Samuel Williams and His World: Before the War and After the Union
Characteristics of Slave Narratives
While each autobiography, memoir, or narrative written by a person who experienced American slavery is extremely personal, readers cannot fail to notice certain patterns and traditions found in such works. Scholar James Olney, in particular, famously outlined some of the best-known traits or tropes found in slave narratives of the Abolitionist era in his article, "I Was Born": Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature. There, Olney creates a list of almost twenty characteristics that emerged from the slave narrative genre.
Williams’s memoir was written at least 50 years after the Civil War. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Williams omitted or reformulated many of the slave narrative characteristics reflected in Olney's list. Williams's writing was for a different audience and in a different historical context. After all, he no longer needed to argue against the existence of slavery. And yet, he certainly felt compelled to argue against false nostalgia for slavery that developed quickly amongst white Americans immediately after the Civil War ended. Moreover, he wrote and published his book with a black-owned press operated by his relatives and had no need to appease expectations of a sponsoring organization which many Abolitionist-era slave narrative writers did. Nonetheless, his narrative shares some of these slave narrative traits, illustrating the ways in which slave narrative writing was carried into the twentieth century.
Olney's list of slave narrative characteristics is used in the chart below to illuminate Williams's reformulation of the slave narrative standard.
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OLNEY'S SLAVE NARRATIVE TRAITS |
PRESENT IN WILLIAMS’S WORK? |
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An engraved portrait, signed by the narrator. |
No |
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A title page that includes the claim, as an integral part of the title, “Written by Himself” or some close variant: “Written from a statement of Facts Made by Himself”; “Written by a Friend, as Related to Him by Brother Jones.” |
No However, “BY SAM ALECKSON” is printed in bold on the front page with no reference to an amanuensis or editor. |
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A handful of testimonials and/or one or more prefaces or introductions written either by a white abolitionist friend of the narrator (William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips) or by a white amanuensis/editor/author actually responsible for the text (John Greenleaf Whittier, David Wilson, Louis Alexis Chamerovzow). In these prefaces the reader is told that the narrative is a “plain, unvarnished tale” and that nothing “has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination” – indeed, the tale, it is claimed, understates the horrors of slavery. |
Yes/No The absence of a white influence on Williams’s memoir may contribute to some of the missing narrative tropes those white writers included in an earlier era of slave narratives. And while Williams’s memoir does not incorporate this trait in a separate preface, his poetic epigraph by William Shakespeare serves this same purpose: “I will a plain unvarnished tale deliver.” |
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A poetic epigraph. |
Yes “I will a plain unvarnished tale deliver.” -Shakespeare. |
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A first sentence beginning, “I was born. . .” and then specifying a place but not a date of birth. |
Yes Unlike earlier slave narratives, however, Williams does include his date of birth. His opening line of chapter one is “I WAS born in Charleston, South Carolina in the year, 1852.” |
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A sketchy account of parentage, often involving a white father. |
No He is clear and emphatic about the nature of his close family unit, choosing the pen name “Aleckson” for himself, likely in memory of his beloved father, Alexander Williams. |
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Description of a cruel master, mistress, or overseer, details of first observed whipping and numerous subsequent whippings, with women very frequently the victims. |
Yes/No He depicts whippings and abuse of men and women, though not always in the graphic and emphatic manner of memoirs from earlier eras. However, he ensures any kindliness of individual enslavers is undercut by the mercurial violence inherent to the system. |
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An account of one extraordinary strong, hardworking slave, often described as a “pure African,” who refuses to be whipped because there is no reason for it. |
Yes/No He does not write of any powerful “African” slave who is especially abused or resistant, but he certainly depicts the story of individuals who are whipped and abused unjustly. |
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Record of the barriers raised against slave literacy and the overwhelming difficulties encountered in learning to read and write. |
Yes While he frames his discussion of literacy lovingly, it nonetheless depicts his own good fortune in instruction as an exception worth discussing because it was so very precious to him. |
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Description of a “Christian” slaveholder (often of one such dying in terror) and the accompanying claim that “Christian” slaveholders are invariably worse than those professing no religion. |
Yes/No Williams makes some references to the Christian qualities of various enslavers (the Jones ladies, for example) but with the presumed goal of demonstrating their kindly nature, not necessarily revealing their hypocrisy. |
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Description of the amounts and kinds of food and clothing given to slave, the work required of them, including the pattern of a day, week, a year. |
Yes/No Williams focuses on food with care and mentions the ways in which clothing is provided well or poorly by various enslavers. He is less detailed in his accounting of workloads and tasks, but as a young child under slavery his sense of work responsibilities and task patters was likely less informed than that of those who had endured slavery as adults. |
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Descriptions of patrols, of failed attempts to escape, of pursuit by men and dogs. |
No |
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Description of successful attempt(s) to escape, lying by during the day, traveling by night guided by the North Star, reception in a free state by Quakers who offer a lavish breakfast and much genial thee/thou conversation. |
No |
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Reflections on slavery. |
Yes One example of his reflections: “There is nothing good to be said of American slavery. I know it is sometimes customary to speak of its bright and its dark sides. I am not prepared to admit that it had any bright sides, unless it was the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln…” |
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Taking of a new last name (frequently one suggested by a white abolitionist) to accord with a new social identity as a free man, but retention of first name as a mark of continuity of individual identity. |
Yes |
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An appendix or appendices composed of documentary material: bills of sale, details of purchase from slavery, newspaper items, further reflections on slavery, sermons, anti-slavery speeches, poems, appeals to the reader for funds and moral support in the battle against slavery. |
No |
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