the true image, what is really seen. There may, of course, still be embellishments or subtle hints which reveal larger implications about the work, but the image one sees in the work is typically what the artist wishes to convey.

An example of the permitted specificity of prose can be found in the following excerpt from Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Could you have seen that mother clinging to her child, when they fastened the irons upon his wrists; could you have heard her heart-rending groans, and seen her bloodshot eyes wander wildly from face to face, vainly pleading for mercy; could you have witnessed that scene as I saw it, you would exclaim, Slavery is damnable!Benjamin, her youngest, her pet, was forever gone! She could not realize it. She had had an interview with the trader for the purpose of ascertaining if Benjamin could be purchased. She was told it was impossible, as he had given bonds not to sell him till he was out of the state. He promised that he would not sell him till he reached New Orleans (16).

There are poetic elements to Jacobs’ writing. The imagery of a “mother clinging to her child,” physically trying to keep him from his fate. The epithets (“Benjamin, her youngest, her pet”), the enormity of a simple observation (“She could not realize it.”). Later on Jacobs reflects, “For once his white face did him a kindly service. They had no suspicion that it belonged to a slave; otherwise, the law would have been followed out to the letter, and the thingrendered back to slavery” (Jacobs 16). She speaks of Benjamin here, who has attempted again to run to freedom. He, like Jacobs, was of lighter complexion, and thus could pass as white. If he had not been capable of passing, Jacobs mentions, he would have been treated as a slave and sent back immediately to his master as if he were a misplaced parcel of post. Although such crafting of ideas may be seen as poetic, these sentiments would not have been as potent to the extent they are were Jacobs to have used poetry. Poetry is too general and universal for such a feat. Prose, with its need to explicate to the fullest, is a greater choice in this regard.

Another advantage prose has over poetry is the ability to deeply analyse the events mentioned in the text. This is vital particularly in early freedom narratives, for with the analysis of the authors’ lives comes a look into the institution of slavery and what it does to the enslaved, the slaver, and society as a whole. The analysis of one’s life is also an implicit control over one’s life; it means that one has the power to understand and come to terms with the life one has lived, both with or without the context of their oppression. This is vital as a coping mechanism, for without the ability to stop and reflect on one’s life, one cannot come to accept oneself for the person one is. Thus, through writing one’s freedom narrative, one can both accept the fact that oneself was once a slave, one can discuss the wrongs done to oneself, and, through the power of having an audience, have one’s feelings and situation and, through these, one’s existence, validated. This is, in itself, a true sense of freedom.

There are, however, limitations to the freedom of the writer, particularly when their narrative is to be published. These boundaries exist only when a narrative seeks publication, for one must keep the audience in mind. A diary may be entirely transparent and go into as much length as one desires, for it is one’s private scribblings; there is a presumption of but one person being the audience: the author. Letters are only minutely different; there is another person to consider, but if one is writing letters to a person it is typically a person close to the writer and thus more leeway may be given in terms of the frankness of the tone and information. When the narrative is to be read by society, however, and all its varying members of all sorts of classes and livelihoods, one is not as free to write as one wishes. One must consider the audience, and how they might react. Would this event prove too much to handle for them? Would that anecdote render them incapable of reading further? The publishing house and the editors may decide to lyse from one’s work those which would (they believe) prove too scandalous or terrible for publication. And, as the narrative yearns for publication, it will shed the weight, more times than not.

William and Ellen Craft lend a paradigm of this kind of editing in their Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,

If the coloured person refuses to answer questions put to him, he may be beaten, and his defending himself against this attack makes him an outlaw, and if he be killed on the spot, the murderer will be exempted from all blame; but after the coloured person has answered the questions put to him, in a most humble and pointed manner, he may then be taken to prison; and should it turn out, after further examination, that he was caught where he had no permission or legal right to be, and that he has not given what they term a satisfactory account of himself, the master will have to pay a fine. On his refusing to do this, the poor slave may be legally and severely flogged by public officers. Should the prisoner prove to be a free man, he is most likely to be both whipped and fined.

The great majority of slaveholders hate this class of persons with a hatred that can only be equalled by the condemned spirits of the infernal regions. They have no mercy upon, nor sympathy for, any negro whom they cannot enslave. They say that God made the black man to be a slave for the white, and act as though they really believed that all free persons of colour are in open rebellion to a direct command from heaven, and that they (the whites) are God's chosen agents to pour out upon them unlimited vengeance… Thus the slaveholders make it almost impossible for free persons of colour to get out of the slave States, in order that they may sell them into slavery if they don't go. If no white persons travelled upon railroads except those who could get some one to vouch for their character in a penal bond of one thousand dollars, the railroad companies would soon go to the "wall." Such mean legislation is too low for comment; therefore I leave the villainous acts to speak for themselves (20-21).

It is understood that there were worse treatments than the genteel way in which the Crafts spoke about what would happen should one be caught by some authority wishing to ‘return’ a perceived slave to the South. However, the Crafts speak only in legal terms, rather than going into great detail about the tortures and brutality dealt upon those perceived as slaves. Perhaps, having written their narrative in England, where culture was more restrictive and appearances were incredibly important, the Crafts felt that explicitly revealing the barbarity of the enslaving authorities would serve to lower their readership, and thus their message would be less efficacious, and their goals unreached. This may also speak to why the Craft narrative, unlike that of Jacobs, includes so much poetry. They often use poetry in the way moderns use emojis when texting, to explicate a feeling or emotion that otherwise would require too much detail and specificity to truly unpack.

Jacobs, too, encounters the need to edit her narrative. Though she is less abashed in terms of the suffering of she and other slaves, and thus goes into the details the Crafts mute with jargon and implication, she changes the names of those in her story. She does this presumably not because she is shamed to know those she encounters, nor because of some difficulty in printing these names, but because she, like many good reporters, wishes to protect her sources. There are those in her story who could be persecuted or worse due to the laws and ideologies in place at the time of her publication. There is, however, greater power attained by Jacobs’ use of pseudonyms. When a slave is acquired, it is the right of their master to rename them as they will. Unlike cell phones or laptops, the slave already has a name, and thus this renaming of the slave is another way in which the owner exhibits their control over the slave. There is no prompt for it, and the slave is not asked whether it desires the name; the owner names the slave as they wish, and the deed is done. Jacobs, by renaming everyone in her narrative, takes her power back, along with pure control over her narrative. The master is under her sway, and his presentation is without his manipulation. It is objective and subject only to those actions he has already performed. Jacobs effectively takes back the narrative rights which had by the institution of slavery been stolen from her.

Whether it be Jacobs, the Crafts, or any other narrator of a freedom narrative, certain freedoms are sought to be obtained through the vehicle of the narrative itself. As with all victims, validation and a sort of verification are yearned. The previously enslaved need to know that their lives have worth, their words have worth, that their stories matter. For the duration of their enslavement, society told them otherwise. When living in an institution which explicitly and implicitly regards one group as inferior, the members of that group will for an extreme duration have problems believing themselves otherwise. It requires, regardless of the mind of the person, time to help heal the wounds dealt by any kind of enslavement, whether it be through the methods Jacobs and the Crafts escaped, through addiction of some sort, or of countless other natures. Enslavement affects not merely the body, but the mind and soul. The question arises often, “What was done to deserve this?” With this question comes a constant insecurity. Writing one’s freedom narrative does not rid one of the question, as can be seen in Jacobs’ narrative with Jacobs’ constant apologies for what she believes to be signage of her lack of education and propriety (as found in her preface, and throughout the narrative); or in the Craft narrative, in the preface, “Without stopping to write a long apology for offering this little volume to the public, I shall commence at once to pursue my simple story” (Craft 1). However, the act of writing one’s freedom narrative causes the author to engage with their past, and thus validate their sufferings and emotional state, which enables healing. Publishing the freedom narrative opens the validation to the public. Anyone and everyone can, once a narrative is published, take from the story what they will. They can understand the author, which is a form of verification and validation.

Another freedom narrators of freedom narratives seek is that to affect their own presentation to the masses, a freedom which enslavement necessarily steals. When one thinks of slaves, one tends to, due to the presentation of them in various media, think of those who are uneducated and broken, who have been whipped into submission and do nothing but what the overseer or master instructs them to do. Freedom narratives, however, show that the slaves are not mere chattel. They are people, who can learn and engage with various publics and have all the mental faculties that slavers wish to drive out of them. By representing escaped slaves in this manner, as people with viable minds and fertile brains, all slaves, former and current, are, by proxy, empowered.

That a person who has escaped slavery can write an eloquent and well-versed work of prose, perhaps one of the most stringent forms of writing, implies that there are great minds being oppressed by a system touting its pervasion into the individual. First, a freedom narrative implies that the narrator has successfully escaped slavery. Slavery. The institution which purportedly beat and broke the backs and beliefs of those who suffered beneath its calloused and cold-hearted chains. If slaves are still capable of yearning for escape, their spirits are not as broken as reported. The drive would not be present. Furthermore, to escape an institution is to fall between the thinnest of cracks. With bounty hunters abound and slavery everywhere, especially below the Mason-Dixon, with their dogs and tracking skills, it would be perceptibly difficult to physically escape, let alone do the work needed to psychologically escape. However, Jacobs, the Crafts, and others not only escaped slavery, but lived long and well enough afterwards to write about it, and publish their narratives.

Second, freedom narratives typically read like one of the great myths taught throughout one’s youth. There is a struggle for some kind of freedom. There are those in power who wish to stop the freedom from being attained. The struggle is documented, and both the growth of the protagonist and defeat of the antagonist with it. There are, of course, tropes implanted in the narrative. The Trickster archetype typically takes the form of a slave who can pass their way out of slavery. Passing, in this case, refers to the light skin tones of some slaves, particularly those who are descended from a mix of slave and owner. Perhaps without premeditation, this kind of birth seems in itself a parallel to the demigod, who can mediate between supernatural and material worlds only because they have within them aspects of both. It is in this way Ellen and William Craft escape slavery. Ellen passes not only as a white person, but a white man, with a slave, for “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” (Craft 19-20).

That Ellen was capable of pulling off not only being white, but being a white man, speaks incredible volumes to the ingenuity and craftiness of slaves, regardless of their lack of education, “but at that time neither of us were able to read them. It is not only unlawful for slaves to be taught to read…” (Craft 18). This kind of deception also exposes a blindness on the part of the institution of slavery. The accepted superiority of one over another blinds the perceived superior to the ingenuity of the perceived inferior. Without the scrutiny mandated by equality, the cracks through which slaves could escape remained accommodating.

Third, not in importance but in sequence, freedom narratives perform a final empowering feat. They make the marginalised seen. They bring those who have been oppressed and suffocated to the forefront of the reader’s attention. No longer can the enslaved be some faraway, unheard of group of people. They exist. They are closer than one could believe. Some have escaped and shared the sorrows and struggles encountered throughout their lives with those who have read the narratives. Once a story is heard, it cannot be unheard. Even ignoring or rejecting a narrative validates its existence. As Jacobs herself admits, “It has been painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I could” (Jacobs 132). But she cannot, and, despite any attempts made to do so, neither can the reader.