The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave

303 Pages·2000·8.707 MB·English

by  Henry Bibb, Charles J. Heglar

LIFE AND ADVENTURES
OF
HENRY BIBB

THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES
OF
HENRY BIBB
AN AMERICAN SLAVE
Henry Bibb
With a new introduction by
Charles J. Heglar
The University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press
2537 Daniels Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53718
3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright © 2001
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
1 3 5 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bibb, Henry, b. 1815.
[Narrative of the life and adventures of Henry Bibb]
The life and adventures of Henry Bibb : an American slave /
Henry Bibb; with a new introduction by Charles J. Heglar.
pp. cm.
Originally published: Narrative of the life and adventures of
Henry Bibb. New York : H. Bibb, 1849.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-299-16890-5 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-299-16894-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Bibb, Henry, b. 1815. 2. Slaves—United States—Biography.
3. Slaves—Kentucky—Social conditions—19th century. 4. Slav-
ery—Kentucky—History—19th century.
I. Heglar, Charles J. II. Title.
E444 .B58 2001
976.9´00496—dc21 00-042307
INTRODUCTION
I
The year 1999 marked one hundred and fifty years since the
initial publication of Henry Bibb’s Narrative of the Life and
Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave; Written by
Himself. While most general discussions of antebellum
slave narratives mention Bibb as one of the more interest-
ing writers in the genre, his Life and Adventureshas not been
readily available to general or academic readers for some
years. This is especially unfortunate considering the current
critical importance of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; Written by
Himself(1845) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl; Written by Herself(1861) in the study of slave
narratives and, consequently, in the study of African Amer-
ican literature. Bibb’s Life and Adventuresadds new and im-
portant dimensions to the examination of the pre–Civil
War slave narrative in the areas of slave marriage and fam-
ily and in the area of plotting and narrative structure.
Since the term slave narrativecovers many kinds of texts
within a heterogeneous genre, it is important to specify the
characteristics of the sub-genre in which Bibb, Douglass,
and Jacobs wrote. Marion Wilson Starling’s compre-
hensive study, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American
History(1981), offers a good overview of the perimeters of
the genre; Starling finds that of the slave narratives pub-
lished between the late seventeenth and the mid-twentieth
centuries, six thousand are extant. In addition to this long
period of production, Starling notes a range of authorship:
some narrativeswere so heavily and obviously edited that
vi introduction
they would be considered ghost-written by today’s stan-
dards; some were dictated to an amanuensis; and some
were authenticated as written by a fugitive slave. Adding
further to differences between and among the items in-
cluded in her survey, Starling finds a wide divergence in the
length of materials considered as slave narratives; the ma-
terials vary from newspaper notices of a few paragraphs to
book-length accounts of several hundred pages (1–49).
Few, if any, generalizations could cover such a variety of
authorship and length over a period of more than two
hundred years. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century narratives are significantly different from antebel-
lum narratives if only because of changes in the economic
and historical context. Antebellum narratives are distinct
from postbellum narratives, and the twentieth-century
Federal Writers Project Slave Narrative Collection inter-
views are noticeably different from all of the preceding
works. Consequently, sub-genres have become a neces-
sary and convenient way to account for differences based
on authorship, length of the composition, period of com-
position, and thematic focus.
Within these sub-genres critics generally have given an
important position to the self-authored slave narratives
written and published between 1830 and 1865. According
to the Oxford English Dictionary,in its initial sense—“that
part of a deed or document which contains a statement of
the relevant or essential facts”—the term narrativeentered
English usage from the Scottish. In colonial American and
eighteenth-century British literature narrative was applied
to a variety of autobiographical accounts which empha-
sized the factuality of significant experiences in the life of
the autobiographer, such as spiritual conversion, Indian
captivity, or criminal confession, whether those accounts
introduction vii
were attributed to whites or blacks. Thus narratives were
not meant as complete autobiographies; instead, they
foregrounded an ordeal—a turning point—in the life of
the individual. By the antebellum period slave narratives
had become a recognizable autobiographical form: a fact-
based tale of a life beginning in slavery and ending in free-
dom. The antebellum narratives represented the crystal-
lization of trends begun in the late eighteenth century, and
the conventions of these antebellum narratives, especially
those established by the written experiences of Douglass
and Jacobs, have become generic standards.
The antebellum slave narratives were written amidst the
heat of the slavery debate when the North and South rep-
resented, at least rhetorically, polar opposites. Many of
these antebellum narratives share structures and meta-
phors that reflect this dichotomy: the narrators awaken
to their physical and psychological enslavement in the
South, resolve to be free, then, using various individual
means, escape to the North where they end their quests in
freedom. This physical and psychological quest consti-
tutes the vertical trope which many critics consider central
to the antebellum narrative. In a country geographically
and politically divided by the presence or absence of slav-
ery, fugitive slaves had a unique rhetorical status for
Northern audiences as witness-participants, a status that
gave self-authored texts a special authority. Contributing
further to the authority of self-authorship, with its impli-
cations of literacy and authenticity, was the publication of
some narratives as book-length, self-contained texts,
which gave the author the space necessary for a more in-
dividualized, thematic treatment of the subject. Indeed,
the antebellum period marks a distinct era in the produc-
tion of book-length texts authored by ex-slaves.
viii introduction
Henry Bibb enters African American autobiographical
literature as the author of one of these distinctive antebel-
lum works. Bibb was born a slave in 1815 in Shelby
County, Kentucky, and as a youth he was frequently hired
out as a house servant to the owners of the plantations and
farms in the area. Unlike so many slaves, Bibb rarely
seemed daunted in his attempts to escape slavery. He be-
gan short-term, temporary running away, or maroonage,
at the age of ten so that by the time he became a young
man he had mastered what he refers to in his Life and Ad-
ventures as the “art of running away.” Bibb was about
twenty-two years old when he made his first flight to free
territory in the North during the winter of 1837; but over
the next four years he returned to the South, was recap-
tured, and escaped on five other occasions (two of these
escape attempts were unsuccessful) before settling in the
Detroit, Michigan area and joining the antislavery move-
ment as a lecturer.
The details of the oral narrative which Bibb then began to
relate from the antislavery lecture platform were so different
from the typical ex-slave’s account that in 1845 the Detroit
Liberty Party established a special committee to investigate
and verify the events of Bibb’s incredible story of escape
from and return to the South. Around the same time he was
delivering lectures exposing the evils of slavery Bibb became
actively involved in antislavery political work with the Lib-
erty and Free Soil Parties, primarily in Michigan and New
York.
Bibb’s proficiency in the “art of running away” and in
attacking slavery are more than enough to merit a modern
reader’s attention. However, the current critical attention
given to the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet
Jacobs as the models for and the best examples of male
introduction ix
and female slave narratives increases the urgency of giving
greater attention to Bibb’s life’s story. On the one hand,
Douglass all but eliminates any discussion of his wife so
that he may present himself as a lone male escaping slav-
ery and becoming the model of a black self-made man.
Douglass’s account has led to charges from some contem-
porary, often feminist, critics that he and other male nar-
rators largely ignore slave women or treat them as objects
in the development of their stories of male individualism.
On the other hand, Jacobs presents herself in contrast to
the middle-class ideal of proper behavior for a young, un-
married woman to demonstrate that slavery has stolen her
opportunity to marry and establish a respectable family.
Jacobs, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, decides to
have children by an unmarried white man, without the
sanction of marriage, as a compromise between coerced
adultery with her master and marriage to a free black
carpenter, which her master forbids. In addition, her nar-
rative moves away from Douglass’s individualism and de-
velops the importance of a community of women, both
black and white, in slavery and in freedom. When the narra-
tives of Douglass and Jacobs are considered in isolation
from other slave narratives they avoid or eliminate the story
of slave marriage and the exploration of the metaphors
that such a marriage suggests. In his study of black auto-
biography, My Father’s Shadow, David Dudley summa-
rizes current thinking by using Douglass and Jacobs as
models for a tradition of black autobiographical writing:
“Black men still tend to view themselves as isolated char-
acters striving alone to make their way in life, while women
tend to see themselves in relation to others, particularly to
their mothers, to their children, and to other women” (31).
In contrast to both Douglass and Jacobs, Bibb shares