Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews

Abstract

Reviewed by: Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews Joycelyn K. Moody (bio) Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 William L. Andrews Oxford University Press, 2019, 389 pp. ISBN 9780190908386, $42.95 hardcover. In "Equal in Paris" (1955), an essay collected in his Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin describes wading through "a sea of acquaintances" in the City of Lights, where he "knew almost no one" (103). He categorizes the persons he did know (or more precisely, knew of), inscribing a hierarchy: Many people were eliminated from my orbit by virtue of the fact that they had more money than I did, which placed me, in my own eyes, in the humiliating role of a free-loader; and other people were eliminated by virtue of the fact that they enjoyed their poverty, shrilly insisting that this wretched round of hotel rooms, bad food, humiliating concierges, and unpaid bills was the Great Adventure. It couldn't, however, for me, end soon enough, this Great Adventure. . . . (103) Before his 1987 death in Saint Paul de Vence, Baldwin could count among his Great Adventures a terrifying stint in a Parisian jail one Christmas season. In "Equal in Paris," he imagines social groupings—tiers of persons in Paris that included "a whole body of people for whom crime was the only possible career" (114). That December, Baldwin raged at being bound among men he deemed "the very scrapings off the Paris streets" (109) and entirely unlike himself. Moreover, while "that evening in the commissariat [he] was not a despised black man," as he would have been regarded in his native New York, imprisoned in Paris he is instead an "ironical Américain" (107). Jailed among "old, old men. . . . And men not so old. . . . And young men. . . . And North Africans, old and young," Baldwin grows increasingly disconcerted, such that "I was unable to accept my imprisonment as a fact, even a temporary fact. I could not . . . accept my present companions as my companions. And they, of course, felt this and put it down, with perfect justice, to the fact that I was an American" (111). His rising hysteria notwithstanding, Baldwin perceives, "The question thrusting up from the bottom of my mind was not what I was, but who. And this question, since a what can get by with skill but a who demands resources, was my first real [End Page 363] intimation of what humility must mean" (107). Baldwin's essay ends with his freedom regained when an acquitted French intermediary recruits another American—an attorney who had once employed Baldwin—to "appear as a character witness" and convince the trial judges that Baldwin's case deserved a merry dismissal, for like them, he was at "a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real" (113, 115, 116). There is no mention of James Baldwin and none of Paris in Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865, but I thought repeatedly of "Equal in Paris" while reading William L. Andrews's monumental study of the ways formerly enslaved authors of antebellum slave narratives inscribed hierarchies among enslaved Black people and white Americans approximately 100 years before Baldwin was jailed in Paris. For just as the jailed Baldwin declares himself "American," and thus due certain privileges denied the French criminal element he considers beneath him, the formerly enslaved authors Andrews examines identify and insinuate echelons within the slaveocracy that position slave entitlement as an advantage they have managed to seize. As Andrews asserts, while class was by no means a term that had a set definition or application for African American writers up to 1865, a significant group of mid-century slave narrators often invoked terms suggestive of class as well as status to comment on social and economic hierarchies among the enslaved as well as whites in the antebellum South. (38) As the preeminent scholar of North American slavery and Southern literature for the past fifty years and the founding curator of the digital database Documenting...