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Reviews
| A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation, by David W. Blight. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007. 320 pages. $25.00, cloth.
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| This is an exciting book. David Blight provides us with the full text of two previously unknown and unpublished narratives of two men who fled from slavery during the Civil War. Blight pulls these two narratives from obscurity to tell a fascinating story about two young men who refused to wait for whites to emancipate them. John Washington and Wallace Turnage escaped from slavery in Virginia and Alabama (respectively) during the Civil War, and they later recorded their adventures in their own words, without the editorial intervention that was so common in published narratives of former slaves. The narratives provide vivid firsthand accounts of both slavery and the experience of wartime flight and emancipation, a rarity among such narratives. Washington, a twenty-four year old Virginian, fled from Fredericksburg across the Rappahannock River on Good Friday ("the Best Friday") in 1862 and went on to assist the Union army. Turnage's narrative is a densely packed account of the teenager's four unsuccessful escape attempts, various slaveholders' attempts to torment him into submission, and his successful fifth flight to freedom and the Union navy's protection at Mobile Bay in 1864. The writing of the two narratives is simple, clear, and poignant. |
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Although the intellectual centerpiece of the book is the last ninety-six pages, the narratives themselves, the bulk of the book (the first 162 pages) is devoted to Blight's illuminating analysis of the two narratives. In lucid, lively prose, Blight retells the stories presented in the narratives, fleshing them out with meticulous research, empathetic speculation, and allusions to other narratives. He places both narratives in the broader drama of slavery and emancipation, using their narratives to recreate the immediacy of the excitement, the terror, and the anguish of the war's emancipation. Rather than simply recounting a story of triumph, Blight reminds readers that "we do a disservice to the experience of the freedpeople by remembering only their music of spiritual victory and not the physical agony through which they passed." Blight follows the two narrators through their escapes into their struggles to build new lives in freedom, until their deaths in the early twentieth century. Usefully, Blight situates the narratives in the memory of slavery in the postwar period and the desire of many Americans, white and black, to forget the painful memories of slavery. Unlike antebellum slave narratives, Washington and Turnage's narratives were not written to further abolitionism, but to create a "usable past" out of the authors' suffering and trauma, for themselves and their children. |
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The book is beautifully written, and students should find it accessible and engaging. The book could work well in American history surveys, in addition to specialized courses. The risk of this book for class use is in its structure. Blight does so well in illuminating the two narratives that, by the time the reader reaches the narratives themselves on page 165, the reader is already thoroughly acquainted with the two men's experiences and a detailed accounting of their escapes. It thus reduces the freshness of the narratives themselves, and it may create temptations for students. Yet the narratives themselves are valuable, and they are worth reading carefully. They tell stories about a struggle for education (a staple in slave narratives), the horror of seeing other human beings put up for sale, and the anguish of a mother and son at being separated. Students will undoubtedly identify with the courage of a teenaged Turnage who, despite being whipped, mauled by dogs, and beaten by various whites during his first four unsuccessful runs for freedom, still fought for freedom rather than accepting his fate as a slave. Students can learn by comparing the different experiences of Washington, an urban slave in Fredericksburg, and Turnage, who was sold from Virginia into the cotton slavery of Alabama. Perhaps most usefully, the narratives dramatize for students the intersection of the roles of Lincoln, the war, and enslaved people themselves in creating emancipation. Students will leave the book with a richer understanding of emancipation as a process dependent not only on presidential decree and military victory, but also on the enormous physical risks undertaken by the countless enslaved men and women who fled their owners during the Civil War. The stories of Turnage and Washington, as Blight puts it, show emancipation as a "revolution from the bottom up that required power and authority from the top down to give it public gravity and make it secure." It is an important story, and one that is told very well by all three authors. |
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| University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa |
Margaret Abruzzo |
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