Self and other in black and white: slaves' letters and the epistolary cultures of American slavery c.1730-1865

Abstract

Understanding American slavery, which for me means at least trying to comprehend how African Americans made it survivable and European Americans made it conscionable, is no easy task, and if I have achieved anything with the foregoing discussion I hope it has been to present a history of the epistolary cultures of slavery which complicates rather than simplifies this story. For to the history of American slavery the slave letters are just that, a complication. They complicate our view of the relationships between bondspeople and of the ways in which masters and slaves related to one another. So too do they complicate our understanding of how their authors saw and constructed themselves and defined and thought about others. Furthermore, they also raise significant questions about the nature of the slave community and the linkages and disjunctures that existed between the cultures African and European Americans constructed in the shadow of slavery, and thus present useful complications to our thinking about the formation of these cultures and the ways in which each sought to appropriate and subvert the cultural practices of the other. In this regard, they also raise complications regarding the transformations of slavery, for while we may view the epistolary and archival cultures that are apparent in the nineteenth century as products of paternalism and the sentimentality that lay at the heart of this project, the intimations of continuity in terms of enslaved people's self-perceptions that are afforded by a comparison of antebellum letters with those that were written in the late colonial and early republican eras suggest that the transformation that slaveholders worked on themselves was perhaps rather less significant for the victims of their slaveholding.Perhaps most importantly, however, they complicate the idea of resistance, a concept that has proved of central importance to studies of slavery and yet which often seems to be used either as a coded reference to a particular concept of masculinity, as Baptist argues, or else in a rather nebulous way in order to give meaning to almost every aspect of slaves' behaviour which did not conform to the o wishes of their masters. But if everything from the slaves' economy to their medicinal practice, from playing dumb to committing infanticide is to be categorized as a form of resistance, it is important to consider whether those that committed these acts were actively engaging in forms of resistance, which is to say in Bhabha's terms, self-consciously situating their actions "within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses," in order to critique and counter "deferential relations of power," or whether they were merely, as Stampp would have it, "unconscious reflections of the o character that slavery had given." As should be quite apparent, my own interpretation suggests the former and not the latter position, and while the slave letters may often be mute on the specifics of such actions, what they do reveal is that the way in which slaves conducted themselves in their epistolary dealings with slaveowners and their disciplinary agents were intimately informed by sophisticated understandings of the workings of power.This is not to suggest, however, that my imaginary archive of slaves' letters is somehow to be treated as the Rosetta stone for understanding slaves' behaviour. It is not. For one thing it is inherently limited, not only because of the preponderance of letters written by slaves who occupied particularly ambivalent positions within the power structures constructed by their masters, but also because of how much it omits. Furthermore, as I have been at pains to stress throughout, it is much more of a record of the power to archive than of the power to correspond, and while this makes a reading of the historical archives from which it has been constructed a profitable way to analyse the archivists who created them, it nonetheless means that as a set of sources the value we attach to the letters must be measured against the reasons for their survival. Nor am I suggesting that this archive should be used to the exclusion of others, and as my own evidentiary choices will have demonstrated, the meanings of the slaves' letters are best analysed by reading them alongside other forms of testimony, whether this comes from ex-slaves, masters or other observers.But even with such limitations in mind, the letters nonetheless afford us an opportunity to see at close quarters what were surely highly significant negotiations over identity for those slaves and masters that they involved, and they have the advantage over many other sources by being the texts of such negotiations as opposed to texts written about them. As such I think it is legitimate to suggest that what we can learn from them may well be representative of similar negotiations which took place beyond the bounds of the epistolary cultures that have been the subject of this thesis. Indeed, I would suggest that the "contextual, contested and contingent" identities that bondspeople and owners constructed for themselves and each other in these negotiations constituted a most important aspect of the competition between domination and resistance, and thus, as I suggested in the introduction, are a useful way to open up conversations about other aspects of resistance and other ways in which African Americans sought to make their enslavement bearable whilst their masters sought to make it excusable.But of course it might be argued that in their literacy, or at least their letter writing, these slaves were transformed, for the textual transcription of identity and the opportunities this allows for its refinement, revision and correction perhaps makes the writing laboratory and indeed the archival laboratory that is its counterpart, such specific and exceptional conceptual spaces as to be completely unrepresentative of the venues in which other slaves had to construct or perform identity.But since so much of human interaction, even amongst the most highly literate of people, is in fact spoken and not written and consists in gesture and action and not in scripture and inscription, one is of course tempted merely to dismiss this putative problem by repeating C. Vann Woodward's oft-quoted defence of slave testimony in all of its subjectivity, contingency and bias: "as if the same objection did not exist to the testimony of the slaveowners." But in fact, Miller is actually raising a rather more profound point, namely the question of whether it fundamentally alters an individual to conceive of language textually rather than orally, and if we are to utilise the texts generated by bondspeople as a measure of the way in which enslaved African Americans, both literate and non-literate, constructed the world around them and constructed themselves within that world, then this is a crucial issue.Without doubt, many philosophers of language regard the transition from orality to textuality as a fundamental paradigm shift since written language is amenable to "microanalysis, annotation, revision, rearrangement and interpretation" by both readers and writers in a way that oral dialogue, which only exists in an historical present, can never be. By extension, therefore, the interior life of the self - which is assumed to be at least partially signified in linguistic terms - is also transformed when it is expressed in a written text to be analysed, reviewed and re¬ written/re-read. Moreover, it can certainly be argued that slaves' own perceptions of the transformatory effects of literacy provide the cue for applying such an analysis to slave writings. Douglass refers to his acquisition of literacy as "the path from slavery to freedom," a pivotal event that allowed him to redefine and reconstitute himself as a subject rather than an object.I think that this concept of a fundamental distinction between the textual and the oral is artificial, and as Paul Ricoeur argues, one may construct an oral hermeneutic model which shares many features with textual hermeneutics in that by memorisation oral discourse may be "fixed in such a way that memory appears as the support of an inscription similar to that provided by external marks."9 This is not to suggest that textualising one's self (and others) does not have potentially transformatory, revelatory effects, but rather that to imagine that this is only true of scriptural textualisation is a mistake. For while written texts do indeed have the potential to allow their authors to reflect on their self-constructions in a unique way, but there are many other mirrors in which to style and restyle one's perception of both self and other and thus such textual construction and reconstruction should not be seen as exceptional or atypical, but in fact merely as a manifestation of a very normal, very human process. In predominantly oral cultures, however, it is frequently unrecoverable and thus it is the fact that the slave letters afford us an opportunity to examine this everyday sociocultural process that is exceptional.