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Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

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Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library [of Congress] digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress.

Source: Library of Congress

In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to write down their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. John A. Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP (and the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress), was extremely interested in the ex-slave material he received from these states. In 1937 he directed the remaining states involved in the project to carry out interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may sometimes be offensive to today's readers (see A Note on the Language of the Narratives ). The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of informants and their houses. The interviewers then turned the narratives over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C. The administrative files accompanying the narratives detail the information supplied to field workers as well as subjects of concern to state directors of the FWP. For more information about the interviewers, the people interviewed, and the processes of collection and compilation, see Norman Yetman's essay which accompanies this online collection.

In 1939, the FWP lost its funding, and the states were ordered to send whatever manuscripts they had collected to Washington. Once most of the materials had arrived at the Library of Congress, Benjamin A. Botkin, the folklore editor of the FWP who later became head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, undertook the remaining editing and indexing of the narratives and selected the photographs for inclusion. As noted above, he organized the narratives by state, and then alphabetically by name of informant within each state, collecting them in 1941 into seventeen bound volumes in thirty-three parts under the title Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C., 1941). The multivolume set and other project files, including some earlier unbound annotated versions of the narratives, are housed in the Manuscript Division and described in the finding aid for the records of the WPA.

Other records relating to the ex-slave project are among the FWP files at the National Archives and Records Administration (Record Group 69.5.5) and are described in the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States, Vol. I . (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1995). Volumes 2-17 of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography , edited by George P. Rawick and others (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79), present these narratives with a slightly different organization; the later volumes of Rawick's series also include ex-slave interviews housed in other archives. Anthologies containing selections from the Library of Congress collection include the Federal Writers' Project's Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery , edited by B. A. Botkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945) and Voices from Slavery (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), edited by Norman R. Yetman, author of An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives under the Articles and Essays tab. For additional works using these narratives as well as other slave narratives, please see the list of Related Resources .

Use WPA Slave Narratives to write an academic research paper. The WPA Slave Narratives would be considered a primary source. Primary sources are documents, images or artifacts that provide firsthand testimony or direct evidence concerning an historical topic under research investigation. Primary sources are original documents created or experienced contemporaneously with the event being researched. It is typically necessary to utilize a primary source in a research paper, along with secondary sources.

Access to WPA Slave Narratives

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"Dialect and the Construction of Southern Identity in the Ex-Slave Narratives" by Lauren Tilton Abstract: In the 1930s, the New Deal provided employment for cultural workers through organizations like the Federal Writers' Project (FWP). The federal government sent writers across the country to collect life histories, an emerging genre at the intersection of oral history, ethnography, and literature. Among the most prominent and debated are the Ex-Slave Narratives, a collection of over 2,400 life histories with former enslaved peoples. Rather than focusing on the Ex-Slave Narratives as a source for understanding the antebellum era or American south during Reconstruction, this article explores how the writing style of the narratives shaped the construction of race and southern identity in the late 1930s. Using text analysis, I show how dialect was not only racialized but also connected to a particular (cultural) geography—the American South. I build off of Catherine Stewart's argument that Ex-Slave Narratives dialect was racialized and often worked to deny interviewees rights to full citizenship by using this powerful representational, rhetorical strategy to "other" formerly enslaved people and therefore deny their full selfhood in the interviews. At the same time, the FWP's Southern Life Histories Project—which focused on life histories with laborers in the lowest economic strata residing in the South—marked dialect as a regional feature. Dialect, therefore, also signified that the person speaking was rural, uneducated, and Southern. This came at a time when Southern life was under a microscope; the national debate centered around whether the South was the reason the nation struggled to end the Great Depression and progress. Dialect effectively marked a person as poor, black, and southern, leaving those interviewed in the Ex-Slave Narratives representationally on the margins of US society.
Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism? In the 1930s, the federal government sent (mostly white) interviewers to learn about slavery from former slaves. Can we trust the stories they brought back?
“‘Lawdy! I Was Sho’ Happy When I Was a Slave!’: Manipulative Editing in the WPA Former-Slave Narratives from Mississippi” by Ellen Hampton Abstract: Examining the typescripts and manuscripts of interviews in the Mississippi state archives from the WPA project on former slaves reveals the often heavy-handed and manipulative editing that occurred before the narratives were published. Editing occurred on both the state and federal level, apparently aimed both at mitigating the evils of slavery as an institution, and at reinforcing minstrel-show stereotypes of African-Americans as ignorant and colorful. The impetus for collecting the interviews – more than 2,000 were done in 17 states – was to try to preserve some knowledge of the experience of slavery in the American South. In the end, it perhaps more accurately preserved the deep racial prejudice that continued to fester more than 70 years after emancipation. Revealing the editing changes made in these interviews, which are available on the Library of Congress American Memory website, is also a reminder to historians that even so-called primary documents can have an embedded agenda.

“No’m, I aint tellin’ no lies. It de gospel truf”: Historical Memory and the Slave Narrative Collection Article by Sarah Whitwell published in The Activist History Review
The Limitations of the Slave Narrative Collection The Library of Congress addresses Problems of Memory, Race and Representativeness, and asks Should the Slave Narrative Collection Be Used?
"Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It: The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past" by Clint Smith
Using the WPA Slave Narratives on the Teaching Hard History Podcast Episode 11, Season 2: From 1936 to 1938, the Federal Writers’ Project collected stories from people who had been enslaved. The WPA Slave Narrative Collection at the Library of Congress is a valuable resource; these oral histories are also problematic. Interpreting these narratives within literary and historical context, students can develop primary source literacy. Historian Cynthia Lynn Lyerly outlines unique insights these texts can add to your curriculum
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In the aftermath of the Turner revolt and the South’ s iron-fisted response to it, a new generation of reformers in the North proclaimed their uncompromising opposition to slavery. Led by the crusading white journalist William Lloyd Garrison, these abolitionists demanded the immediate end of slavery throughout the United States. Free blacks in the North lent their support to Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, editing newspapers, holding conventions, circulating petitions, and investing their money in protest actions. Searching for a means of galvanizing public concern for the slave as “a man and a brother,” this generation of black and white radical abolitionists began actively soliciting and publicizing the narratives of fugitive slaves. Southern response to the Turner revolt spurred anti-slavery agitation, including the publication of slave narratives. From 1830 to the end of the slavery era, the fugitive slave narrative dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America, far outnumbering the autobiographies of free people of color, not to mention the handful of novels published by African Americans. Most of the major authors of African American literature before 1865, such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, launched their writing careers via narratives of their experience as slaves.

Advertised in the abolitionist press and sold at antislavery meetings throughout the English-speaking world, a significant number of antebellum slave narratives went through multiple editions and sold in the tens of thousands. The widespread, sometimes international, popularity of the narratives of celebrated fugitives such as Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, Henry Bibb, and William and Ellen Craft was not solely attributable to the publicity the narratives received from the antislavery movement. Readers could see that, as one reviewer put it, "the slave who endeavours to recover his freedom is associating with himself no small part of the romance of the time." To the noted transcendentalist clergyman Theodore Parker, slave narratives qualified ironically as the only indigenous literary form that America, the reputed “land of the free,” had contributed to world literature. To Parker, "all the original romance of Americans is in [the slave narratives], not in the white man’s novel."

In 1845 the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself became an antebellum international best seller. A fugitive from Maryland slavery, Douglass spent four years honing his skills as an abolitionist lecturer before setting about the task of writing his autobiography. The genius of Douglass’s Narrative , often considered the epitome of the slave narrative Douglass's Narrative links literacy and freedom. before 1865, was its linkage of the author’s adult quest for freedom to his boyhood pursuit of literacy, thereby creating a lasting ideal of the African American hero committed to intellectual achievement and independence as well as physical freedom. During the first five years of its publication, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is estimated to have sold at least 30,000 copies, a greater number of sales than Moby-Dick (1851), Walden (1854), and Song of Myself (1855) could have amassed in common during the first five years of their publication.

In the late 1840s well-known fugitive slaves such as William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, James W. C. Pennington, and William and Ellen Craft reinforced the rhetorical self-consciousness of the slave narrative by incorporating into their stories trickster motifs from African American folk culture, extensive literary and biblical allusion, and a picaresque perspective on the meaning of the slave’s flight from bondage to freedom. As social and political conflict in the United States at mid-century centered more and more on the presence and fate of African Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom expanded the scope of the slave narrative to critique racism. Americans, the slave narrative took on an unprecedented urgency and candor, unmasking as never before the moral and social complexities of the American caste and class system in the North as well as the South. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass’s second autobiography, conducted a fresh inquiry into the meaning of slavery and freedom, adopting the standpoint of one who had spent enough time in the so-called “free states” to understand how pervasive racism and paternalism were, even among the most liberal whites, the Garrisonians themselves. Harriet Jacobs, the earliest known African American female slave to author her own narrative, also challenged conventional ideas about slavery and freedom in her strikingly original Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861).

Jacobs’s autobiography shows how sexual exploitation made slavery especially oppressive for black women. But in demonstrating how she fought Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl challenges the image of the female slave as victim. back and ultimately gained both her own freedom and that of her two children, Jacobs proved the inadequacy of the image of victim that had been pervasively applied to female slaves in the male-authored slave narrative. The writing of Jacobs; the feminist oratory of the "Libyan sybil," Sojourner Truth; and the renowned example of Harriet Tubman, the fearless conductor of runaways on the Underground Railroad, enriched African American literature with new models of female self-expression and heroism.

In the 1850s, slave narratives contributed to the mounting national debate over slavery. The most widely read and hotly disputed American novel of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), was profoundly influenced by its author’ s reading of slave narratives, to which she owed many graphic incidents and the models for some of her most memorable characters. Uncle Tom, she explained, had been inspired by her reading of The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada (1849). Stowe’s novel, in turn, spurred the publication of narratives that promised to out-do her in exposing the full truth about the horrors of slavery. The most famous—and widely read—was Solomon Northup’s ghostwritten autobiography, whose title summed up his shocking story: Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana (1853).

After the abolition of slavery in 1865 former slaves continued to publish their autobiographies, often to show how the rigors of slavery had prepared them for full participation in the post-Civil War social and economic order. A notable example of the post-Civil War slave narrative flowed from the pen of Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, whose Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868) recounted the author’s successful rise from enslavement to independent businesswoman and confidante to the First Lady of the United States, Mary Todd Lincoln. The influence of the slave narrative reaches into the twentieth-first century. In November 1874, Mark Twain broke into the prestigious Atlantic Monthly with “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” the narrative of Mary Ann Cord, the Clemens family cook, who had been enslaved for more than sixty years before emancipation. Ten years later, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , ostensibly the autobiography of a poor-white teenager who tries to help an older slave escape, became a major white contribution to the American fugitive slave narrative. The biggest selling of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century slave narratives was Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901), a classic American success story that extolled African American progress and interracial cooperation in the Black Belt of the deep South since the end of slavery in 1865. Notable twentieth-century African American autobiographies, such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), as well as prize-winning novels such as William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1989), and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2004), bear the unmistakable imprint of the slave narrative, particularly in probing the origins of psychological as well as social oppression and in their searching critique of the meaning of freedom for twentieth-century black and white Americans alike.

Guiding Student Discussion

What does the title page of a slave narrative tell us?

The title page of a slave narrative bears significant clues as to the authorship of the narrative itself. Subtitles often convey the role that the subject named in the narrative’s title actually played in the production of the narrative. The narratives of Equiano, Grimes, Douglass, Wells Brown, and Bibb, for instance, all bear the subtitle Written by Himself . Though the title page of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl does not name the “Slave Girl” whose life story follows, the subtitle of the book states that it was Written by Herself . Narratives that identify the subject and author of the text as one and the same represent, in the eyes of many scholars, the most authoritative texts in the tradition. Ask students why it would be important for white readers of the mid-nineteenth century to see the Written by Himself or Herself subtitle in these narratives? Why is authorship of one’s own story so important? Students should understand that identifying a slave narrator as literate and capable of independent literary expression was a powerful way to combat a key proslavery myth, which held that slaves were unself-conscious and incapable of mastering the arts of literacy. Students should remember that in mid-nineteenth-century America, where many whites had had little or no schooling, literacy was a marker of social prestige and economic power.

What is the significance of the prefaces and introductions found in many slave narratives?

Typically, the antebellum slave narrative carries a black message inside a white envelope. Prefatory (and sometimes appended) matter by whites attest to the reliability and good character of the black narrator while calling attention to what the narrative would reveal about the moral abominations of slavery. Notable examples of white prefaces to black texts (only a small minority of nineteenth-century slave narratives carry a preface by a person of African descent) are William Lloyd Garrison’s in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Lydia Maria Child’s in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . In both cases, the prefaces seek to authenticate the veracity of the narratives that follow them. A good question to ask students is, why did these narratives need such prefaces? Would the race or color of the preface writer—both Garrison and Child were white—matter to the slave narratives’ primarily white readership?

What is the plot of most pre-Civil War slave narratives?

Beyond the prefatory matter, the former slave’s autobiographical narrative generally centers on his or her rite of passage from slavery in the South to freedom in the North. Usually, the antebellum slave narrator portrays slavery as a condition of extreme physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual deprivation, a kind of hell on earth. Since most antebellum narratives Slave narratives adapt the rite-of-passage story to propagandistic purposes. were intended to serve a propagandistic purpose—to illustrate in graphic but authoritative terms the hardships of actual day-to-day life in slavery—the focus of most of these narratives tends to be more on the institution of slavery rather than on the consciousness of the individual slave. Students will learn a great deal from some narratives—such as those of Grimes, Bibb, and Northup—about the day-to-day grind of back-breaking agricultural labor that we often associate with slavery. Such narratives are not always as self-reflective as readers today might like. Students should understand that fugitive slaves could not assume that whites were interested in what they thought or how they felt about matters other than slavery.

In studying such narratives as Douglass’s, Wells Brown’s, Jacobs’s, and the Crafts’, students might explore what slavery was like for comparatively fortunate slaves. Douglass, for instance, spent a crucial part of his boyhood in a port city where he had access to information and had the opportunity to learn to read. In his young manhood he had the opportunity to learn a trade and hire his time in Baltimore. Wells Brown, another skilled slave, had the advantage of working primarily as a house servant, not a field hand. So did Harriet Jacobs and William and Ellen Craft. Students could ask themselves why slaves with these comparative advantages were the ones who not only risked everything to escape but then wrote so passionately and eloquently about the injustices of their enslavement.

What is the turning-point in a slave narrative? Is it when the slave resolves to escape or when he or she arrives in the North? How does the slave arrive at the decision to escape? Does the narrator portray a process of growing awareness, dissatisfaction, and resistance that culminates in the escape effort?

Most slave narratives portray a process by which the narrator realizes the injustices and dangers facing him or her, tries to resist them—sometimes physically, sometimes through deceit or verbal opposition—but eventually resolves to risk everything for the sake of freedom.

Precipitating the narrator’s decision to escape is usually some sort of personal crisis, such as the sale or death of a loved one (Box Brown), insults and cruelties too great to bear (Pennington), a dark night of the soul (Henson), or simply a rare opportunity too inviting to forego (Jacobs). Many readers were fascinated by the harrowing accounts of flight featured in some of the most popular slave narratives, such as Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery, Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide (1849) and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860). Douglass, on the other hand, refused to disclose the means by which he made his escape, thereby directly contradicting the expectations of the form he himself had adopted. Why would Douglass make such a decision, knowing his readership wanted to read these kinds of escape accounts (in his post-Civil War Life and Times of Frederick Douglass , he explained how he made his way to freedom)?

How do most slave narratives end? How do they portray life in the North?

Impelled by faith in God and a commitment to liberty and human dignity comparable (some narrators insist) to that of America’ s Founders, the slave’s arduous quest for freedom almost always climaxes in his or her arrival in the North. In some well-known antebellum narratives, the attainment of freedom is signaled not simply by reaching the so-called free states but by renaming oneself (Douglass and William Wells Brown make a point of explaining why), finding employment, marrying, and, in some cases, dedicating significant energy to antislavery activism. Few slave narratives condemn the widespread racial discrimination and injustice that African Americans endured in the North. The Life of William Grimes is a remarkable exception. If students compare the final paragraphs of this autobiography and the last chapter of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to the final scene of Douglass’s Narrative (see below), they will have a chance to compare and contrast three different perspectives on life in the North.

Different Perspectives on Life in the North from Three Slave Narratives

From The Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself (1825) PDF file . . . Those slaves who have kind masters, are perhaps as happy as the generality of mankind. They are not aware that their condition can be better, and I dont know as it can: indeed it cannot by their own exertions. I would advise no slave to leave his master. If he runs away, he is most sure to be taken. If he is not, he will ever be in the apprehension of it. And I do think there is no inducement for a slave to leave his master, and be set free in the northern states. I have had to work hard; I have been often cheated, insulted, abused, and injured; yet a black man, if he will be industrious and honest, he can get along here as well as any one who is poor, and in a situation to be imposed on. I have been very unfortunate in life in this respect. Notwithstanding all my struggles and sufferings, and injuries, I have been an honest man. There is no one who can come forward and say he knows any thing against Grimes. This I know, that I have been punished for being suspected of things, of which, some of those who were loudest against me, were actually guilty. The practice of warning poor people out of town is very cruel. It may be necessary that towns should have that power, otherwise some might be overrun with paupers. But it is mighty apt to be abused. A poor man just gets a going in business, and is then warned to depart. Perhaps he has a family, and dont know where to go, or what to do. I am a poor man, and ignorant. But I am a man of sense. I have seen them contributing at church for the heathen, to build churches, and send out preachers to them, yet there was no place where I could get a seat in the church. I knew in New-Haven, Indians and negroes, come from a great many thousand miles, sent to be educated, while there were people I knew in the town, cold and hungry, and ignorant. They have kind of societies to make clothes, for those, who they say, go naked in their own countries. The ladies sometimes do this at one end of a town, while their father’s who may happen to be selectmen, may be warning a poor man and his family, out at the other end, for fear they may have to be buried at the state expense. It sounds rather strange upon a man’s ear, who feels that he is friendless and abused in society, to hear so many speeches about charity; for I was always inclined to be observing. I have forebore to mention names in my history where it might give the least pain, in this I have made it less interesting and injured myself. I may sometimes be a little mistaken, as I have to write from memory, and there is a great deal I have omitted from want of recollection at the time of writing. I cannot speak as I feel on some subjects. If those who read my history, think I have not led a life of trial, I have failed to give a correct representation. I think I must be Forty years of age but don’t know; I could not tell my wife my age. I have learned to read and write pretty well; if I had opportunity I could learn very fast. My wife has a tolerable good education, which has been a help to me. I hope some will buy my books from charity, but I am no beggar. I am now entirely destitute of property; where and how I shall live I don’t know; where and how I shall die I dont know, but I hope I may be prepared. If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave. I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America. Let the skin of an American slave, bind the charter of American Liberty. From Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) PDF file Mrs. Bruce came to me and entreated me to leave the city the next morning. She said her house was watched, and it was possible that some clew to me might be obtained. I refused to take her advice. She pleaded with an earnest tenderness, that ought to have moved me; but I was in a bitter, disheartened mood. I was weary of flying from pillar to post. I had been chased during half my life, and it seemed as if the chase was never to end. There I sat, in that great city [New York], guiltless of crime, yet not daring to worship God in any of the churches. I heard the bells ringing for afternoon service, and, with contemptuous sarcasm, I said, "Will the preachers take for their text, ’Proclaim liberty to the captive, and the opening of prison doors to them that are bound’? or will they preach from the text, ’Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you’?" Oppressed Poles and Hungarians could find a safe refuge in that city; John Mitchell was free to proclaim in the City Hall his desire for "a plantation well stocked with slaves;" but there I sat, an oppressed American, not daring to show my face. God forgive the black and bitter thoughts I indulged on that Sabbath day! The Scripture says, "Oppression makes even a wise man mad;" and I was not wise. I had been told that Mr. Dodge [Jacobs’s current owner] said his wife had never signed away her right to my children, and if he could not get me, he would take them. This it was, more than any thing else, that roused such a tempest in my soul. Benjamin was with his uncle William in California, but my innocent young daughter had come to spend a vacation with me. I thought of what I had suffered in slavery at her age, and my heart was like a tiger’s when a hunter tries to seize her young. Dear Mrs. Bruce! I seem to see the expression of her face, as she turned away discouraged by my obstinate mood. Finding her expostulations unavailing, she sent Ellen to entreat me. When ten o’clock in the evening arrived and Ellen had not returned, this watchful and unwearied friend became anxious. She came to us in a carriage, bringing a well-filled trunk for my journey-trusting that by this time I would listen to reason. I yielded to her, as I ought to have done before. The next day, baby and I set out in a heavy snow storm, bound for New England again. I received letters from the City of Iniquity, addressed to me under an assumed name. In a few days one came from Mrs. Bruce, informing me that my new master was still searching for me, and that she intended to put an end to this persecution by buying my freedom. I felt grateful for the kindness that prompted this offer, but the idea was not so pleasant to me as might have been expected. The more my mind had become enlightened, the more difficult it was for me to consider myself an article of property; and to pay money to those who had so grievously oppressed me seemed like taking from my sufferings the glory of triumph. I wrote to Mrs. Bruce, thanking her, but saying that being sold from one owner to another seemed too much like slavery; that such a great obligation could not be easily cancelled; and that I preferred to go to my brother in California. Without my knowledge, Mrs. Bruce employed a gentleman in New York to enter into negotiations with Mr. Dodge. He proposed to pay three hundred dollars down, if Mr. Dodge would sell me, and enter into obligations to relinquish all claim to me or my children forever after. He who called himself my master said he scorned so small an offer for such a valuable servant. The gentleman replied, "You can do as you choose, sir. If you reject this offer you will never get any thing; for the woman has friends who will convey her and her children out of the country." Mr. Dodge concluded that "half a loaf was better than no bread," and he agreed to the proffered terms. By the next mail I received this brief letter from Mrs. Bruce: "I am rejoiced to tell you that the money for your freedom has been paid to Mr. Dodge. Come home to-morrow. I long to see you and my sweet babe." My brain reeled as I read these lines. A gentleman near me said, "It’s true; I have seen the bill of sale." "The bill of sale!" Those words struck me like a blow. So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. I well know the value of that bit of paper; but much as I love freedom, I do not like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged to him or his. I had objected to having my freedom bought, yet I must confess that when it was done I felt as if a heavy load had been lifted from my weary shoulders. When I rode home in the cars I was no longer afraid to unveil my face and look at people as they passed. I should have been glad to have met Daniel Dodge himself; to have had him seen me and known me, that he might have mourned over the untoward circumstances which compelled him to sell me for three hundred dollars. When I reached home, the arms of my benefactress were thrown round me, and our tears mingled. As soon as she could speak, she said, "O Linda, I’m so glad it’s all over! You wrote to me as if you thought you were going to be transferred from one owner to another. But I did not buy you for your services. I should have done just the same, if you had been going to sail for California to-morrow. I should, at least, have the satisfaction of knowing that you left me a free woman." My heart was exceedingly full. I remembered how my poor father had tried to buy me, when I was a small child, and how he had been disappointed. I hoped his spirit was rejoicing over me now. I remembered how my good old grandmother had laid up her earnings to purchase me in later years, and how often her plans had been frustrated. How that faithful, loving old heart would leap for joy, if she could look on me and my children now that we were free! My relatives had been foiled in all their efforts, but God had raised me up a friend among strangers, who had bestowed on me the precious, long-desired boon. Friend! It is a common word, often lightly used. Like other good and beautiful things, it may be tarnished by careless handling; but when I speak of Mrs. Bruce as my friend, the word is sacred. My grandmother lived to rejoice in my freedom; but not long after, a letter came with a black seal. She had gone "where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest." Time passed on, and a paper came to me from the south, containing an obituary notice of my uncle Phillip. It was the only case I ever knew of such an honor conferred upon a colored person. It was written by one of his friends, and contained these words: "Now that death has laid him low, they call him a good man and a useful citizen; but what are eulogies to the black man, when the world has faded from his vision? It does not require man’s praise to obtain rest in God’s kingdom." So they called a colored man a citizen ! Strange words to be uttered in that region! Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition. The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children’s sake far more than for my own. But God so orders circumstances as to keep me with my friend Mrs. Bruce. Love, duty, gratitude, also bind me to her side. It is a privilege to serve her who pities my oppressed people, and who has bestowed the inestimable boon of freedom on me and my children. 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. Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea. From Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) PDF file I was quite disappointed at the general appearance of things in New Bedford. The impression which I had received respecting the character and condition of the people of the north, I found to be singularly erroneous, I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts, and scarcely any of the luxuries, of life were enjoyed at the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people owned no slaves. I supposed that they were about upon a level with the non-slaveholding population of the south. I knew they were exceedingly poor, and I had been accustomed to regard their poverty as the necessary consequence of their being non-slaveholders. I had somehow imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth, and very little refinement. And upon coming to the north, I expected to meet with a rough, hard-handed, and uncultivated population, living in the most Spartan-like simplicity, knowing nothing of the ease, luxury, pomp, and grandeur of southern slaveholders. Such being my conjectures, any one acquainted with the appearance of New Bedford may very readily infer how palpably I must have seen my mistake. In the afternoon of the day when I reached New Bedford, I visited the wharves, to take a view of the shipping. Here I found myself surrounded with the strongest proofs of wealth. Lying at the wharves, and riding in the stream, I saw many ships of the finest model, in the best order, and of the largest size. Upon the right and left, I was walled in by granite warehouses of the widest dimensions, stowed to their utmost capacity with the necessaries and comforts of life. Added to this, almost every body seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared with what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore. There were no loud songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which betokened the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing, as well as a sense of his own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly strange. From the wharves I strolled around and over the town, gazing with wonder and admiration at the splendid churches, beautiful dwellings, and finely-cultivated gardens; evincing an amount of wealth, comfort, taste, and refinement, such as I had never seen in any part of slaveholding Maryland. Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked children and barefooted women, such as I had been accustomed to see in Hillsborough, Easton, St. Michael’s, and Baltimore. The people looked more able, stronger, healthier, and happier, than those of Maryland. I was for once made glad by a view of extreme wealth, without being saddened by seeing extreme poverty. But the most astonishing as well as the most interesting thing to me was the condition of the colored people, a great many of whom, like myself, had escaped thither as a refuge from the hunters of men. I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland. I will venture to assert that my friend Mr. Nathan Johnson (of whom I can say with a grateful heart, "I was hungry, and he gave me meat; I was thirsty, and he gave me drink; I was a stranger, and he took me in") lived in a neater house; dined at a better table; took, paid for, and read, more newspapers; better understood the moral, religious, and political character of the nation,--than nine tenths of the slaveholders in Talbot county, Maryland. Yet Mr. Johnson was a working man. His hands were hardened by toil, and not his alone, but those also of Mrs. Johnson. I found the colored people much more spirited than I had supposed they would be. I found among them a determination to protect each other from the blood-thirsty kidnapper, at all hazards. Soon after my arrival, I was told of a circumstance which illustrated their spirit. A colored man and a fugitive slave were on unfriendly terms. The former was heard to threaten the latter with informing his master of his whereabouts. Straightway a meeting was called among the colored people, under the stereotyped notice, "Business of importance!" The betrayer was invited to attend. The people came at the appointed hour, and organized the meeting by appointing a very religious old gentleman as president, who, I believe, made a prayer, after which he addressed the meeting as follows: " Friends, we have got him here, and I would recommend that you young men just take him outside the door, and kill him! " With this, a number of them bolted at him; but they were intercepted by some more timid than themselves, and the betrayer escaped their vengeance, and has not been seen in New Bedford since. I believe there have been no more such threats, and should there be hereafter, I doubt not that death would be the consequence. I found employment, the third day after my arrival, in stowing a sloop with a load of oil. It was new, dirty, and hard work for me; but I went at it with a glad heart and a willing hand. I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and newly-married wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence. When I got through with that job, I went in pursuit of a job of calking; but such was the strength of prejudice against color, among the white calkers, that they refused to work with me, and of course I could get no employment. * Finding my trade of no immediate benefit, I threw off my calking habiliments, and prepared myself to do any kind of work I could get to do. Mr. Johnson kindly let me have his wood-horse and saw, and I very soon found myself a plenty of work. There was no work too hard—none too dirty. I was ready to saw wood, shovel coal, carry the hod, sweep the chimney, or roll oil casks,—all of which I did for nearly three years in New Bedford, before I became known to the anti-slavery world. In about four months after I went to New Bedford, there came a young man to me, and inquired if I did not wish to take the "Liberator." I told him I did; but, just having made my escape from slavery, I remarked that I was unable to pay for it then. I, however, finally became a subscriber to it. The paper came, and I read it from week to week with such feelings as it would be quite idle for me to attempt to describe. The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire. Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds—its scathing denunciations of slaveholders—its faithful exposures of slavery—and its powerful attacks upon the upholders of the institution—sent a thrill of joy through my soul, such as I had never felt before! I had not long been a reader of the "Liberator," before I got a pretty correct idea of the principles, measures and spirit of the anti-slavery reform. I took right hold of the cause. I could do but little; but what I could, I did with a joyful heart, and never felt happier than when in an anti-slavery meeting. I seldom had much to say at the meetings, because what I wanted to say was said so much better by others. But, while attending an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket, on the 11th of August, 1841, I felt strongly moved to speak, and was at the same time much urged to do so by Mr. William C. Coffin, a gentleman who had heard me speak in the colored people’s meeting at New Bedford. It was a severe cross, and I took it up reluctantly. The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren—with what success, and with what devotion, I leave those acquainted with my labors to decide. * I am told that colored persons can now get employment at calking in New Bedford—a result of anti-slavery effort.

15 “There is Might in Each”: Slave Narratives and Black Feminism

DoVeanna Fulton, Arizona State University

Published: 13 January 2014
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Exploring slave narratives written by women, this essay argues that in their narratives enslaved women situate themselves and the women around them at the center of active resistance to slavery and confirm the efficacy of the slave narrative form and black feminism to meaningfully represent themselves and engage in public debates on slavery and racial and gender equality. Focusing particularly on the intimate relationships shared by black women with their white mistresses or employers, the author examines narratives by Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, and Mattie Jackson as representative narratives that substantiate a black feminist standpoint in which the narrators exhibit critical analyses of their labor such that work and economics are only one measure in a larger system of subjective valuation and personal worth. Moreover, these narratives document relations between black and white women in the urban cultural landscape where their intimate relations reveal complex interracial gendered interdependencies that proved black women’s self-worth in slavery and freedom.

Enslaved women used their pens and voices to enter the public discourse on slavery by documenting their slave experiences. More important, in narratives written by themselves or related to amanuenses, black women defined themselves and constructed their lives as shaped by and in spite of enslavement. While women’s slave narratives reveal rape, sexual exploitation, and familial separation in far more direct and intimate encounters than most males experienced or narrated—as well as similar physical abuse and dehumanizing labor practices that males did experience—enslaved women’s narratives situate themselves and the women around them at the center of active resistance to slavery. Moreover, with narrative finesse the texts disclose agentive subjects who “challenge gendered assumptions about interracial power, desire, purity and alliance,” as P. Gabrielle Foreman (2009) argues, and affirm identity formations grounded in human dignity and self-worth informed by their subject positions of women with the power to produce labor, physically and intellectually. In her discussion of black women’s writings that trouble notions of racial identification, Foreman examines the trope of the mulatta that crosses racial boundaries and questions racial ideologies (2009, 6). From a broader perspective, I suggest that, whether mulatta or not, by virtue of the fact that they are at the intersection of race and gender categories, black women’s narratives confront racial and gendered assumptions. These narratives offer readers analyses of slavery and American sociopolitical landscapes from a black feminist standpoint, whereby black women’s lives and experiences are centralized in the critical assessment of the worlds in which they live. In her groundbreaking text, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , the most influential scholarship in black feminist theory, leading black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins (2000) identifies controlling images that stereotype African American women as mammies, matriarchs, and jezebels. Yet the narratives of enslaved women counter these images. “These voices of African American women are not those of victims but of survivors. Their ideas and actions suggest that not only does a self-defined, articulated black woman’s standpoint exist, but its presence has been essential to black women’s survival” ( Collins 2000 , 93). The narrators confirm the efficacy of the slave narrative form and black feminism to meaningfully represent themselves and engage in public debates on slavery and racial and gender equality.

As many scholars have shown, most slave narratives produced by men portrayed women slaves as passive, helpless victims of physical and sexual abuse. In her pioneering article, “In Respect to Females…Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Narrators,” Frances Foster (1981) illustrates that men’s slave narratives overwhelmingly depict women as helpless victims of physical abuse, rape, and moral degradation. This depiction was so prevalent that it became one of the conventions of slave narratives: other conventions included the initial “I was born…” statement, the apology for their lack of literary skill, the narration of childhood innocence until they experience an event that raises their consciousness of slavery, the telling of horrors witnessed in slavery, their determination to escape, and finally freedom in the North. Many white readers of slave narratives came to expect these elements because they affirmed racist notions of blacks as uneducated and intellectually inferior to whites and thus unable to create literary texts outside the bounds of these criteria. Conversely, Foster argues, “From their narratives it is repeatedly clear that slave women saw themselves as far more than victims of rape and seduction. Though they wrote to witness slavery’s atrocities, they also wrote to celebrate their hard won escape from that system and their fitness for freedom’s potential blessings” (1981, 67). In concert with the portrayal of powerless victims, women slave narrators faced the prevailing gender ideal of the “Cult of True Womanhood” that demanded “true” women to be pious, domestic, submissive, and pure. Cultural historian Barbara Welter details the ideals of the Cult of True Womanhood as “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power” (1966, 152). According to nineteenth-century race and gender ideology, black women were inherently incapable of meeting these ideals, thus rendering their membership in the Cult of True Womanhood impossible. In her extended analysis of the Cult of True Womanhood and black women’s exclusion from it, Hazel Carby notes, “Any historical investigation of the ideological boundaries of the cult of true womanhood is a sterile field without a recognition of the dialectical relationship with the alternative sexual code associated with the black woman. Existing outside the definition of true womanhood, black female sexuality was nevertheless used to define what those boundaries were” (1987, 30). In this context a woman who wanted to “tell [her] free story,” to paraphrase scholar William Andrews (1986) , was compelled to construct a narrative that appealed to an audience of primarily white readers while undermining race and gender assumptions about their personhood and experiences.

Prior to 1861 slave narratives produced by women numbered far fewer than those by male narrators. In fact the bibliography The Pen Is Ours , compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond, includes only nine narratives published before 1861 either written or related by former enslaved African American women. Collins posits that the minimal number of enslaved women’s voices “heard from is less a statement about the existence of black women’s ideas than it is a reflection of the suppression of ideas that do exist” (2000, 93). Unlike the dearth of narratives recounting African American women’s lives published in the antebellum period—just prior to, during, and after the Civil War—literary productions by black women increased substantially. Although Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is the most well-known slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) has become the most widely read narrative by an enslaved woman. For many years scholars assumed Incidents was a fictional narrative written by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. However, through her extraordinarily dedicated research scholar Jean Fagan Yellin proved this assumption false. Yellin’s work documents Jacobs’ authorship and attests to the facts of each real-life figure that Jacobs characterizes. Unfortunately, its initial publication was overshadowed by the start of the Civil War, a fact prompting Frances Smith Foster to speculate that “had the manuscript been published in 1858 when it was finished, its author might have been granted an audience with President Lincoln,” as was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ([1852] 1981 ), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1993, 117).

Using the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs combines the forms of the slave narrative and the domestic novel to create a unique text in which she details the horrors of the slave experience while presenting a determined woman with a clear sense of self-worth and humanity, nurtured by her parents, grandmother, and a supportive community and actualized through exercised agency as a sexual being, mother, anti-slavery activist, and laborer. With the declaration, “My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each,” Jacobs acknowledges the authority accorded to her master by the slave institution (1861, 81). However, she recognizes her empowerment through fortitude and purpose developed and sustained by a wide variety of resources and experiences. Scholars Nina Baym (1978) and Jane Tomkins (1985) have elucidated the general plot and cultural and literary significance of what Baym calls “women’s fiction” and Tomkins calls “sentimental fiction.” Baym describes the basic plot as “the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world…. At the outset she takes herself very lightly—has no ego, or a damaged one, and looks to the world to coddle and protect her….To some extent her expectations are reasonable—she thinks that her guardians will nurture her….But the failure of the world to satisfy either reasonable or unreasonable expectations awakens the heroine to inner possibilities. By the novel’s end she has developed a strong conviction of her own worth as a result of which she does ask much of herself. She can meet her own demands, and, inevitably, the change in herself has changed the world’s attitude toward her, so much that was formerly denied her now comes unsought” ( Baym 1978 , 19). It is this plot structure that Jacobs modifies in Incidents .

In slavery and freedom Jacobs labored as a care-giver for white children of slave owners and employers. The narrative demonstrates her overt consciousness of the value of her labor to both her owners/employers and to herself. For example, once she escapes North, Jacobs works as a nurse for the family of Nathaniel Willis (whom Jacobs names Mr. Bruce in the narrative). Although she finds Mrs. Willis “a kind and gentle lady” who offers intellectual conversation and opens her library to Jacobs, it is abundantly clear to Jacobs that her most immediate concern is performing her duties so that “by dent of labor and economy, I could make a home for my children” (1861, 169). Her clarity of purpose does not overshadow her sense of self-worth and human dignity. While traveling with the Willis family, Jacobs refuses the hotel’s demand that she stand behind the child’s chair to feed her at the dining table. After she decides to have their meals delivered to their rooms, the staff rebels and the other black servants complain that she is getting preferred treatment. Jacobs responds, “My answer to that was that the colored servants ought to be dissatisfied with themselves, for not having too much self-respect to submit to such treatment; that there was no difference in the price of board for colored and white servants, and there was no justification for difference of treatment. I staid [sic] a month after this, and finding I was resolved to stand up for my rights, they concluded to treat me well” (1861, 177). She concludes this chapter with the declaration, “Let every colored man and woman do this, and eventually we shall cease to be trampled under foot by our oppressors” (1861, 177). By adapting the narrative forms of the slave narrative and domestic novel, Incidents exemplifies the black feminist standpoint through Jacobs’s critical analysis of southern slavery, labor conditions, human rights, and racial discrimination in northern locations that expose the terrors of enslaved women’s lives and the hypocrisy of the rhetoric of freedom in the North.

The narrative action in Incidents not only illustrates black feminist principles, Jacobs writes the text fully conscious of the intersections of black women’s human dignity and labor and the manner in which her physical labor impinges upon the intellectual labor of writing the narrative. In letters to her friend and confidant, feminist activist Amy Post, Jacobs laments the quality of her writing and proclaims, “God did not give me that gift but he gave me a soul that burned for freedom and a heart nerved with determination to suffer even unto death in pursuit of that liberty which without makes life an intolerable burden” (1861, 236). In another letter she writes,

[M]‌y friends Mr. and Mrs. Brackett is [sic] very anxious that I should go to their home and write. [T]hey were here and spent a day and night with me and saw from my daily duties that it was hard for me to find much time to write. [A]s yet I have not written a single page by daylight. Mrs. W[illis] don’t know from my lips that I am writing for a book and has never seen a line of what I have written. I told her in the autumn that I would give her Louisa [sic] services through the winter if she would allow me my winter evenings to myself but with the care of the little baby and the big babies and at the household calls I have but a little time to think or write. (1861, 238)

Jacobs’s writing constraints and determination to finish the narrative evince her awareness of the race, gender, and class positionality she occupies in knowledge production that challenges multiple political landscapes—legislative, geopolitical, and sociopolitical. Moreover, the letters reflect interracial, intragender relational dynamics black women encountered with their white employers or mistresses in labor production. Although Jacobs holds Mrs. Willis in high esteem, she is careful and suspect of Mrs. Willis’s reciprocal regard once she learns of Jacobs’s slave experiences. The possibility of garnering Willis’s disdain, or being dismissed from her position, is a cognizant reality Jacobs faced. Yet her confidence in the value her self-worth and life experience to effect change trumps the apprehension of losing Willis’s appreciation of Jacobs’s personal integrity.

The dilemma of establishing and maintaining her personal dignity and humanity that Jacobs confronts is evident in many slave narratives authored by women. Owing to nineteenth-century race and gender ideology, black women’s value as human beings—both during slavery and after emancipation—was repeatedly questioned by whites. Slave narratives and other historical evidence confirm many nineteenth-century white women held black women’s humanity suspect as well. Yet their labor and the products of their labor were constantly sought after as profitable commodities. Angela Davis writes, “Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been considered genderless as far as slaveholders were concerned” (1983, 5). Even though, as Davis points out, slave women performed agricultural work alongside men—and, as Sojourner Truth proclaimed, sometimes worked as much as any man—enslaved black women performed and articulated their labor as circumscribed by their gender. Birthing, nursing, and rearing children, cooking and preparing food, making and laundering clothes, cleaning and maintaining homes, black women’s labor and lives sustained the institution of slavery and the people both subject to and beneficiaries of slavery. Work deemed “women’s work” was essential to the social, industrial, and economic conditions of slavery. In addition to agricultural and domestic labors, enslaved women worked in factories and mills. “By 1860 more than 5000 slaves, most of them women, worked in cotton and woolen mills under white supervisors” ( Wertheimer 1977 , 118). Black women recognized their significance and that their labors substantiated their human dignity and worth.

In Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House , Elizabeth Keckley (1868) relates her slave mistress’s critique that Keckley will never be “worth her salt.” This phrase resonates because it questions Keckley’s essential humanity as a sufficient, capable being. Although the phrase may have multiple cultural and colloquial references—for example, salt as salary paid to soldiers during Roman times, or the small amount of salt in baked bread, one of life’s basic necessities—“worth her salt” indicates the value of a human being measured in currency or on a minute scale. In the context of slavery, this phrase points to the market value placed on a slave’s worth. According to Xiomara Santamarina, “Keckley’s literary reformulation of [B]‌lack female agency along the lines of labor emphasizes, above all, the dignity of her labor in all its aspects: slave, free, interracial, and profoundly gendered” (2005, 143). In their narratives of slavery and freedom, black women demonstrate how their labors can be interpreted as agentive acts that affirm their value: personally, socially, institutionally, and economically. The narratives of slavery and freedom of Elizabeth Keckley (1868) and Mattie J. Jackson (1866) substantiate a black feminist standpoint in which the narrators exhibit critical analyses of their labor such that work and economics are only one measure in a larger system of subjective valuation and personal worth.

Of equal importance, these narratives document relations between black and white women in the urban cultural landscape where black women’s labor commands white women’s wealth, sometimes their respect, but rarely their regard as equals. Keckley’s and Jackson’s narratives, both set in major U.S. cities, demonstrate black women as agents of their own labor, which fosters fluidity and autonomy in the face of repression and domination. These women exploited urban spaces that afforded interactions with multiple clients, employers, and slave owners, interactions that yielded freedom, agency, and economic sustenance. Yet their relations with white women reveal complex interracial gendered interdependencies that proved black women’s “salt” in slavery and freedom.

Urban spaces offered some nineteenth-century black women opportunities to control their labor and thus control their lives. The multiple locations and demands for labor found in cities provided possibilities for freedom that rural spaces did not. Barbara Wertheimer documents black women’s labor in slavery and writes, “City slave women worked a wide variety of jobs, as chambermaids, vendors, nursemaids, hairdressers, seamstresses, laundresses, and servants…. The possibilities for learning to read and write, as well as the opportunity to acquire training in a trade; improved in the city, for the more skilled a slave, the more she could command for her master in hiring out” (1977, 120). For both enslaved and free women of African descent, life in cities afforded economic and social opportunities as well as vulnerabilities to worker exploitation in the nexus of labor, products and the marketplace between black women and their white women client-employers or slaveholders. Moreover, the intimate relationships often developed between these women contributed to entangled trades.

Elizabeth Keckley’s experiences with society women in St. Louis, Missouri and Washington, D.C. expose this complex exchange and the machinations that black women performed to succeed in these environments. In her postbellum slave narrative, Keckley offers limited information on her life during slavery. In fact, only the first three chapters are devoted to this period. The following twelve chapters concentrate on her experiences in Washington, D.C. as the modiste for Mary Todd Lincoln and other politicians’ wives, including Varina Davis, wife of then-Senator and soon-to-become Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Despite the truncated description of her enslavement, Keckley situates her abilities to perform tasks effectively and her conscientious work ethic at the center of her slave narrative. Although she does not ignore the common slave experiences many women encountered such as rape and physical abuse, Keckley defines her subjectivity by the value her labor produces and her abilities as an economic resource. Scholars Carolyn Sorisio and Xiomara Santamarina have examined what I call Keckley’s economics of the self as both ownership and her right to enter public discourse. Sorisio argues, “As the nation began its path toward what many hoped would be a radical reconstruction, Keckley’s book carves out a space for herself as an African American woman claiming her right to participate in the public postbellum commodity culture not as property, but as proprietor” (2000, 21). Adding to this argument, I suggest Keckley’s narrative uses the mobility afforded in the urban spaces of St. Louis and Washington, D.C. as a metaphor for her upward mobility in Washington society, albeit a mobility “behind the scenes.”

Enslaved in St. Louis, Keckley earned wages as a dress designer and maker for the “best ladies” in the area. While Virginia Meacham Gould posits that the difference between plantation slavery and urban slavery was that planters and farmers relied on slaves for producing income and urban slaveholders relied on the goods and services produced by slaves, Keckley’s master depended on her income as a dressmaker (1996, 180–180). Her wages fed her master’s household of 17 members for over two years. Although her master agreed to manumit Keckley and her son for $1200, she could never build savings because of the demand to support his family. However, when finally she decided to travel to New York, by “taking the cars,” to raise the money to purchase their freedom, one of those “best ladies” intervened. The aptly named Mrs. Le Bourgois tells her, “Lizzie, I hear that you are going to New York to beg for money to buy your freedom. I have been thinking over the matter, and told Ma it would be a shame to allow you to go North to beg for what we should give you. You have many friends in St. Louis, and I am going to raise the twelve hundred dollars required among them…. Don’t start for New York now until I see what I can do among your friends” (emphasis in original; 1868, 54–55). With this initiative, the funds are raised and Keckley and her son are freed. This incident demonstrates Keckley’s mobility and value within the context of her local urban space. Instead of traveling to New York to raise funds—and, arguably, as the country’s major location of commodity exchange, New York was the ultimate auction block—Keckley’s relationships with the “best ladies” of the city prove an immediate resource and spare her the experience of traveling by rail to solicit funds from strangers. Thus her movement from slavery to freedom occurs where it justifiably should, in the location where she is enslaved. This location is significant because it flies in the face of antebellum slave narratives in which freedom is gained in the North and enslaved people’s right to own themselves and human value are never recognized by whites in the South. If we think of the movement from slavery to freedom as an upward trajectory, then Keckley’s narrative undermines this notion and demonstrates a mobility in which one does not have to abandon the Southern location in the pursuit of freedom.

Once she gains her freedom, however, Keckley does leave St. Louis. She offers readers a figure of resourceful married woman who is not constrained by patriarchal norms. She writes, “All this time my husband was a source of trouble to me, and a burden. Too close occupation with my needle had its effects upon my health, and feeling exhausted with work, I determined to make a change. I had a conversation with Mr. Keckley; informed him that since he persisted in dissipation we must separate; that I was going North, and that I should never live with him again, at least until I had good evidence of his reform” (1868, 63–64). The straightforward, dispassionate tone in which she relates this event conveys her standards of morality, efficiency, and determination. Although she writes they had a conversation, actually she informs him of her decisions and declares her independence. Keckley refuses to become caught in what Patricia Hill Collins calls the “in love and trouble tradition” in which many black women find themselves (2000, 183). In her study of marriage among African Americans in the antebellum period, Foster “challenges assumptions about freedom and enslavement, love and marriage, protecting and providing until death does part,” noting that antebellum writings by African Americans indicate a belief “that neither social status nor physical passion should be reasons to marry” (2010, 32, 35). Foster maintains that “the literature shows that if antebellum African Americans had the right to choose their mates, they judged it a privilege worth protecting” and that they were “picky, very picky” (2010, 36). Keckley’s decision to leave her husband is in line with this reasoning. She presents a black feminist analytical standpoint by placing herself at the center of the relationship and the decisions she must make to sustain her wholeness. Again, this experiential and narrative act is in contradistinction to slave narratives produced by males in which women serve and define themselves in relation to others. That Keckley parallels this agentive act alongside the act of moving North suggests her mobility from burdened, unhappily married woman to a self-determined, whole subject is an upward movement toward freedom.

In fact, Keckley does not move North, she moves east “in the spring of 1860, taking the cars direct for Baltimore” (1868, 64). Significantly, she takes a direct rail from one urban space to the next, bypassing all rural spaces in between. As newly freed from both enslavement and spousal dissipation, Keckley moves quickly and efficiently, as her mode of transit implies, into the position of self-actuated businesswoman. Initially, she attempts to begin a school training young black women in her system of cutting and fitting dresses. After six weeks with no success, Keckley moves to Washington, where she finds employment and quite quickly builds a clientele among Washington’s elite women. She informs readers: “I rented apartments in a good locality, and soon had a good run of custom” (65). Not only does this “good locality” facilitate her business, it offers her a ready location from which to move from skilled laborer to businesswoman employing over ten assistants and intimate confidant of “First Ladies” of the North and South. This movement can only happen in the urban space where Keckley travels between her personal residence and place of business to the Davis home and Lincoln White House.

Moving from her personally defined space into the intimate domestic space of public figures transforms Keckley from a skilled wage earner to member of the domestic space who performs myriad tasks: from hairdressing to nursing to laying out young Willie Lincoln’s body after his death. Santamarina maintains, “The manner in which Keckley’s role as skilled dressmaker translates into a ‘diversified’ source of miscellaneous labor for the whole Lincoln family attests in part to the lack of specificity, or boundaries, that marks the deeply racial and gendered aspects of her labor” (2005, 154). Santamarina points out white workers’ resistance to the familial relations fostered by domestic service, seeing it as devaluing skilled trade labor. “Keckley,” she writes, “subverting this equation of familial service with low status, exploits Mary Lincoln’s exploitation of her racial and gendered economic susceptibility” (2005, 154). This subversion moves Keckley from paid wage laborer to intimate “friend,” a transformation that she embraces. It is this intimacy that allows her further subversion in subtle ways. Instead of devaluing her skilled labor, Keckley’s work performing “miscellaneous labor” for the Lincolns actually becomes more valuable because she does not only define herself as a laborer or worker but as an intimate “friend” who shares confidences with Mary Lincoln and participates in the joys and sorrows of the White House.

Despite the intimacy Keckley maintains between Mary Lincoln and herself, the narrative reveals the friendship was less reciprocal than the term suggests. Mary Lincoln consistently requests, and even demands, Keckley give her time, her service, and herself to satisfy the Lincolns’ needs and desires. Keckley never discusses her personal or private life or conditions in the White House. In fact, the narrative suggests Mary Lincoln displays a decided lack of interest in Keckley’s life. Nevertheless Keckley subverts the one-sided relationship with subtle narrative construction. In the chapter on the death of Willie Lincoln, the Lincoln’s second son, Keckley describes the boy’s character and his mother’s devotion to him. She then relates the death-bed scene and the following mourning period. Yet right in the middle of this description, Keckley tells readers of her son’s death on the battlefield in the Civil War. She asserts, “It was a sad blow to me, and the kind womanly letter that Mrs. Lincoln wrote to me when she heard of my bereavement was full of golden words of comfort” (1868, 105). Instead of providing the letter or an excerpt of it, as readers could expect—especially given the excess of letters and legal documents inserted throughout the rest of the narrative—Keckley follows this paragraph with the elegy to Willie Lincoln written by poet and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis. This narrative construction is interesting because the juxtaposition suggests the elegy is not only to Willie Lincoln, it is to Keckley’s son as well. Thus Mary Lincoln’s “kind womanly” words are replaced by the well-known poet’s lyrical prose in which the manly characteristics of bravery and courage are highlighted. Of additional interest in this narrative choice is that the poet is the same Willis who employed Harriet Jacobs in New York, whom Jacobs did not trust because she found his commitment to abolition suspect. Ironically, then, by juxtaposition Willis pays homage to Keckley’s son, a casualty of the Civil War who gave his life in the fight against slavery.

Moreover, this juxtaposition intimates her anger at both Mary Lincoln’s callousness and the public response to Keckley’s and Lincoln’s relationship. Keckley’s narrative intent is to establish publicly her personal relationship with Mary Lincoln in a manner that authorizes Keckley to resuscitate Mrs. Lincoln’s reputation—and by extension her own—by explaining Mrs. Lincoln’s motives for selling her wardrobe in what became known as the “Old Clothes Scandal.” Unfortunately, not only does the public interpret her intent directly opposite Keckley’s aim, her reputation is severely damaged as a result of publishing the narrative. “We can interpret Keckley’s work,” Sorisio argues, “as exposing the underlying anger, the unconscious or covert wrath, she may have felt for Mary Todd Lincoln in particular, or for white ladies in general. If the public’s wrath against Keckley is overt, Keckley’s wrath against some members of the public may be covert and private. Behind the Scenes becomes, then, among other things, a means by which Keckley can go public with her anger” (Sorisio 2005, 21). Thus this narrative juxtaposition indicates Keckley’s anger and establishes her dignity, which this interracial interdependent relationship would undermine.

As opposed to the representation of a savvy businesswoman that Keckley presents, slave girl Mattie Jackson (1866) relates instances of abuse and protection, respectively, by white women benefactors of the slave girl’s labor. Jackson’s St. Louis experience during the Civil War facilitated her efforts to undermine and ultimately escape her slave mistress’s authority and cruelty. The abuse and cruelty of her mistress, Mrs. Lewis, rivals that of any slaveholding woman found in American literature. Lewis not only beat her slaves, her demands for Mattie’s mother’s labor as cook and general housekeeper cause the death of Mattie’s infant brother. Yet St. Louis, occupied by Union troops, provides opportunities for Mattie’s and her mother’s multiple escape attempts—in which they finally succeed—as well as discursive subversion of Mrs. Lewis’ political literacy and public confidence. Jackson’s narrative is the only known text by a black woman that relates military action in St. Louis and the seizure of Camp Jackson. Both she and her mother, Ellen Jackson, act as war messengers to Mrs. Lewis, who refuses to credit their knowledge. Jackson recalls,

I told my mistress that the Union soldiers were coming to take the camp. She replied that it was false, that it was General Kelly coming to reenforce Gen. Frost. In a few moments the alarm was heard. I told Mrs. L. the Unionists had fired upon the rebels. She replied it was only the salute of Gen. Kelley [sic]. At night her husband came home with the news that Camp Jackson was taken and all the soldiers prisoners…. She was much astonished, and cast her eye around to us for fear we might hear her. Her suspicion was correct; there was not a word passed that escaped our listening ears. (2009, 108)

Although Mrs. Lewis fails to give credence to her reporting, Jackson’s knowledge is more accurate and thus her discursive authority is more effective than Mrs. Lewis’s assumed authority as slave mistress.

Similarly, Ellen Jackson’s literacy proves far more worthwhile and meaningful to the Jacksons and Mrs. Lewis as it undermines the slaveholder’s knowledge and substantiates Ellen Jackson’s intellectual acumen. Once again, the proximity of Union soldiers in the urban space facilitates this exchange. Jackson recounts,

My mother and myself could read enough to make out the news in the papers. The Union soldiers took much delight in tossing a paper over the fence to us. It aggravated my mistress very much. My mother used to sit up nights and read to keep posted about the war. In a few days my mistress came down to the kitchen again with another bitter complaint that it was a sad affair that the Unionists had taken their delicate citizens who had enlisted and made prisoners of them—that they were babes. My mother reminded her of taking Fort Sumpter and Major Anderson and serving them the same and that turn about was fair play. (2009, 108)

Clearly, Ellen Jackson’s literacy serves her well. In contrast to Mrs. Lewis’s vapid comment based on sentiment without context, Ellen responds by situating the St. Louis event in the larger events of the war and offers an assessment based on fact and justice. Mattie Jackson’s narrative intervention locates Ellen’s insight in the framework of literacy and objective evaluation rather than the reactionary vacuity that Mrs. Lewis exhibits. Ellen Jackson relies on a multifaceted literacy that combines both reading and geopolitical knowledge about St. Louis and the larger Civil War arena. In his essay, “ Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt ,” Philip Troutman confirms that insurgent literacy “exposes the ways people and knowledge moved in and out of what we usually think of as bounded spaces of American slavery and even within the most tightly controlled spaces of incarceration, the holding cells of the domestic slave trade” (2005, 204). Although they were bound by slavery in the Lewis household, Ellen Jackson’s insurgent literacy challenges that bond and provides a model for her daughter’s subjective definition.

Keckley’s and Jackson’s narratives counterbalance one another and suggest racialized labor relations in the urban landscape were far from monolithic. Keckley’s relationships with white women in St. Louis and Washington were neither entirely favorable nor were they wholly exploitative. While Jackson’s interaction with Mrs. Lewis most often included abuse, she and her mother managed to assert their authority as intellectual beings empowered to assess the world and determine their own lives. The urban spaces in which these women lived and worked assisted in their empowerment. These locations and relations offered multivalenced qualities in which black women, through physical labor and discursive practice, proved their worth and human value.

Narratives of enslavement by women present scholars and readers with an array of opportunities to understand the complex material and discursive realities that black women met and represented in American slavery. Despite the multitude of narratives, the central defining principles of the texts remained the same: the innateness of black women’s humanity and freedom and that their perspectives on the world were equally valid and valuable. These theoretical principles are at the core of black feminist criticism. The narrators critically assess the world around them from their own subjective positions and articulate self-distinctions informed by their experiences, which are hallmarks of black feminist praxis. By coalescing the literary form of the slave narrative with black feminism, these texts manifest power and authority that confirm the declaration that there is, indeed, might in each.

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet A. Jacobs

Literature Notes
The Slave Narrative Tradition in African American Literature
About Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Character List
Summary and Analysis
Chapters 3-4
Chapters 5-6
Chapters 8-9
Chapters 10-11
Chapters 12-13
Chapters 14-16
Chapters 17-20
Chapters 23-25
Chapter 26-29
Character Analysis
Linda Brent
Aunt Martha
Uncle Benjamin
The First Mrs. Bruce
The Second Mrs. Bruce
Character Map
Harriet Ann Jacobs Biography
Critical Essays
The Feminist Perspective
Slave Rebellions and Runaway Slaves
We the People. . . ": Slavery and the U.S. Constitution
Slave Narrative Conventions
Full Glossary for Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Essay Questions
Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays The Slave Narrative Tradition in African American Literature

The slave narrative is a form of autobiography with a unique structure and distinctive themes that traces the narrator's path from slavery to freedom. Although traditional slave narratives such as Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass' Narrative exemplify these works, numerous contemporary black authors have adapted the slave narrative format.

Contemporary slave narratives (also referred to as neo-slave narratives) include works such as Richard Wright's Black Boy and The Autobiography of Malcolm X , co-authored by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Both works trace the narrator's journey from poverty and mental slavery or imprisonment to freedom achieved primarily through an awareness of new choices and options, a determination to overcome societal and self-imposed limitations, and a willingness to assume personal responsibility for transforming one's life. Wright's "black boy" — much like the authors of traditional narratives — discovers a sense of freedom by writing, while Malcolm X transcends his role as hustler, pimp, and prison inmate to become a renowned spokesperson, leader, and political activist.

Toni Morrison's Beloved and Ernest Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman exemplify the fictional slave narrative, a form that originated with works such as William Wells Brown's Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter, A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), the first novel by a black American; Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, (1859), the first novel by a black woman in the United States; and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which used the fictional story of an elderly black man to focus attention on the horrors of slavery. Morrison's novel, Beloved , tells the story of Sethe, a woman who portrays a former slave who killed her daughter to save her from being returned to slavery. Gaines' work, written in the form of an interview with the fictional Miss Pittman, traces Miss Pittman's life from slavery to freedom as a Civil Rights activist.

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying also incorporate elements of the slave narrative, but in these two works, both authors transform conventional elements to achieve new dimensions. For example, Macon "Milkman" Dead, the selfish, apathetic protagonist in Song of Solomon , achieves both mental and spiritual freedom only when he lets go of his materialistic lifestyle and returns to the South to reconnect with his cultural and historical roots. In A Lesson Before Dying , Jefferson, a young man on Death Row for a murder he did not commit, is able to cast off his slave mentality and free his mind and soul only when he learns to transcend society's perceptions of him as less than a man and begins to reconnect with his community and see himself as a human being entitled to respect and dignity.

Many critics applaud contemporary slave narratives because they show individuals rising from the depths of despair to overcome seemingly impossible odds. However, some critics contend that the narratives perpetuate the myth that people can overcome society's racism by sheer willpower and determination. Many critics believe that the narratives are deceptive because they offer a false sense of hope to blacks, while encouraging whites to think that if some blacks can break down barriers and cross over racial boundaries to achieve success, those who do not have only themselves to blame.

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Guest Essay

José Andrés: Let People Eat

A woman wearing a head scarf sits on a cart next to a box of food marked “World Central Kitchen.”

By José Andrés

Mr. Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen.

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.

In the worst conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up. You cannot save the hostages by bombing every building in Gaza. You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.

We welcome the government’s promise of an investigation into how and why members of our World Central Kitchen family were killed. That investigation needs to start at the top, not just the bottom.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said of the Israeli killings of our team, “It happens in war.” It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.

It was also the direct result of a policy that squeezed humanitarian aid to desperate levels. Our team was en route from a delivery of almost 400 tons of aid by sea — our second shipment, funded by the United Arab Emirates, supported by Cyprus and with clearance from the Israel Defense Forces.

The team members put their lives at risk precisely because this food aid is so rare and desperately needed. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, half the population of Gaza — 1.1. million people — faces the imminent risk of famine. The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.

The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality — of our shared hope for a better tomorrow.

There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures.

I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves.

It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.

José Andrés is a chef and the founder of World Central Kitchen.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Don’t Be Fooled By Trump’s Failure to Endorse a Nationwide Abortion Ban

F ormer President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he favors state control over abortion law and policy and declined to endorse a nationwide ban. He also claimed that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was favored by “all legal scholars” on “both sides.” Abortion is “where everybody wanted it, from a legal standpoint,” according to Trump.

All of this is patently false, of course. Decades of legal scholarship and advocacy support the federal constitutional right to abortion that Dobbs eliminated. Some scholars who support legal abortion as a matter of policy have criticized the result the Court reached in Roe , but they are in the minority. Others have critiqued the reasoning of Roe v. Wade . Some, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg , prefer the equality rationale of Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), where the Court noted the central importance of reproductive freedom to women’s ability to participate fully and equally in the social, political, and economic life of the nation. But the notion that all or most legal scholars wanted the Court to obliterate the right to choose abortion is ludicrous.

No one should be fooled by Trump’s failure to endorse any of the proposed nationwide abortion bans, a move designed to appear “moderate” and lull voters into a false sense of complacency. Make no mistake: a second Trump administration will empower an anti-abortion movement determined to make abortion illegal everywhere. Even if Republicans do not take over Congress, there are plans in place to make medication abortion unavailable and to resurrect the 1873 Comstock Act, an archaic anti-vice law, to ban abortion nationwide. Proponents of fetal personhood, which defines an embryo as a legal person from the moment of fertilization, will be closer to realizing their goal, threatening not only abortion and miscarriage care but also IVF and common forms of contraception. Trump promotes the grotesque lie that Democrats want to “execute babies” to distract from his own party’s extremism.

Trump peddles these false and misleading claims because he understands that the truth about abortion endangers his candidacy and Republicans generally. Far from ending the controversy, returning abortion to the states already has led to outcomes wildly out of step with public opinion. Doctors and hospitals routinely deny patients basic medical care, including miscarriage treatment, because they are not close enough to death to have their rights outweigh those of an embryo or fetus. State laws with no or ineffective exceptions force children, survivors of rape and incest, and people with nonviable fetuses to carry pregnancies regardless of the consequences to their health and future fertility. Maternal health deserts multiply because doctors fear criminal and civil liability. Abortion bans exacerbate a maternal and infant mortality crisis that makes pregnancy a mortal danger to American women— especially Black women , who are almost three times more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts.

Read More: How Louisiana Has Become a Microcosm of the Abortion Access Fight

Even people with qualms about abortion in theory don’t favor these horrific results in fact. Recent polling from Gallup and Axios respectively reveals supermajority popular opposition to total and near-total bans on abortion, and majority support , even among Republicans, for keeping the government out of reproductive health care decisions altogether. Every ballot initiative since Dobbs has been resolved in favor of abortion rights and access. In fact, abortion motivates Americans to turn out and vote for candidates who support reproductive freedom.

Perhaps the most pernicious of Trump’s lies is that returning abortion to the states is a victory for democracy. Depriving people of the right to make the most basic decisions about their bodies and lives is deeply undemocratic and a hallmark of authoritarian regimes worldwide. Extreme abortion bans and fetal personhood laws pass despite popular opposition because of unchecked partisan gerrymandering that gives Republicans supermajorities. Even the most conservative lawmakers live in fear of a primary challenge from the right if they support any exceptions, however minor and ineffective, to total abortion bans. Trump says abortion law after Dobbs is “all about the will of the people.” But in fact, Republicans are scrambling to take decisions about abortion out of the people’s hands by preventing referenda from reaching the ballot, protecting state courts that defy public opinion from accountability for their decisions, and disenfranchising voters.

The GOP has long used abortion to secure the support of voters to promote a much broader right-wing agenda. Trump, as promised, packed the federal judiciary with jurists who would destroy the government’s ability to regulate corporations, combat climate change and political corruption, enact sensible gun-safety laws, provide for affordable health care, expand opportunities for women and people of color, fight discrimination, protect the rights of workers and immigrants, ask the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, and so on. The problem is that a majority of Americans actually support each of the policies the Right is determined to undo. To remain in power, Republicans must undermine democratic institutions and practices. Partisan and racial gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the evisceration of campaign finance regulation and voting rights laws are longstanding strategies; more recently, election denialism, insurrection, political violence, and white supremacist resurgence—all fomented by Trump—place democracy and the rule of law in mortal danger. All of this is at stake in Trump’s ultimate lie: his claim to be a champion of democracy rather than the architect of its demise.