Telling Untold Stories: Philippa Gregory's "A Respectable Trade" and David Dabydeen's "A Harlot's Progress"

Abstract

In the fall of 1999, U.K. Channel 4 presented another season of its stories. Throughout October (Black History month in the U.K.), the story told on four consecutive Sunday nights was that of role in the circum-Atlantic slave trade.1 Produced by notable U.K. journalist Trevor Phillips and by Philip Whitehead, the series was handsomely presented, accompanied by an extensive web page and a bound volume. Britain's Slave Trade took as its topic the dark side of glorious imperial past. To an audience accustomed to gazing upon the monuments of empire, whether as tourists to Georgian cities like Bath, as visitors to great houses like Blaise Castle, or as consumers of yet another film about Jane Austen's England, the series had a simple message: the money for all this splendor came from somewhere. And in eighteenth-century England, far too often the origins of such wealth lay in the traffic in black slaves. As a private vice made into public (Mandeville), the circum-Atlantic slave trade has at last been brought forth as a topic for British prime-time debate. But what does it mean to tell an untold story? The phrase implies that the story preexists its telling, that it waits not to exist, but only to be enunciated. The series thus teased out the untold, articulating a story that apparently only awaited its own telling. The film crew skirted the circum-Atlantic, traveling to the former Gold Coast of Africa, to the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Barbados, to Welsh estates, to the cities of Bristol and Liverpool, gathering both personal and academic testimony. The camera followed a white woman in search of her black slave ancestors and a black theologian seeking a white ancestor he believed to have existed. Britain's Slave Trade displayed nostalgia for a point of origin at which, for better or worse, everything would be perfectly clear. At such a moment, ancestors would be clearly recognized, whether in their perfidy or in their bondage, in their acts of complicity or their acts of resistance. At such a time, both doers and deeds could be clearly labeled. Individuals would be named, singled out, made culpable when necessary. Looking back at such a moment with the benefit of our hindsight, we would recognize at last the damage done and we would know what form reparation should take. The desire to tell the untold is also the desire to reach closure, and closure is construed as the therapeutic coming to terms with dark secrets once repressed but now brought into