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 Brigitte Fielder Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865. By William L. Andrews. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 389. $36.95, ISBN 978-0-19-090838-6.) Compiled over decades of research and spanning an impressive archive, William L. Andrews's study of the social and economic distinctions among enslaved people provides an important contribution to the study of life under slavery. This accounting of class attends to distinctions of both labor and access to resources and social benefits, as well as to the complex relations of privilege and power to which class contributed. Differences in labor conditions and in the social and material advantages and allowances that were more regularly denied to enslaved people produced social differentiations of rank among enslaved people and complicated relations to white people of various ranks and classes. Andrews reads class beyond its resonances with Black freedom and gives texture to the breadth of conditions under enslavement. The book extends discussions of class beyond the clichéd reduction of relations between field and house slaves to reveal not a simple hierarchy but a precarious set of relations that nevertheless influenced day-to-day lives and structured experiences of slavery. The slave narrative is an expert genre for the study of Black life as well as a key genre for reading the intertwining of class with identity construction. These narratives reveal the workings of class, which produced complex relationships among enslaved people and also with white people. Such narratives show, in part, "narrators' awareness of class as both a prop for and a potential weapon against entrenched white power" (p. 18). Importantly, Andrews does not lose sight of what any differences in these conditions of class could not do: alleviate slavery. He notes, "A privilege granted to a slave was not a legal or human right," and rarely an outright gift, but more often a quid pro quo that could be revoked at will (p. 6). This arrangement distinguished relative advantages of position among enslaved people even while it revealed the differences between these kinds of class advantage and privileges attached to whiteness. Class distinctions were not merely aspirational but could be wielded and withdrawn at will. The distinctions did not approximate freedom, although they posed a danger to slavery by sometimes making freedom more attainable. Andrews treats slave narratives published between 1840 and 1865, a "generation" of testimony that includes well-known narratives by writers such as William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as still understudied autobiographies. This peak array of the genre includes narratives of enslaved workers in settings from the industrial to the agricultural to the domestic. Even as he defines the advantages and limitations of focusing on this [End Page 522] period, Andrews makes a case for reading broadly within the genre. Yet, as Andrews acknowledges, these selected narratives are not necessarily representative. For example, a scan of the sixty-one narratives and fifty-two narrators in the appendix of works included in this study reveals that only a handful of these bear names traditionally given to women. Although Andrews does treat women's experiences beyond this position of author, here we only glimpse the complex relationships between material and social privilege, reproductive labor, and sexual assault in the examples he discusses from this archive. At its crux, however, Andrews offers a renewed look into some of the most prominent (and relatively elite) narratives of the genre, while also urging readers to consider these alongside the genre's much broader depth. Because class has overwhelmingly been discussed in light of both paid labor and free forms of sociality, this study leaves readers with the opportunity to also reconsider the implications that class under slavery had for class in various contexts for Black freedom. Readers will leave this book with a keen eye for enslaved writers' attunement to class amid their discourses on race, slavery, and freedom. Brigitte Fielder University of Wisconsin–Madison Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association