Capturing the Captivity: African Americans among the Puritans

Abstract

A century before Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects (1773), the British colonies had given birth to a simple indigenous American prose form: the Indian captivity (Carleton 176). Straightforward accounts of the capture, trials, and eventual liberation of Anglophone settlers, these narratives provided early colonists with their first native genre. Pamphlets celebrating the heartrending trials, exploits, and Christian forbearance of women like Mary Rowlandson or Elizabeth Hanson went through numerous editions, delivering a message that both entertained and enlightened their avid readers. As Phillips Carleton has said, to contemporary audiences these read to pieces stories were as heroic as Icelandic sagas (170,180). By the end of the eighteenth century, African Americans had discovered the utility of this earliest of American forms. As had their Puritan predecessors, captivated blacks like Briton Hammon and John Marrant told the story of their encounters with frightening, Godless attackers, torture, and death. Such genre-bound narratives, whether penned by black or white American, were designed to engage the reader in the narrator's own experience of captivity (and/or conversion), and as such served specific purposes. Both sets of narrators desired to impress their audience with their appreciation of and direct experience with the supreme being; both tales were designed to elicit sympathy for their bondage in the grasp of alien, incomprehensible captors. For African American storytellers and their white amanuenses, a signal importance of the narratives lay in their similarity to the pamphlets and broadsides that had appeared before.1 Yet unlike their immediate literary models, African Americans shared non-white status with their captors. That irony infuses the ordeals of these colonial African American Christians with a unexpressed and unacknowledged racial ambiguity. Still another paradox resounds in their adoption of a Puritan genre. As readers and writers alike moved away from the devout atmosphere of colonial New England, a divergence of intent arose between