Friday from the Archives: “Authenticating Experience: North Carolina Slave Narratives and the Politics of Place ” an essay by Gay Wilentz in NCLR 1992
Closing out Black History Month by looking at this article from our first issue, highlighting the African-American struggle towards equality, and what progress has been made. There’s still a very long way to go, even (especially) now, so looking back at how enslaved people here in North Carolina “wrote themselves into being” reinvigorates us by reminding us people have always found a way to tell their own story.
In this essay, Gay Wilentz writes, “the writings and the recorded oral testimonies of slaves, fugitive slaves, and free blacks of North Carolina constitute a varied tradition.” She examines the work of “four separate slave narratives (written by Lunsford Lane, Moses Roper, Moses Grandy, and Harriet Jacobs), and David Walker’s Appeal.” Wilentz points out:
“For the narrators who wrote “themselves into being,” each narrator’s voice not only had to be authenticated by a white person’s stamp on the preface of the narrative, but had to be, in its own discourse “self-authenticating”: “Black narrators realized that to assume the privileged status of author in the literary discourse of white America, they would have to write self-authorizing, that is, self-authenticating narratives” (Andrews 23). To authenticate the text, each narrator had to find his/her own voice within the context of place- that cultural milieu in which s/he was a slave. The writing of the narrative would dialectically reflect this movement from silence to voice, from non-being (within the eye of the white other) to being, in other words, to create what was already there – their humanity.”
Even in these earliest writings, these slave-authors have to be justified to their white readers, or else they won’t be taken seriously. We still see this in how our Black community struggles to be respected, not only Black authors, but Black and other diverse people in general.
Read the essay on Gale Cengage, or purchase a copy of NCLR‘s 1992 issue to see the other articles within!
