Panel: Reconstructing African-American History
Copanelists: Kendra L. Fulllwood and Ann Rayson
The Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave is the first fugitive slave narrative in American history. When it appeared in New York in 1825, it was the longest African American autobiography published up to that time. Because Grimes wrote and published his narrative on his own, without deference to white editors, publishers, or sponsors, his Life has an immediacy, candor, and no-holdsbarred realism unparalleled in antebellum slave narratives. The famous fugitives of the 1840s and 1850s, even Douglass, Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, all wrote in accordance with an antislavery script that circumscribed their freedom to speak out about what they had experienced as slaves in the South and as quasi-free men and women in the North. William Grimes, however, wrote before this antislavery script had been composed.
The Life appeared years before the advent of any organized national American antislavery movement, before David Walker’s Appeal (1829), before the first African American newspaper, before William Lloyd Garrison had publicly acknowledged himself an abolitionist, before Frederick Douglass could read the word “abolitionist.” Beholden to no one and unschooled in antislavery propaganda, Grimes’s Life represents a truly unfiltered and personally authentic account of both southern slavery and the severely compromised “freedom” of the northern states in antebellum America.
My talk will be based on a new edition of the Life of William Grimes that I have co-edited with Regina Mason, the great-great-great-granddaughter of William Grimes. Oxford University Press will publish the edition in June 2008.
William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
and Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts
and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He
is the author of The
Literary Career
of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) and To Tell a Free Story: The First
Century of Afro-American Autobiography,
1760–1865 (1986). He is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African
American Literature (1997) and The
Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2003),
and general editor of North
American Slave Narratives