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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by RYAN DAVID FURLONG

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by RYAN DAVID FURLONG 6 2020 NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW number 29 Fugitive Slave The Myth “Ex-Pat”: of Northern Black Freedom in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl BY RYAN DAVID FURLONG William L. Andrews’s pioneering The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: An Anthology has found the early seedlings of US black literature to be firmly planted in the rich soils of North Carolina: “No other state in the American South has left a more indelible impression on African American literature before the twentieth century than has North Carolina.”1 Whereas white writ- ers from North Carolina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered us little in terms of establishing an American belles lettres, early black writers from the state – George Moses Horton, Da- vid Walker, Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and David Bryant Fulton – have emerged today as vital contributors in grounding the very “roots,” to COURTESY OF THE MASSACHUSETTSCOURTESY ACHIEVEMENT HALL OF BLACK use Andrews’s earthy metaphor, of the African American literary tradition and a US national literature. In the case of Harriet Jacobs, Jean Fagan Yellin’s herculean labors have resurrected her life and letters to canonical status. Most notably, Jacobs’s autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), fueled her rapid ascen- sion to literary fame as the most popular writer of early black North RYAN DAVID FURLONG is a PhD candidate Carolinians. The book is now widely taught in classrooms across in English and American literature at the University of Iowa specializing in the United States, included in most college-level literature antholo- early American and nineteenth-century gies, reprinted in several critical editions and popular paperbacks, literature, with particular research and written about regularly by literary scholars in a wide variety of interests in the literature of slavery, African American autobiography, post- journals and academic books. secular theory and criticism, religious In fact, Jacobs’s transformation into a classic American author experience, and human personhood. His has not merely come about by critics’ expansion of the US literary dissertation project looks at white and black anti-slavery writers’ engagements canon, but also as a result of a growing appreciation for her innova- with the problem of evil, black doubt, and tive re-workings of nineteenth-century literary discourses, complex racial justice. He also works as a research thematic preoccupations, and politically-charged ideas, all of these assistant for The Walt Whitman Archive. in service to ending the South’s “peculiar institution” vis-à-vis her ABOVE Harriet Ann Jacobs, 2002 1 William L. Andrews, ed., Introduction, (oil on canvas, 20x24) by T. A. Charron The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: An Anthology, (U of North Carolina P, 2006) 8. North Carolina Expatriate Writers N C L R 7 runaway-slave story. Now, Jacobs certainly intended Incidents to stand in as a representative Southern tale of black female suffer- ing, psychological torment, religious loss, sexual degradation, single motherhood, and familial discord. However, the book’s opening epigraph – a brusque condemnation of slavery and invitation to Northern readers to join the abolitionist cause – was anonymously attributed to “A Woman of North Carolina,” a plea that situated Jacobs’s narrative within a much more local setting and personal “ what it meant to be in context: the Old North State. Otherwise put, Jacobs’s book is a des- perate account of her search for a country or region her family might ‘slavery’ or in ‘freedom’ be able to call home, whether under slavery in North Carolina or in for fugitive slaves was “free” Northern cities like Philadelphia or New York. As Incidents attests, however, what it meant to be in “slavery” or in “freedom” for not as self-evident as fugitive slaves was not as self-evident as one might suppose, but one might suppose.” depended on multiple definitions of each term that could easily defy, exceed, or upset the neat and tidy regional categories of a free North or enslaved South. Even long after the chains of slavery had fallen to US abolitionism and the Confederacy’s surrender to Union forces, African American writers would confront the problem of living as second-class citizens in a post–Civil War society in which notions of black “freedom” and “slavery” were routinely muddied or undercut, from segregationist housing policies and exploited black labor in the Great Migration north to the sharecropping farms and black codes of the Jim Crow South. This, we might say, poses an interesting question for this NCLR special feature topic: do we consider runaway slaves like Jacobs expa- triates, too? We tend to think of literary expatriates from the US as mostly wealthy and elite writers (and largely white) – Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, to name an obvious few – who voluntarily left the US in search of political refuge, social experi- mentation, aesthetic inspiration, and philosophical truth. Nancy L. Green has historicized this popular image of the American “ex-pat”: Most often, the noun “expatriate” [in the US] conjures up the KAREN BALTIMORE designed this essay, the interwar “Lost Generation” writers [who] . captured readers’ essays on Charles Chesnutt and Tony Earley, imaginations and framed an important debate on exile and a the interview with Allison Hedge Coke, and the poetry in this issue. She is a graphic comparative critique of the New World versus the Old. The term designer and illustrator located in Cary, NC, “expatriate” [also] has been extended backward to refer to Edith and has been designing for NCLR since 2013. Wharton in the early twentieth century and beyond World War Find other samples of her work and contact information for your graphic design needs at II to James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Encompassing every- www.skypeak.com. one from the Henrys – James and Miller – to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, from White Bostonians and New Yorkers to Black Harlemites, from those escaping sexual and social conven- tion to those fleeing prejudice and discrimination, expatriate writ- ers, artists, and musicians have become a romanticized icon.2 2 Nancy L. Green, “Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept,” American Historical Review 114.2 (2009): 307; subsequently cited parenthetically. One might add the Beat Generation of the 1950s to Green’s list. 8 2020 NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW number 29 But, as Green further claims, the term expatriate in the US literary tradition has also carried a range of meanings “from simple residence abroad (‘for a considerable amount of time’) to the more definitive legal renunciation or destitution of allegiance, ‘denational- ization’ or ‘decitizenization’” (307). Etymologically speaking, expatri- ate – composed from ex (“out of ”) and patria (“native country”) – also indicates a native homeland one departs for some foreign place. But, what happens when one, like Jacobs, neither has a “native country” to begin with, nor another place to live? Or, to return to Green, what if the life of this “romanticized icon,” the literary expatriate, did not exist for blacks fleeing the slave South and confronting a racist North? How could they even reject US citizenship or national allegiance since slaves, by definition, were not US citizens or democratic equals, let alone considered human beings? Jacobs’s Incidents may subvert what we traditionally associate with the US expatriate writer because, as a nineteenth-century slave woman, her life afforded her neither the rights and privileges of US citizenship and therefore a sense of belonging to a “native country,” nor the freedom to move “out of ” the South in pursuit of a home to truly call her own. Incidents shows us, in fact, that far from later US expatriates (white or black) living abroad, fugitive slaves simply could not partake in the “ex-pat” lifestyle of voluntary choice, foreign escape, or relative freedom as homeless exile and racist dehumaniza- tion, instead, faced them at nearly every turn, North or South. I would argue, first, that Jacobs exposes this racial exile in Inci- dents by disrupting the popular myth of Northern black freedom in pre–Civil War abolitionist discourse, the “slave narrative’s conven- tional vertical trope of movement from South to North, from slavery to freedom,” which Charles J. Heglar argues, reinforced the North as the site of genuine freedom for runaway slaves, while the South existed as its polar opposite: absolute slavery.3 Likewise, from the 1830s onwards, abolitionist writers, editors, and reformers incorpo- rated this mythos into many anti-slavery novels, autobiographies, short stories, and poems that readers knew all too well: black free- dom necessitates escape from South-to-North.4 But, as Stephanie Li points out, “Despite this seemingly obvious association, it is impor- tant to note that flight did not guarantee [or signify] unconditional 3 Charles J. Heglar, Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft (Greenwood, 2001) 64. 4 For example, Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), was certainly not blind to the North’s lack of freedom and equality – economically, socially, romantically, politically, or otherwise – but his first autobiography, by and large, portrays the North as a place of relative black freedom for himself and others. Similarly, Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1858; published 2002), an anti-slavery novel written by a fugitive slave, paints the 1850s North in almost Edenic terms within her final chapter, aptly titled, “In Freedom.” So too, white abolitionists invoked the North as a beacon of black freedom and hopeful possibility beyond the terrors of the South, like in “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star” by John Pierpoint (1841).
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