Her Refusal to Be Recast(e): Annie Burton's Narrative of Resistance

Abstract

I Annie L. Burton's 1909 autobiography, Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days, is postbellum slave autobiography of an ordinary black woman, who refuses be re-enslaved in either word or in deed. In her simply written narrative, she offers extraordinary resistance emerging racial caste system of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America. While her text begins with reminiscences about her childhood in chattel bondage, at heart of her work is power struggle between black women domestic workers and their white female employers. The story of her voyage from slavery in Clayton, Alabama, domestic work in industrial North, and finally business-ownership in Jacksonville, Florida, charts powerful economic and social forces that attempted re-inscribe a system of slavery onto first generation of nominally freed African Americans. Burton's refusal participate in this reinstatement of her slave condition challenged pervasive image of black woman as mammy, that is, faithful, obedient domestic servant. Burton's Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days details not only one woman's quest from slavery physical freedom but also her journey from a proscribed role creation of her own free identity. As a document of resistance, Burton's narrative begins strangely. In her chapter titled Recollections of a Happy Life, she writes, the memory of my care-free childhood days on plantation, with my little white and black companions, is often with me (3). Burton recalls that both black and white children were entirely ignorant of their positions as racialized subjects, neither knowing nor caring what things were going on in great outside their realm (3). These initial happy memories strike a dissonant chord, as generally most painful aspects of bondage are detailed at beginning of a slave narrative. Burton, simply and powerfully, chooses juxtapose these happier memories with details of hunger and nakedness she experiences as a child during slavery days, in contrast her well-kept and well-fed white companions (4-5). She recalls being whipped for eating more than her allotment of food (4), and she remembers slave women sold for their failure produce offspring (5). Burton gives a detailed account of lynching of a slave who was wrongly accused of murder of his overseer (5). She acknowledges that her own father was a white planter who never noticed ... or in any way acknowledged her as his child (8). So while it is initially discomforting that Burton writes about some of her happy, memories of slavery, reader is clear that Burton suffers no illusion as utter brutality of this peculiar institution. The contrast of Burton's happy childhood days with these bitter and brutal realities of slavery speaks desire within her autobiography reconcile a brutal past and yet maintain hope--and sanity--for a future. (1) And it is uncertainty of that future that Burton gives voice in her narrative. Born into slavery, and a young girl during Civil War, Burton was witness a world being turned upside down; for once, slave owners were living and acting in fear. She sees her slave master leaving unceremoniously for woods and remaining concealed there for five days when Union troops arrive in Alabama. She writes with delicious irony: the niggers had away whenever they got a chance, but now it was master's and other white folks' turn run (9). She describes freedom as a righteous blow to owners of plantations and slaves, especially as their children would feel it more than they, for they had been reared be waited upon by willing or unwilling slaves (39). Yet despite system of slavery being turned upside down in front of Annie Burton's eyes, fundamental ideas about blackness, proper role for black people in America, and functions and duties of black women were not changing. …