Slave Narratives

Fatherhood and Masculinity in Slave Narratives

The American slave narrative typically displays a number of characteristics that reveal the narrator's understanding of masculinity. First, the male slave narrator often invokes a sense of lost origins, usually depicted in terms of the destruction of his family through separation and death. Slavery's destruction of the black family—its “traffic in humans” torn from parent, child, and sibling—came to function as one of the genre's central indictments of slavery. As a system of human ownership, slavery denied the patriarchal rights of fathers to make decisions about their children, which is to say that black fatherhood under slavery was invisible or ineffectual. When a female slave conceived a child through rape by her owner, the child she bore faced the dilemma of being “owned” by the biological father. Slave narratives thus suggested that being a slave presented enormous challenges to achieving a model of manhood that valued the rights and obligations of fatherhood. Despite a slave's desire to create traditional family structures, opportunities to attain personal autonomy or fulfill family obligations often conflicted with one another. In The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), for instance, the author attempts to escape slavery with his mother, only to leave her in slavery in order to ensure his own release. Thus, Brown's achievement of the freedom of manhood comes only through his failure to protect his mother.

Violence and Masculinity in Slave Narratives

Slave narratives also focus on scenes of physical brutality as a way of bearing witness to the cruelty slavery inflicts on its victims. To some extent, the culture of slavery dominated both male and female slaves through intimidation and acts of physical violence; thus, the threat of the whip and chain were often highlighted in the slave narrative. Slave narratives also suggest a tension between the heroic masculinity represented by resistance to slavery and the white codes of genteel or refined masculinity that deplored physical violence. On the one hand, slave narrators such as Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northrup identified a slave's combat with a white slaveholder or overseer as a mark of acquired manhood. “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” Douglass remarks on the threshold of his famous fight with Edward Covey, a slavebreaker, “you will now see how a slave was made a man” (Douglass 1960, 97).

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