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“I can not help telling some one of it, that they may feel as grateful as I feel… and if there is one that should feel grateful it is this feeble-bodied slave girl….”
If politics argues that certain groups of people are born into physical slavery, but can free themselves through a single act, psychology suggests that individual slaves are not born, but made—and that emancipation will also be a protracted journey. One does not readily forget, though one may travel far from, the lessons of identity learned in childhood.
My epigraph is taken from Kate Drumgoold's autobiographical narrative, A Stove Girl's Story: Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold (1898), about her experiences as a slave and afterwards. Born in Virginia of slave parents in 1858 or 1859, Drumgoold was therefore four or five when, in 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation; two years later, what remained of her family (ten daughters and their mother) moved to Brooklyn, where Drumgoold grew up and lived, working as a domestic and teacher. Consequently, by the time Drumgoold began to write her slave story, her actual life as a slave—which had itself been brief—had been long over. But as her narrative demonstrates, being a slave is not only (as if that were not enough) the organizing fact of her childhood history, four or five years at the mouth of memory; being a “feeble-bodied slave girl” (small and weak—like the child she actually was) shapes her view of herself nearly forty years later.
Narratives of traumatic experiences recounted after the events raise questions about liberation and enslavement as they relate to the act of telling. Finding linguistic relief in the act of telling, narrators liberate themselves from their memories. But the particular form of liberation slave narratives could provide was at least double. Given that the ideology of slavery