However, he ensures any kindliness of individual enslavers is undercut by the mercurial violence inherent to the system.Īn account of one extraordinary strong, hardworking slave, often described as a “pure African,” who refuses to be whipped because there is no reason for it. He depicts whippings and abuse of men and women, though not always in the graphic and emphatic manner of memoirs from earlier eras. He is clear and emphatic about the nature of his close family unit, choosing the pen name “Aleckson” for himself, likely in memory of his beloved father, Alexander Williams.ĭescription of a cruel master, mistress, or overseer, details of first observed whipping and numerous subsequent whippings, with women very frequently the victims. His opening line of chapter one is “I WAS born in Charleston, South Carolina in the year, 1852.”Ī sketchy account of parentage, often involving a white father. Unlike earlier slave narratives, however, Williams does include his date of birth. “I will a plain unvarnished tale deliver.” - Shakespeare.Ī first sentence beginning, “I was born.” and then specifying a place but not a date of birth. And while Williams’s memoir does not incorporate this trait in a separate preface, his poetic epigraph by William Shakespeare serves this same purpose: “I will a plain unvarnished tale deliver.” The absence of a white influence on Williams’s memoir may contribute to some of the missing narrative tropes those white writers included in an earlier era of slave narratives. In these prefaces the reader is told that the narrative is a “plain, unvarnished tale” and that nothing “has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination” – indeed, the tale, it is claimed, understates the horrors of slavery. However, “BY SAM ALECKSON” is printed in bold on the front page with no reference to an amanuensis or editor.Ī handful of testimonials and/or one or more prefaces or introductions written either by a white abolitionist friend of the narrator (William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips) or by a white amanuensis/editor/author actually responsible for the text (John Greenleaf Whittier, David Wilson, Louis Alexis Chamerovzow). Olney's list of slave narrative characteristics is used in the chart below to illuminate Williams's reformulation of the slave narrative standard.Īn engraved portrait, signed by the narrator.Ī title page that includes the claim, as an integral part of the title, “Written by Himself” or some close variant: “Written from a statement of Facts Made by Himself” “Written by a Friend, as Related to Him by Brother Jones.”
Nonetheless, his narrative shares some of these slave narrative traits, illustrating the ways in which slave narrative writing was carried into the twentieth century. Moreover, he wrote and published his book with a black-owned press operated by his relatives and had no need to appease expectations of a sponsoring organization which many Abolitionist-era slave narrative writers did. And yet, he certainly felt compelled to argue against false nostalgia for slavery that developed quickly amongst white Americans immediately after the Civil War ended. After all, he no longer needed to argue against the existence of slavery. Williams's writing was for a different audience and in a different historical context. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Williams omitted or reformulated many of the slave narrative characteristics reflected in Olney's list. Williams’s memoir was written at least 50 years after the Civil War. There, Olney creates a list of almost twenty characteristics that emerged from the slave narrative genre. Scholar James Olney, in particular, famously outlined some of the best-known traits or tropes found in slave narratives of the Abolitionist era in his article, " I Was Born": Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature. While each autobiography, memoir, or narrative written by a person who experienced American slavery is extremely personal, readers cannot fail to notice certain patterns and traditions found in such works.
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