The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave available in Paperback
The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave
- ISBN-10:
- 0299168948
- ISBN-13:
- 9780299168940
- Pub. Date:
- 02/01/2001
- Publisher:
- University of Wisconsin Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0299168948
- ISBN-13:
- 9780299168940
- Pub. Date:
- 02/01/2001
- Publisher:
- University of Wisconsin Press
The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave
Paperback
Buy New
$24.95Buy Used
$17.17-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
First published in 1849 and largely unavailable for many years, The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb is among the most remarkable slave narratives. Born on a Kentucky plantation in 1815, Bibb first attempted to escape from bondage at the age of ten. He was recaptured and escaped several more times before he eventually settled in Detroit, Michigan, and joined the antislavery movement as a lecturer.
Bibb's story is different in many ways from the widely read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. He was owned by a Native American; he is one of the few ex-slave autobiographers who had labored in the Deep South (Louisiana); and he writes about folkways of the slaves, especially how he used conjure to avoid punishment and to win the hearts of women. Most significant, he is unique in exploring the importance of marriage and family to him, recounting his several trips to free his wife and child. This new edition includes an introduction by literary scholar Charles Heglar and a selection of letters and editorials by Bibb.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780299168940 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wisconsin Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2001 |
| Series: | Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.70(d) |
| Lexile: | 1180L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY BIBB
AN AMERICAN SLAVEBy Henry Bibb
The University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright © 2001 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin SystemAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0299168905
Introduction
IThe year 1999 marked one hundred and fifty years since the initial publication of Henry Bibb's Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave; Written by Himself. While most general discussions of antebellum slave narratives mention Bibb as one of the more interesting writers in the genre, his Life and Adventures has not been readily available to general or academic readers for some years. This is especially unfortunate considering the current critical importance of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; Written by Himself (1845) and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Written by Herself (1861) in the study of slave narratives and, consequently, in the study of African American literature. Bibb's Life and Adventures adds new and important dimensions to the examination of the pre-Civil War slave narrative in the areas of slave marriage and family and in the area of plotting and narrative structure.
Since the term slave narrative covers many kinds of texts within a heterogeneous genre, it is important to specify the characteristics ofthe sub-genre in which Bibb, Douglass, and Jacobs wrote. Marion Wilson Starling's comprehensive study, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (1981), offers a good overview of the perimeters of the genre; Starling finds that of the slave narratives published between the late seventeenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, six thousand are extant. In addition to this long period of production, Starling notes a range of authorship: some narratives were so heavily and obviously edited that they would be considered ghost-written by today's standards; some were dictated to an amanuensis; and some were authenticated as written by a fugitive slave. Adding further to differences between and among the items included in her survey, Starling finds a wide divergence in the length of materials considered as slave narratives; the materials vary from newspaper notices of a few paragraphs to book-length accounts of several hundred pages (1-49).
Few, if any, generalizations could cover such a variety of authorship and length over a period of more than two hundred years. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century narratives are significantly different from antebellum narratives if only because of changes in the economic and historical context. Antebellum narratives are distinct from postbellum narratives, and the twentieth-century Federal Writers Project Slave Narrative Collection interviews are noticeably different from all of the preceding works. Consequently, sub-genres have become a necessary and convenient way to account for differences based on authorship, length of the composition, period of composition, and thematic focus.
Within these sub-genres critics generally have given an important position to the self-authored slave narratives written and published between 1830 and 1865. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in its initial sense-"that part of a deed or document which contains a statement of the relevant or essential facts"-the term narrative entered English usage from the Scottish. In colonial American and eighteenth-century British literature narrative was applied to a variety of autobiographical accounts which emphasized the factuality of significant experiences in the life of the autobiographer, such as spiritual conversion, Indian captivity, or criminal confession, whether those accounts were attributed to whites or blacks. Thus narratives were not meant as complete autobiographies; instead, they foregrounded an ordeal-a turning point-in the life of the individual. By the antebellum period slave narratives had become a recognizable autobiographical form: a fact-based tale of a life beginning in slavery and ending in freedom. The antebellum narratives represented the crystallization of trends begun in the late eighteenth century, and the conventions of these antebellum narratives, especially those established by the written experiences of Douglass and Jacobs, have become generic standards.
The antebellum slave narratives were written amidst the heat of the slavery debate when the North and South represented, at least rhetorically, polar opposites. Many of these antebellum narratives share structures and metaphors that reflect this dichotomy: the narrators awaken to their physical and psychological enslavement in the South, resolve to be free, then, using various individual means, escape to the North where they end their quests in freedom. This physical and psychological quest constitutes the vertical trope which many critics consider central to the antebellum narrative. In a country geographically and politically divided by the presence or absence of slavery, fugitive slaves had a unique rhetorical status for Northern audiences as witness-participants, a status that gave self-authored texts a special authority. Contributing further to the authority of self-authorship, with its implications of literacy and authenticity, was the publication of some narratives as book-length, self-contained texts, which gave the author the space necessary for a more individualized, thematic treatment of the subject. Indeed, the antebellum period marks a distinct era in the production of book-length texts authored by ex-slaves.
Henry Bibb enters African American autobiographical literature as the author of one of these distinctive antebellum works. Bibb was born a slave in 1815 in Shelby County, Kentucky, and as a youth he was frequently hired out as a house servant to the owners of the plantations and farms in the area. Unlike so many slaves, Bibb rarely seemed daunted in his attempts to escape slavery. He began short-term, temporary running away, or maroonage, at the age of ten so that by the time he became a young man he had mastered what he refers to in his Life and Adventures as the "art of running away." Bibb was about twenty-two years old when he made his first flight to free territory in the North during the winter of 1837; but over the next four years he returned to the South, was recaptured, and escaped on five other occasions (two of these escape attempts were unsuccessful) before settling in the Detroit, Michigan area and joining the antislavery movement as a lecturer.
The details of the oral narrative which Bibb then began to relate from the antislavery lecture platform were so different from the typical ex-slave's account that in 1845 the Detroit Liberty Party established a special committee to investigate and verify the events of Bibb's incredible story of escape from and return to the South. Around the same time he was delivering lectures exposing the evils of slavery Bibb became actively involved in antislavery political work with the Liberty and Free Soil Parties, primarily in Michigan and New York.
Bibb's proficiency in the "art of running away" and in attacking slavery are more than enough to merit a modern reader's attention. However, the current critical attention given to the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs as the models for and the best examples of male and female slave narratives increases the urgency of giving greater attention to Bibb's life's story. On the one hand, Douglass all but eliminates any discussion of his wife so that he may present himself as a lone male escaping slavery and becoming the model of a black self-made man. Douglass's account has led to charges from some contemporary, often feminist, critics that he and other male narrators largely ignore slave women or treat them as objects in the development of their stories of male individualism. On the other hand, Jacobs presents herself in contrast to the middle-class ideal of proper behavior for a young, unmarried woman to demonstrate that slavery has stolen her opportunity to marry and establish a respectable family. Jacobs, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, decides to have children by an unmarried white man, without the sanction of marriage, as a compromise between coerced adultery with her master and marriage to a free black carpenter, which her master forbids. In addition, her narrative moves away from Douglass's individualism and develops the importance of a community of women, both black and white, in slavery and in freedom. When the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs are considered in isolation from other slave narratives they avoid or eliminate the story of slave marriage and the exploration of the metaphors that such a marriage suggests. In his study of black autobiography, My Father's Shadow, David Dudley summarizes current thinking by using Douglass and Jacobs as models for a tradition of black autobiographical writing: "Black men still tend to view themselves as isolated characters striving alone to make their way in life, while women tend to see themselves in relation to others, particularly to their mothers, to their children, and to other women" (31).
In contrast to both Douglass and Jacobs, Bibb shares with his audience the story of his courtship, his slave marriage, and his divorce. According to his Life and Adventures, in 1833 Bibb exchanged wedding vows with Malinda, a slave on a neighboring Kentucky plantation, and together they had a daughter, Mary Frances, in 1835. This slave family, unrecognized by law or organized religion, becomes central to the form and content of Bibb's written narrative, as it had been for his earlier oral version of his life's story on the antislavery lecture platform. For instance, the suspense in Bibb's story depends on whether he will rescue his family, not on whether he will successfully escape to the North. Because of his concern for his slave family, Bibb rewrites the symbolic, and seemingly irreversible, transformation in the conventional linear plot of the fugitive's journey from slave in the South to free man in the North. After he reached the free North, Bibb returned to Kentucky to rescue his family; on several of these returns, he was recaptured before escaping again.
After one of these unsuccessful attempts to free his family from slavery in Kentucky, Bibb reports that he was sold with his wife and child to a plantation in Louisiana in 1839. Although he tried to escape from Louisiana with his family, they were recaptured; Bibb was then separated from Malinda and Mary Frances and sold to a band of traveling gamblers. They in turn sold him to an American Indian from whom Bibb eventually escaped to the North once again. Consequently, when Bibb joined the antislavery movement in Detroit, Michigan, he did so with a personal mission: to raise the money necessary to purchase his wife and child and reestablish his family in freedom. In the closing chapters of his narrative, however, after several agents have failed to locate his wife and family, Bibb recounts that he grew restless and returned as far south as Madison, Indiana, a small town across the river from friends and relatives in Kentucky. At that time he was informed that his wife had been sold from the Louisiana plantation where he had last seen her and that for the last three years she had been living as the mistress of her new owner. At this point in his narrative Bibb declares himself divorced from his slave wife, just as he had entered marriage through a vow rather than a legal ceremony.
After his self-declared divorce Bibb returned to his antislavery labors in the Detroit area. Through his lecturing and participation in the antebellum black convention movement he became acquainted with other black activists such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, a free black who was active in antislavery and black emigration projects. In 1847 Bibb met and began a courtship of Mary E. Miles, who was born a free woman in Massachusetts. After graduating from the Normal School in Albany, New York, she went on to make a reputation as an educator in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, in addition to working in the antislavery movement. In June 1848 Bibb legally and formally married her. As a couple Henry and Mary Bibb continued to work together in a wide range of antislavery and racial-uplift activities.
In 1849 Bibb published the poignant story of his doomed attempt to have both freedom and family. Although his narrative was popular with northern audiences, Bibb and his wife emigrated to Canada after the passage of a stronger Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 because of his concerns for his safety. Henry and Mary Bibb became leaders of the growing fugitive slave community in Canada and strong advocates of education. Mary returned to her profession as a teacher and opened a school in their home for the children of fugitive slaves. Unfortunately, the school grew so large and so rapidly that it was plagued by financial problems. The Bibbs also supported emigration to Canada in speeches and in print; not surprisingly, Bibb was one of the major advocates and sponsors of a black emigration convention held in Toronto in 1852. Of course, they also aided fugitive slaves with advice and sometimes with room and board as they arrived in Canada. As a culmination of these activities, Bibb and his wife worked diligently to establish the Refugee Home Society as a model settlement for fugitives, and encouraged moral uplift through their support of temperance and the Methodist church.
In 1851 Bibb was able to reach a wider audience with his ideas when he became editor and publisher of the biweekly Voice of the Fugitive, the first black Canadian newspaper. In his editorials Bibb defended the black community against the all-too-frequently racist portrayals found in some mainstream Canadian newspapers; moreover, he strongly advocated land ownership and agricultural production for blacks because he felt that these were the means by which they could truly become independent. In addition, Bibb felt that ex-slaves usually had already acquired skill in agricultural production during their enslavement.
Bibb's activities in Canada did not escape challenges from other black activists. Indeed, the final years of his short life were troubled by a bitter dispute with Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a free black woman who had also emigrated to Canada after the Fugitive Slave Law was strengthened in 1850. The contrasts in the views of the two made conflict all but inevitable. Bibb was the editor of the Voice of the Fugitive, which advocated that blacks control their own affairs; Cary was the editor of the more integrationist Provincial Freeman. Their differences in outlook were notable in their editorial positions. Bibb favored independent and separate growth for the black community; Cary favored an integration of blacks into Canadian society.
Continue...
Excerpted from THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY BIBB by Henry Bibb Copyright © 2001 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.