General Overview:
Gates begins his introduction by pointing out the fact, both obvious and somehow perennially overlooked, that in the entire history of human bondage, it was only black slaves in the New World that "created a genre of literature that at once testified against their captors and bore witness to the urge of every black slave to be free and literate" (1). Marion Wilson Starling concludes that between 1703 and 1944 (when George Washington Carver published his autobiography), over 6006 ex-slaves had narrated their captivity through interviews, essays and books. As a genre, these accounts tended to be share similar shapes and make use of similar tropes, testimony to the fact that writers of slave narratives were making use of those that came before, studying, revising, and returning to the patterns established by the slave authors who preceded them. Thus, through a continual process of imitation, repetition and telling revision of recognizable elements, the slave narrative became "a communal utterance, a collective tale, rather than merely an individual's biography"(2). Authors of slave narratives wrote to meet two purposes: to craft a compelling narrative from the events of their own lives, and to make "the narrative of their odyssey from slavery to freedom an emblem of every black person's potential for higher education and the desire to be free" (2).
Early examples of these narratives had a distinct oratorial quality that testifies to their origins as speeches on the Abolitionist circuit--often the printed texts were formal revisions of their spoken words, and thus bear the stamp of such rhetorical construction. Thus, these texts provide a rich resource for scholars interested in tracing in tracing the trope of orality in contemporary black fiction. Furthermore, these early narratives establish the precedents in what will become a long line of texts that figuratively demonstrate or emblematize the very real link between literacy and freedom in the African American imagination.
Douglass's narrative serves as the touchstone in this collection, and Gates epmhasizes Douglass's rhetorical mastery in establishing himself as "'the' black slave, [the embodiment of] the structures of thoughts and feelings of all black slaves... the resplendent, articulate part that stands for the whole, for the collective black slave community" (6). Douglass's command of metaphor, irony, synecdoche, apostrophe, and especially chiasmus "enables him to chart with fine precision in only a few pages how 'a man was made a slave'... and 'how a slave was made a man'" (6).
Gates and other scholars believe that the "silent second text" that most crucially informed the structure of Douglass's narrative was that of Equiano, who evidently both pioneered the trope of chiasmus in slave narrative and introduced the use of two distinct two voices--that of the older, wiser Equiano of the narrative "present" and of the young Equiano reacting with simple wonder to the New World of his captors. Equiano's narrative is also remarkable for its "overarching reversal-plot pattern, within which all sorts of embedded reversals take place" (9).
Mary Prince's narrative is notable as the first narrative composed by a woman, and as the book that consequently is the first to make the reader acutely aware of the costs of the sexual brutalization and exploitation of the black woman slave as well as those of the severance of the mother's "natural relation to her children and the lover of her choice" (9). No longer merely the objects of narration in the narratives written by black men, Prince's volume inaugurates black women's transformation into subjects (subjects is defined here as "those who have gained a voice"). Furthermore, thanks to a bold statement Prince makes toward the conclusion of her narrative, Prince's narrative marks "thefirst claim in the Afro-American autobiographical tradition for the black woman as singularly authorized to represent all black people, regardless of gender" (10).
Jacobs's narrative, taking the reins from Prince's, will go further, charting the sexual exploitation of black slave women in "great and painful detail" (12). To this it adds, through the depiction of the author's relationship to her maternal grandmother, "one of the earliest examples of literary female bonding in the black tradition" (12).
Jacobs's narrative
