304 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 11 halftones, 1 map, notes, bibl.

Lane's economic strategy proved both a resounding success and a galling failure. His diligence and business acumen enabled him, by the time he was only twenty-two years old, to amass an astonishing sum, $1,000, to pay his mistress for his liberty. But when he set out to use the same methods to purchase his wife and children, he was stymied. His story comes to an eventual happy ending, but only after Lane is divested of his illusions about how conservative behavior, the acquisition of property, and connections among supposedly paternalistic whites would exempt a proper Negro from the rigors and injustices of slavery and racism. Readers of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man (1952) will recognize in Lane, before his liberating disillusionment at the end of his Narrative, a forerunner of Ellison's naive hero, who also must learn that role-playing to gain an advantage against white supremacy can easily lead to co-optation by the very system one is trying to exploit.

By 1848 the enthusiastic reception of The Narrative of Lunsford Lane required three additional reprintings of the book by his Boston publisher. Lane's abiding status in and importance to the antislavery movement are evidenced by the appearance of a full-length, white-authored biography, Lunsford Lane; or, Another Helper from North Carolina, in Boston in 1863.[13] The popularity of Lane's narrative may have been a factor in the publication of Moses Grandy's a year after Lane's first came out. Published initially in London in 1843 while Grandy was on an antislavery lecture tour, the Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America was quickly reprinted three times in 1844 by another Boston antislavery publisher. That Grandy and Lane were both published by antislavery presses in the same city and also claimed Boston as their place of residence when their narratives appeared suggests that these two North Carolina expatriates may well have met each other, perhaps on the antislavery circuit or in Boston's lively African American community. In any case, their narratives have much in common. Each recounts the life of an industrious, persevering enslaved family man from North Carolina, who attained his freedom in accordance with the laws of the slavocracy, but not before having been subjected to varying degrees of fraud, humiliation, and threat designed to frustrate the aspirations of even the most obliging and accommodating of slaves. The antislavery movement's strategy of publishing narratives by men like Lane and Grandy seems also to have stemmed from a common purpose: to counter the pervasive proslavery image of the slave as incompetent, shiftless, and dependent. Lane and Grandy stand out as exemplars of the white American work ethic, worthy of the admiration and sympathy of northern middle-class America. Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy "the most comprehensive firsthand account ever written of slavery and African American maritime life in the South."[14] Born in Camden, a small port on the Pasquotank River in northeastern North Carolina about forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean, Grandy worked on the water as a river ferryman and lighter pilot, a sailor on schooners on the Albemarle Sound, and a canal-boat captain in the Dismal Swamp. Grandy's matter-of-fact storytelling does not linger over the hardships of the slave waterman's life, perhaps because whatever trouble the former slave endured following the sea was counterbalanced by the relative freedom that an enslaved waterman enjoyed and by the profit he stood to earn if he hired his time successfully, as Grandy did. Two masters promised the enterprising Grandy his freedom once he paid them off. But in each case, after raising the required sum, he was rebuffed, his masters pocketing his money. One of the most remarkable features of Grandy's narrative is the detailed accounts he gives of the arguments he had with the white men who cheated him. Pausing in his normally terse narration of his life, Grandy dramatizes several scenes in which he refused to submit tamely to his masters' prevarication and double-dealing. These scenes portray a slave in a striking posture: without threatening his master physically, Grandy goes on the verbal offensive, demanding his rights in accordance with a contract, which to his mid-nineteenth-century northern readers, especially those males who believed that a man's word should be his bond, would have been all but sacred. Emboldened perhaps by the independence and self-confidence he had gained from his life on the water, Grandy shows how he converted instances of potential humiliation into opportunities for public shaming of the men who had robbed him. In a southern court of law, Grandy had no voice, of course, but his narrative shows how effectively he appealed to the court of public opinion, even in the South. Because he skillfully mobilized white male peer pressure on his master, the slave ultimately won the verdict he sought—freedom.

The Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy relates slavery's day-to-day inhumanity and its more sensational cruelties in the course of the narrator's reflections on more than forty years in bondage. After gaining his freedom, Grandy moved north, but unlike Lane and indeed most slave narrators of his era, Grandy refused to rhapsodize over life in the so-called Free States. "When I first went to the Northern States, which is about ten years ago, although I was free as to the law, I was made to feel severely the difference between persons of different colours. No black man was admitted to the same seats in churches with the whites, nor to the inside of public conveyances, nor into street coaches or cabs: we had to be content with the decks of steam-boats in all weathers, night and day,—not even our wives or children being allowed to go below, however it might rain, or snow, or freeze; in various other ways, we were treated as though we were of a race of men below the whites." Crediting abolitionists for ameliorating the worst of these practices, Grandy makes a point of stating the continuing threat of proslavery mobs and of legal sanction for the seizure and sale of "any coloured person who is said to be a slave" in the North. The former slave's prescription for combating such repression is characteristically conservative. Applauding the abolitionists for their agitation, he trusts that his fellow blacks will be accepted "on the same footing as our fellow citizens" when northern whites "see we can and do conduct ourselves with propriety." This is exactly what Grandy as narrator does in recounting the story of his life. Anticipating the counsel of Booker T. Washington to aspiring black Americans in the late nineteenth century, Moses Grandy, an early voice of the black bourgeoisie in the United States (as was Lane), closes his narrative with a deferential bow to white America's middle-class mores and profuse thanks to whites near and far, especially "our untiring friends, the abolitionists," who have helped black people get free or advance themselves in freedom. Grandy the slave—self-reliant, tough-minded, and demanding in his dealings with whites—softens and fades into a more ingratiating freeman by the end of the narrative, no doubt to leave a favorable impression on whites from whom Grandy hoped to secure contributions for the purchase of still-enslaved members of his family. Part of what makes Grandy, as well as Lane, intriguing is the question that is often asked of Washington as well: how much of what we see in these men's autobiographies is a mask—the image they wanted their white readers to have of upwardly mobile black men—and how much is real?

A glance at the title of the first edition of Thomas H. Jones's autobiography, Experience and Personal Narrative of Uncle Tom Jones; Who Was for Forty Years a Slaveø, indicates how important image-making was to the publishers of Jones's autobiography when it first appeared in Boston and New York in 1854. The immense readership that kept Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) selling briskly two years after its initial publication is the most obvious reason why Jones's publishers sought to identify him with the pious, self-sacrificial hero of Stowe's novel. Other than similar first names and a strong Christian faith, however, mid-nineteenth-century readers would have found few affinities between Thomas H. Jones, the formerly enslaved stevedore-preacher of Wilmington, North Carolina, and Stowe's idealized Negro. That does not seem to have dampened enthusiasm for subsequent editions of Jones's autobiography. In 1857 a second, somewhat revised version of Jones's story came out in Worcester, Massachusetts, under the title The Experience of Thomas H. Jones: Who Was a Slave for Forty-three Years, featuring a likeness of Jones as a well-dressed, dignified freeman. Selling well through the Civil War years, Jones's autobiography remained popular even after slavery was abolished in the United States, as attested by reprintings in 1868, 1871, 1880, and 1885. Few antebellum slave narratives remained in print after the downfall of slavery. That Jones's autobiography continued to thrive makes it one of the most long-lived of all the slave narratives published in the nineteenth century.

A likely reason for the enduring appeal of Jones's narrative is his engrossing account of how he learned to read and write as a boy while working in his Wilmington master's general store. Nine years before Jones's narrative first appeared, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) had told a similar story of a slave boy who, in defiance of his master's commands, managed to learn his letters on the streets of Baltimore in a plucky and inventive fashion that endeared him to thousands of readers in the United States and abroad. Thus the linkage of freedom to the acquisition of literacy was forged in the slave narrative. Jones followed Douglass in portraying his own dedication, as a slave boy on his own, to an incipient faith that somehow literacy would lead to freedom. Jones's account of learning to read and write, however, is more suspenseful than Douglass's—and more painful and violent. The struggle for knowledge establishes Jones, even in boyhood, as a battler, willing to face down a disdainful white boy and an outraged, accusing master in order to guard his access to learning. Unlike Moses Roper, who apologizes to his reader for lying when his route to freedom was threatened by whites, Jones unabashedly recounts the canny deceptions he used to defend himself against his intimidating master.

Through learning to read, Jones is converted to Christianity, a process that takes on noteworthy political ramifications as the youth reaches his manhood. Several black churchmen, slave and free, encourage and assist Jones in his quest for salvation, while whites provide at best behind-the-scenes support. Jones's master is as passionately opposed to his slave's becoming a Christian as he was to his becoming educated. Although by the early nineteenth century many slaveholders in the urban South had learned to accept their slaves' active participation in evangelical churches, as long as their faith did not undermine the system of slavery, few masters granted their Negroes complete spiritual equality as Christians.[15] Jones's master discerned a challenge to his authority in his young slave's determination to worship where and when his conscience dictated. The conflict between master and slave over Jones's commitment to conscience and to the African American religious community in Wilmington that sustained him through many subsequent trials and tragedies reminds us of the spiritual and psychological resources that black Christianity in the antebellum South accorded believers like Thomas Jones.

Prior to 1885, Jones's autobiographies depict his life in slavery as progressing from the acquisition of literacy through conversion to Christianity to marriage and ultimate freedom. The climax of these versions of Jones's life comes when he escapes from Wilmington in 1849 to join his family, which he had sent ahead of him, in Boston. Only hinted at in the early editions of his life story, Jones's ministry in slavery seemed sufficiently important to him in 1885, when he was probably more than eighty years old, that he added a second part to his autobiography, where, instead of describing his life in freedom, he returns to his young manhood in antebellum North Carolina to give an account of his career as a slave preacher. This decision allowed Jones to preserve one of the most informative firsthand accounts of the religious practices of slaves and of instances of whites' worshiping with blacks in the slaveholding South ever published in the nineteenth century. Because only the final edition of Jones's autobiography contains both the story of his struggle for freedom and his reminiscences of his preaching career in slavery, the 1885 version of The Experience of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-three Years is reprinted in full in this volume.

Although the narratives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones were each well received and widely distributed in their own time, they have not been as well remembered or extensively read today as the last major slave narrative written by a North Carolinian in the slavery era, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). This anonymously authored autobiography by an escapee from Edenton never achieved even a second printing in the nineteenth century, but since its authentication in the early 1980s it has become one of the most celebrated and studied texts in African American literature. Jacobs's compelling reconstruction of her experience in slavery, together with her insights into sexuality, power, and the conflicted relationship of Edenton's interlocking white and black communities, makes Incidents as important a contribution to North Carolina's distinguished library of slave narratives as the four texts included in this volume. But unlike the work of her four male contemporaries from her home state, Jacobs's autobiography exists today in multiple reprint editions that are so readily available as to obviate the need to reprint Incidents in this volume too.[16]

No other southern state can match the contemporary impact or continuing import of black North Carolina's contribution to American literature during the slavery era. None of North Carolina's white writers of the first half of the nineteenth century can claim nearly the audience that black North Carolina writers, from David Walker and George Moses Horton to Harriet Jacobs, have today. Was the extraordinary literary production of black North Carolina before 1865 attributable not solely to the talents and determination of these writers but also to the conditions from which they emerged? Was slavery in North Carolina, as experienced by Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas Jones, of a character sufficiently different from the institution as practiced elsewhere in the South that we might consider these four men somehow less disadvantaged by their enslavement and better prepared to seize the opportunities of freedom, including the literary initiative of the slave narrative? The editors of North Carolina Slave Narratives hesitate to speculate on this question, since there is no compelling reason to assume that the experiences of Roper, Lane, Grandy, and Jones in slavery can be generalized throughout an entire state. It is difficult to draw general conclusions about slavery as an institution based on accounts of enslavement as varied as those of these four unusual men. We also doubt whether the severity of an individual's experience of slavery would have any necessary correlation to a person's decision to write a narrative about his or her life in bondage. One can find little evidence in the narratives of those who endured slavery that the degree of cruelty exacted by the system materially affected their desire for freedom or, having achieved that, their willingness to denounce the oppressiveness and injustice of slavery. As Rev. James W. C. Pennington, a fugitive from Maryland, wrote in the preface to his autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849): "The mildest form of slavery, if there be such a form, looking at the chattel principle as the definition of slavery, is comparatively the worst form; for it not only keeps the slave in the most unpleasant apprehension, like a prisoner in chains awaiting his trial; but it actually, in a great majority of cases, where kind masters do exist, trains him under the most favorable circumstances the system admits of, and then plunges him into the worst of which it is capable."[17]

Survivors of slavery in North Carolina published memoirs of their antebellum trials and postbellum triumphs well into the twentieth century. Except for Friday Jones's self-published narrative, Days of Bondage (1883), and William Henry Singleton's Recollections of My Slavery Days (1922), however, postbellum North Carolina slave narratives still await scholarly attention and a twenty-first-century readership.[18] The oral histories of former slaves from North Carolina, collected during the 1930s when the Federal Writers Project deployed hundreds of interviewers in the South to elicit testimony from African Americans who remembered slavery, make up two substantial volumes in George P. Rawick's The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography.[19] John W. Blassingame's Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies contains representative samplings of various forms of short life-writing by black people from North Carolina.[20] There is, in short, a much deeper and wider stream of autobiographical writing and witnessing about slavery and freedom by black North Carolinians than can possibly be represented in one book. The aim of North Carolina Slave Narratives is simply to offer its readers access to the wellspring of this inexhaustible tradition.

Notes

1. See the Gronniosaw and Equiano narratives in ,Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772-1815, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and William L. Andrews (Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1998).
2. For further information on pioneering antislavery work by African Americans, see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 203-36; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); and Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
3. For race prejudice among early white antislavery leaders, see Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), and Richard Newman, "The Transformation of American Abolition, 1780s-1830s" (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Buffalo, 1998), chaps. 4-5.
4. David Walker, Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World (Boston: the Author, 1829). Further quotations from Walker's Appeal are taken from this text. For more information on Walker, see Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
5. See Catherine Bishir, "Black Builders in Antebellum North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review 61 (October 1984): 422-62; Gale Farlow, "Black Craftsmen in North Carolina," North Carolina Genealogical Society Journal, pt. 1: 6, no. 1 (Feb. 1985), 2-13; pt. 2: 6, no. 2 (May 1985): 91-103; Lawrence Lee, The Lower Cape Fear in Colonial Days (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); and David S. Cecelski, The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
6. Walker's Appeal, ed. Peter P. Hinks (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 104.
7. Ibid., 105.
8. All quotations from Horton's verse are from The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry, ed. Joan R. Sherman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
9. For biographical information on Horton, see ibid., 1-32, and Richard Walser, The Black Poet (New York: Philosophical Books, 1966).
10. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumon, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimkâ Weld and Sarah Grimkâ, 1822-1844 (New York: Appleton-Century, 1934), 1:390; 2:717.
11. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 107-11.
12. C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers,vol. 1, The British Isles, 1830-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
13. William G. Hawkins, Lunsford Lane; or, Another Helper from North Carolina (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1863).
14. Cecelski, The Waterman's Song, 27.
15. For a thorough account of the process by which the slaveholding South accommodated itself to the evangelizing of slaves and to their participation in religious life and institutions, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: the "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 96-150.
16. Three of the most valuable current editions of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are those edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Nell Irvin Painter (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000); and Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster (New York: Norton, 2001).
17. James W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in the State of Maryland, United States (London: Charles Gilpin, 1849), v.
18. Days of Bondage: The Autobiography of Friday Jones was rediscovered and reprinted in 1999 in a facsimile edition, with an introduction by William L. Andrews, by the J. Y. Joyner Library of East Carolina University. Singleton's Recollections of My Slavery Days, edited by Katherine Mellen Charron and David S. Cecelski, was published by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources in 1999. Among the post-Civil War narratives of slavery and freedom produced by North Carolinians are London Ferebee, A Brief History of the Slave Life of Rev. L. R . Ferebee, and the Battles of Life, and Four Years of His Ministerial Life (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards, Broughton, Printers, 1882); Allen Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times (Worcester, Mass.: Chas. W. Burbank, 1895); William Mallory, Old Plantation Days [Hamilton, Ontario]: s.n., [1902?]; Morgan L. Latta, The History of My Life and Work: Autobiography by Rev. M. L. Latta, A.M., D.D. (Raleigh, N.C.: the Author, 1903; and William H. Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit; or, Fifteen Years in Slavery (Eau Claire, Wis.: James H. Tifft, 1913. A diary written by William Gould, a fugitive slave from Wilmington, North Carolina, who became a sailor in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, has been edited by his great-grandson William B. Gould IV under the title Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
19. The North Carolina Narratives are volumes 14 and 15 in series 2 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972-79). For critical commentary on the oral histories of ex-slaves, see Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); and Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds. Remembering Slavery (New York: New Press, 1998).
20. John W. Blassingame, ed. Slave Testimony (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).

Suggested Reading

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Ball, Edward. Slaves in the Family. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1998.

Bland, Sterling Lecater. Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Boles, John B. Black Southerners, 1619-1869. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.

Bolster, W. Jeffrey. "'To Feel like a Man': Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800-1860." In A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, 354-81. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Cecelski, David. The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Cornelius, Janet Duitsman. "When I Can Read My Title Clear": Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.

Crow, Jeffrey J., Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley. A History of African Americans in North Carolina. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1992.

Escott, Paul D. Slavery Remembered: The Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. 2d ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1972.

Jacobs, Donald M., ed. Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Johnson, Guion G. Ante-bellum North Carolina: A Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937.

Miller, Randall M., and John David Smith. Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.

Olney, James. "'I Was Born': Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature." In The Slave's Narrative, edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 148-75. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Ripley, C. Peter, ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Vol. 1, The British Isles, 1830-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988.

Stevenson, Brenda E. Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.