Introduction

James Olney has written that the antebellum slave narratives are at once history, literature, autobiography, and polemic. In response to his comment, Geraldine Hajduk, the history teacher with whom I team teach, and I have developed this slave narrative project as the major component for our first-semester eleventh-grade honors American studies course (1). While ours is an honors class combining U.S. history and literature, this assignment has also been successful in the regular level class. Reading, discussing, and writing their own fictional slave narratives enables students to connect literary texts and historical contexts and experience antebellum history in a personal way. As Erica, one of our stronger students reflected, long after she had completed the project and the course:

The slave narrative was one of the most beneficial projects of the year because it was through that project that I really started to understand the idea of historicizing and the strength of the links between literature and history. I had thought about the idea of historicizing since the beginning of the class, but I think this project helped me internalize it—it made the ideas much more clear. Also, I think it was neat because it was the first project I ever did where I felt like I was finding out new things—that I wasn’t just giving the teacher a written version of something she (he) already knew and had seen a thousand times.

As Erica’s comments attest, the slave narrative can present students with an understanding of the interconnectedness of history and literature and an opportunity (often their first) to research and then carve out something new, something never before written.

The experience of “becoming” slaves also offers students of all backgrounds the chance to relive a difficult but important historical period and to understand the strength and bravery of the people who survived it. This simulation is difficult for students, because in effect they must “enslave” themselves in order to create their narratives. Experiences vary for white students; one student confided that “reading about all of the cruelties and punishments” slaves suffered “made me feel as if being white I had done something wrong.” Another reported that the project offered him a rare glimpse into the mindset of Southern slave holders as well as a newfound respect for the “incredible” bravery and “scholarly” intellect of antebellum slaves.

While black students experience this project in profoundly different ways from non-black students, many teachers err in expecting them to have special understanding of the experience of slavery. While some black students may have access to family histories that make writing a slave narrative easier or more meaningful, many others do not. In fact, the most important difference black students bring to this project is their heightened emotional and personal investment, which at once makes this assignment more difficult, as well as potentially more painful and rewarding. Jayme, a very bright and earnest black student, shared two reflections with Gerri and me. The day after submitting her slave narrative project, Jayme confided that she often avoided “talking or watching movies about slavery.” Overcoming such resistance can produce the richest rewards the project offers. At the end of the semester, Jayme offered the following observations:

My favorite essay [of the year] is the slave narrative....My ancestors told their unheard stories through me, and I felt like I was closer to them afterward....When I wrote the in-class essay for [Ernest Gaines’s] A Lesson Before Dying [later second semester], I understood what was going on. It seemed like the unit was taught with more interest in the underlying issues instead of the surface issues that everyone could understand.

For black students, the slave narrative project can offer a connection not attainable for other students, and the project can also lay a foundation that enables a richer understanding of the issue of race as it courses through the rest of American history. Responsible, sensitive, and open class discussions, while difficult to negotiate, can make these connections even more substantial.

Time Frame

The lesson takes place over a period of three months; most of the work is done outside of class, but we generally devote one hour of class time each week to in-class group discussion and group work.

Objectives

Materials

Instructors will need a class set of narratives (see suggested resources) and access to secondary materials either through a campus media center or a computer lab with Internet capability. Each student should receive the assignment sheet (included with this article) and a list of slave narrative conventions (available through the web version, <http://www.indiana.edu/~oah/magazine/>) relatively early in the process.

Procedure

Assessment

The first assessment comes with the research check and the multiple-choice test. The test ensures the students have mastered the basic aspects of antebellum history. This helps the history teacher reinforce the traditional coverage of the material, but it also guarantees that the student narratives will reflect the appropriate historical background.

The assessment of the slave narratives is based on three major criteria: form/grammar, content, and adherence to the slave narrative conventions; the grading form we use is available through the web version of this article. It is paramount to stress to students the importance of form and grammar in this particular assignment. The slave narrators were not only autobiographers; they were advocates for their people, trying to convince their white readers that former slaves could write with flair and precision comparable to other writers. As grammatical errors would weaken this effort, avoiding them becomes a vital part of the historical simulation.

Some students welcome the clear structure of the conventions and see them as a guide, but about the same amount of students feel the list stifles their creativity. Ultimately, Gerri and I determined that the rigid conventions were another valuable part of the simulation. As Olney’s research reveals, the original slave narrators had to negotiate these genre expectations in their writing. The constraints students feel in writing their narratives offer a wonderful opportunity to address how editors and publishers shape writing. Students feel that writing is a purely individual act, but it is important for them to understand that public writing is far more complicated. Genre expectations—whether the genre be slave narratives, short stories, novels, or poetry—shape the writing of individuals in direct and indirect ways. By experiencing this influence on their own writing, students can more deeply comprehend the complex relationship between author, text, and context.

Endnotes

1. Gerri and I first encountered the slave narrative project under the direction of Professor Joyce Joyce, Chicago State University.

Suggested Resources

Secondary Sources
Blockson, Charles L. The Underground Railroad: Dramatic Firsthand Accounts of Daring Escapes to Freedom. New York: Prentice Hall, 1987.

Goodheart, Lawrence B., Richard D. Brown, and Stephen G. Rabe, eds. Slavery in American Society. 3rd ed. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company, 1993.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery: 1619-1877. Edited by Eric Foner. Reprint, New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1994.

Mullane, Deirdre. Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

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. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Stampp, Kenneth Milton. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. Reissue, New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Thomas, Velma Maia. Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa to Slavery and Emancipation: A three-dimensional interactive book with photographs and documents from the Black Holocaust Exhibit. New York: Crown Publishers, 1997.

Slave Narratives

Brent, Linda [Harriet Jacobs]. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861. Reprint, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1983.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. The Classic Slave Narratives: The Life of Olaudah Equiano, The History of Mary Prince, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Mentor Books, 1987.

Jacobs, Harriet Ann. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. 1861. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Fictional Slave Narratives

Brown, William Wells. Clotel, or The President’s Daughter. 1853. Reprint, New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995.

Condé, Maryse. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

McLauren, Melton A. Celia, A Slave. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Internet Resources

American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology: <http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~HYPER/wpa/wpahome.html>. This collection contains many narratives in digital form, as well as an extensive links section.

Documenting the American South: Narratives on Slavery: <http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/neh/neh.html>. The University of North Carolina maintains this increasingly exhaustive compilation of slave narratives.

Douglass Archives of American Public Address at Northwestern University: <http://douglass.speech.nwu.edu/plai_a60.htm>. The archives contain speech guides and notes by and about Frederick Douglass.

Excerpts from Slave Narratives: <http://vi.uh.edu/pages/ mintz/primary.htm>. These excerpts are an excellent source of research through primary sources and firsthand accounts.

Library of Congress African American Mosaic Exhibition: <http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/ african/afam001.html>. This exhibition provides a comprehensive look at the entire era of American slavery, including facts about slavery, personal stories, and many historical documents.

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University: <http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/>. This award-winning site has a section devoted to American slavery and includes primary documents, contextual essays, and photographs.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery Movements to 1860: <http://www.cc.colorado.edu/ Dept/HY/HY243Ruiz/>. This site offers rich, easy to use summaries of slave life.

Slave Narrative Project
Assignment Sheet

1. Group assignments (groups of four or five):

2. Individual assignments:

1. Students will take an objective test on all research terms. The test will count toward students’ final grades.
2. Each student will compose a slave narrative. The narrative should be ten pages (double-spaced, ten point type, standard margins). Instructors will grade the narrative according to the following criteria:

• Originality/creativity
• Historical accuracy (All research should be either footnoted or endnoted in the text. Footnotes are preferable, but if the student is not using a word processor with automatic footnoting, endnotes are acceptable.)
• Adherence to slave narrative conventions (as presented in class handout)
• Grammar (All narration should be presented in formal, standard English. Dialogue, to reflect historical accuracy, may reflect non- standard English usage.)

Dave Winter teaches American literature, English, and journalism at Wheeler High School in Marietta, Georgia.