Review of SLAVERY AND CLASS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH

JEALandewsrev

William L. Andrews.  Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony 1840-1865.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.  ISBN  978-0-19-090838-6. 389 pp., hardback.

William Andrews , E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill, has had a distinguished career as a scholar of African American literary history.  He has written, edited, and co-edited approximately forty books.  The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) served notice that Andrews had learned well from his mentor Blyden Jackson, and To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography 1760-1865 ( 1986) was widely recognized as a seminal work in studies of autobiography as portals for discovery in American history and culture(s).  It is fair to say that To Tell a Free Story secured Andrews' place as an authority  in the unfolding of literary historiography.  Indeed, that book initiated great expectations for his explorations in American life histories and in the contested arena of the slave narrative.  His most recent investigation of slavery and class does not disappoint. It is a n invitation to observe some American scholars  circle back to their intellectual origins to secure an audience for work to be done in narrative testimony from 1865 to the present.

Given the turgidity which characterizes the bulk of academic writing, Andrews offers his readers clarity and interesting turns of phrase.  Even in a randomly chosen sentence of some length

Moreover, by imputing a do-like mentality and behavior to beaten, hungry, and desperate slaves, Douglass widened the distance between the many slaves who suffered under "bad masters" and the few whose "good masters" fed and clothed them well, worked them "moderately," surrounded them "whit physical comfort," and thereby unwittingly encouraged them  to dream of freedom. (260)



syntax and diction compel attention.  Nevertheless, the surprise of readability in  Slavery and Class in the American South does tempt us to  transgress, to silently read "slave narrative testimony" as "enslaved narrative testimony" and  to position ourselves to grasp why contemporary historiographical thinking  might challenge Andrews' production of  "traditional" speculations about the nature of textuality, assumptions which obtained  before the advent of digital humanities and subtle readings of texts under the influence of cognitive science.  Andrews examines a generation of testimony produced in the American matrix of what Charles W. Mills  aptly described in The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) and thus provides an opportunity to reconsider flux in the ontology of testimony through the lens of literary history. Reconsideration leads to critique of Andrews' arguments from angles provided by Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), Tommy J. Curry's The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017) and a range of contemporary monographs in African American intellectual history.

Andrews' argument pertains to  the implications of language used in sixty-one narrative published between 1840 and 1865, to what is overtly or covertly inscribed  in those antebellum narratives.  The thematic  organization of the book casts light on the frequency of key reference to "class," "status," and "caste in four chapters.  Chapter 1 gives special notice to multiple class perspectives, but the less prominent  attention given to "caste" has peculiar relevance in 2020 for our thinking about narratives and constellations of consciousness  in communities of the enslaved.  Although the 2016 Survey of Caste in the United States issued by Equality Labs [[ https"//www.equalitylabs.org/castesurvey ]] urges us to believe American caste is primarily a matter of how South Asian Americans have negative experience under the pressures of white supremacy, we know from John Dollard's classic work in social psychology, Caste and Class in A Southern Town (1937) that caste has been a powerful  determinant  in diverse American ethnic histories, both before and after 1865.

The second chapter gives us a comprehensive focus on "The work, occupations, social affinities, and socioeconomic  mobility of mid-century narrators" ( 24).  Chapter 3 examines in some depth narrative depictions of conflict between blacks and whites, with generous attention to Frederick Douglass' autobiographies of 1845 and 1855.  The fourth chapter ups the ante as it were by way of distinctions between enslaved runaways and enslaved fugitives, because judicious attention is accorded to divergent psychological economies in the narratives.

In the Epilogue, Andrews circle back to his seminal work in To Tell a Free Story by specifying "a few signal differences between mid-nineteenth and late-nineteenth-century slave narrative" (25).  Thus, the end of Slavery and Class in the American South articulates what ought to be fresh, ongoing inquiry about the contemporary status of class, enslavement, and caste in the writing of American life histories across an ethnic spectrum.  Indeed, Slavery and Class in the American South is a crafty and well-crafted study that brings its own testimony to the implacable, erosive presence of race in the American republic of letters.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            May 30, 2020