In Their Words | by Mark Briggs -- Endeavors, Winter 2000

Preserving the narratives of slaves.

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North American Slave Narratives

In Their Words
by Mark Briggs

Harriet Jacobs realized she was a slave at age six. She quickly came to despise the institution that ruled the antebellum South. At 21, she escaped her owner’s cruelty and the abusive domination that began when she was 15, but she didn’t go far.

She couldn’t flee to the free North and leave behind her two small children. Fearing capture while on the run, she hid in the tiny attic of a friend’s cottage. A short-term solution became long-term incarceration. Harriet bored a hole through the wood to allow the outside world in. She could see townspeople she knew pass by outside. She even watched her former master, persistently pursuing his escapee. This two-inch hole was virtually her only contact with the outside world for seven years. For seven years, she lay in the attic, hardly able to move. By the time safe passage to the North became available, she no longer had use of her limbs.

Her story is worth telling—and retelling—but it is not the only one. A remarkable number of slaves put pen to paper, or told someone who could, accounting for a significant piece of our nation’s history. These works, many existing only as crumbling books, have found a new life through a collaborative effort at Carolina, which blends new technology with old-fashioned story telling into a one-of-a-kind collection.

Documenting the American South (DAS) is a collection of digitized resources on Southern history, literature, and culture published on the World Wide Web. The UNC-CH Academic Affairs Libraries sponsor this effort, which now includes five projects. One of them, North American Slave Narratives, will eventually feature 200 first-person slave stories. A $110,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and funding from the Academic Affairs Library has made possible this two-year project with a two-pronged goal: preservation and publication.

“It’s never been done before,” says William L. Andrews, chair of the English department and editor of the series. “People have talked about wanting to do a mass edition of all the slave narratives. But no one’s ever done it. So this will be unprecedented. It will be the first time in history that all the slave narratives in English will be available at the same time in reliable editions.”

Pat Dominguez, Humanities Bibliographer at the Academic Affairs Library, knew Carolina had something special in its large collection of slave narratives. She was surprised, however, at the popularity of the works, with circulation numbers off the chart for 150-year-old books.

“A lot of these tattered books have been read to death and loved to death,” says Dominguez, principal investigator for the project.

Dominguez saw the Internet as an opportunity to protect the fragile works while enhancing their availability. Andrews shaped the project by sharing his bibliography of slave narratives—the most complete listing ever compiled—and serving as series editor.

“The idea was to make these works widely available not only to the citizens of North Carolina but to the world,” says Dominguez. Some 16,000 people visit the DAS home page every month, while approximately 7,000 people access the North American Slaves Narratives on the Web during the same time.

The narratives are forceful accounts of the ruthlessness of slavery. The brutal living and working conditions, the separation of families, and the physical torture all play out in the words of those most affected. At the time of publication, many of the narratives were discounted by pro-slavery advocates as abolitionist propaganda, sometimes simply because of the quality of writing. Harriet Jacobs poetically articulates the harsh realities of her life in “Incidents of a Slave Girl,” published in 1861:

I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away. …
Who can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of their tyrants. …
When spring returned, and I took in the little patch of green the aperture commanded, I asked myself how many more summers and winters I must be condemned to spend thus. I longed to draw in a plentiful draught of fresh air, to stretch my cramped limbs, to have room to stand erect, to feel the earth under my feet again. …
I hardly expect that the reader will credit me, when I affirm that I lived in that little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space to move my limbs, for nearly seven years. But it is a fact; and to me a sad one, even now; for my body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment, to say nothing of my soul. …

Harriet’s former owner eventually sold her children and her younger brother. Later, her children were freed, and Harriet seized an opportunity to leave her self-made prison, finding passage to Brooklyn by boat. More than a century later, her story is still a gripping read. Other works convey similar intrigue and emotion, like that of Henry Box Brown, who sealed himself in a crate and shipped himself to freedom in the North. Or Solomon Northup, a free black man in New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northup remained a slave for 12 years before he was able to smuggle a message to people in the North who helped him reclaim his freedom.

Today in a converted storage room on the second floor of Wilson Library, these historic tales are being given a new-age twist. Digital scanners whir and buzz, the only sound above the mouse clicks and keyboard pecks as half a dozen graduate students gaze at computer monitors. Natalia Smith, the project’s manager, is quick with a joke to liven up the mood. It is tedious work, using optical character recognition (OCR) software and flat-bed scanners to import text into computers, then painstakingly cleaning the copy. Any artwork included in the book is also scanned and included in the pages that will eventually be published on the Web. About 85 narratives have been posted to the Internet so far. The project will conclude in December 2000.

“I loved it. It was hard to leave,” says Carlene Hempel, a business reporter at the News & Observer who earned a master’s degree in journalism last spring and spent nearly two years working on the DAS project. “It is one of the most incredible things I have ever done. It’s very special—it was something that I talked about all the time. You feel the enormity of the work.”

A staff of 19 rotates through flexible shifts each day of the week and even on weekends. DAS encompasses more than 300 works from the 18th, 19th and first decades of the 20th century.

“It’s an ideal job. I get paid to increase my knowledge,” says Fiona Mills, a Ph.D. student in English specializing in African American literature who started working in February. “Sometimes I can’t wait to come to work.”

One-fourth of the titles come from UNC-CH libraries, another fourth come from libraries at North Carolina Central and Duke, and the rest are from libraries all over the country. The opportunity to work on the project influenced Andrews’ choice to come to Carolina from the University of Kansas in 1996. It is his bibliography, the product of two decades of study, which helped produce the collection’s list.

Though the project is not yet half-complete, its impact has already registered. Email from around the globe has acknowledged what the staff always knew: making these important works available to a larger audience would be a significant contribution to the study of the American South. “We underestimated our audience,” Smith says. “We suddenly realized our audience is the world.”

“So many of our former students, who didn’t have these resources available to them while they were pursuing their degrees, have moved into the teaching arena and are taking advantage of this as a teaching tool, wherever they may be now,” says Libby Chenault, a librarian in the Rare Book Collection at Wilson.

Andrews, who has received correspondence from several descendants of authors included in the project, hopes the collection will continue to grow. Since the beginning, several works have been discovered. One narrative, unknown to Andrews, was offered by a librarian at East Carolina who saw the collection online. Andrews discovered another short diary at Wilson during a photo shoot for this article. It’s a work he had heard of but didn’t know existed in Carolina’s collection.

Through the years, some have challenged the authenticity of many slave narratives, not only for reasons of abolitionist propaganda, but also out of pure prejudice. Andrews notes that several of the more famous narratives—those by Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, or William Wells Brown—have become classics and have generated biographies and intense scholarly research. Historians have corroborated the stories told in these narratives time and again. This is not surprising, according to Andrews, because the antebellum abolitionist movement wanted very much only to publish narratives that could be corroborated.

“It’s remarkable how much they did remember and how much they got right,” Andrews says. “Consider sitting down and writing your own autobiography without being able to consult sources. And of course you weren’t brought up with any schooling, so you’re trying to guess how people spelled their names based on an education that you just got in the last few years. Or in the case of someone like Douglass or William Wells Brown, you never had a day of formal schooling in your entire life.”

Remarkable, indeed, to feel the anguish and misery of slavery in these first-hand accounts. A year from now, a complete collection will preserve these gripping narratives for generations to come, and it will be accessible from anywhere in the world.

“They are incredibly moving stories of pain and suffering, and they provide the only documentation of slavery written from the perspective of slaves. It’s an important part of detailing the country’s history,” says Dominguez. “The issue strikes a very deep chord.”

Read the North American Slave Narratives online.

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