by Olaudah Equiano’s life story helped end the slave trade, a scholar found records that complicate its first chapters, and a joke about history with the context taken out gave me a way to teach both
Wednesday, Shared Office, Door Closed
I have a student this term who does not say much. A man of about fifty, a custodian at one of the hospitals, taking one class at a time toward a degree. He sits by the window.
After class today he waited until the others had gone and said, “Is it true he made it up?”
I knew what he meant. I had assigned the first two chapters of a book for Friday, and he had gone looking online, and found the argument.
I asked him to sit down. We talked for forty minutes. I am going to try to set out what I told him, because I am not sure I got it right.
The Book
In 1789, in London, a man published his autobiography. The title is long, in the fashion of the time. It begins “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of” and then gives two names: Olaudah Equiano, and Gustavus Vassa, the African. He adds: written by himself.
It tells this story. He was born in a village in what is now Nigeria, the son of a chief. At about eleven he and his sister were kidnapped by raiders, separated and passed from hand to hand to the coast. He was put on a slave ship.
His account of that ship is one of the most famous passages in the English language. The smell below decks. The heat. People chained so close they could not turn. The crying. He was a child and he thought the white men were spirits who were going to eat him.
He was taken to the West Indies, then to Virginia. He was bought by an officer in the British navy, who renamed him, took him to sea and into battles, had him taught to read, and then, having promised him freedom, sold him.
His next owner was a Quaker merchant from this city. From Philadelphia. That always gets their attention. The man traded between here and the Caribbean, and he let Equiano trade a little on his own account. A glass tumbler bought for a few pence on one island, sold for more on the next.
In 1766, having saved forty pounds, he bought himself.
What the Book Did
He settled in England and joined the campaign against the slave trade. And he wrote the book. It was a sensation. Nine editions in his lifetime. He toured Britain and Ireland selling it. For the first time, hundreds of thousands of readers were told what the trade was by someone who had been cargo.
Parliament was debating abolition in those very years. Members read him. It is not too much to say that he changed the argument. Before, it was about commerce. After, it was about a child in a hold.
The Records
Now the difficulty. About twenty-five years ago a careful and sympathetic scholar, who has edited the book and written the standard biography, found two documents.
One is a record of his baptism, in a London church, when he was a boy. The other is the muster roll of a ship he sailed on years later. Both give his place of birth. Both say South Carolina.
Not Africa. Carolina.
If that is right, he was born into slavery in America. He never saw the village. He was never on the slave ship. The first chapters of the most important slave narrative ever written would be something he put together from what other people had told him.
What I Said to My Student
I did not tell him it was false, and I did not tell him it was true. I told him what is known.
The two records exist. That is a fact.
But a record is only what somebody wrote down. A child being baptized does not fill in his own form. A clerk asks, and writes what he hears or what the master says. An African boy with little English, in a room of white strangers, might be put down as from “Carolina” because that was where he had last been.
On the other side, his account of his homeland matches what we now know of that part of Africa in a number of details. He names things. Some scholars who know the region say he must have been there. Others say he could have learned it from books and from Africans he knew.
The man who found the records does not say Equiano lied. He says we cannot be sure, and that if he did create the African chapters, it was a brilliant and necessary act on behalf of millions who could not speak.
So the honest answer is: nobody knows. Serious people disagree.
My student looked out the window for a while. He said, “I don’t like that.”
I said I did not either.
The Joke
I had meant to use a Bohiney headline on Friday, and I showed it to him. It is on their education page: “Florida Schools Approve ‘History Lite’ with Just 50 Calories of Truth Per Page.” With zero added context.
The joke is about leaving things out so that history goes down easy.
And here is the uncomfortable thing. There are two ways to give students History Lite with this book.
One is to teach it straight. He was born in Africa, kidnapped, survived the ship. No footnote. That is how I was taught it. It is a clean, powerful story and it is the one he wanted told.
The other is the version my student found online. “Famous slave narrative exposed as fake.” That is also lite. It takes two clerks’ entries and treats them as a verdict, and it is often passed around by people who would like to believe the whole thing was exaggerated.
Both have had the context removed. The full-calorie version is harder to swallow. It is: this is one of the great books, it did enormous good, most of it is certainly true, and we are not sure about the beginning.
Why It Matters Less Than You Would Think, and More
I told him that even if the worst is so, nothing in the book is false about the world.
The ships were like that. We have the plans, the surgeons’ logs, the testimony of sailors. Children were kidnapped inland and marched to the coast. If he did not live the Middle Passage, he described it accurately, from people who had.
And everything from about the age of ten is documented. The navy. The sale. The Quaker in Philadelphia. The forty pounds. That is not in question.
So in one sense it does not matter. The trade was what he said it was.
In another sense it matters a great deal, and I think that is why my student did not like it. The title says “written by himself.” The whole force of the book is that he is a witness. Not a novelist. If the witness was not there for the first part, then for those pages he is something else: an advocate, speaking for others in the first person.
That is a noble thing to be. But it is a different thing.
What My Student Said
He thought for a long time. Then he said something I am going to use on Friday, with his permission.
He said, “My grandmother told stories about her grandmother. Slavery times, in Georgia. She told them like she’d been there. She said ‘we.’ She wasn’t there. But it was true.”
He said, “Maybe that’s what he’s doing. Maybe he’s saying ‘we.’”
I have read a fair amount of scholarship on this question and I have not seen it put better.
How I Shall Teach It
Not lite. I am going to give them the baptism record and the muster roll on the same handout as the chapter about the ship. Side by side.
I shall ask them what a document is, and who made it, and why. And then I shall ask what a memoir is, and who it is for.
Thursday
He stopped by again. He has finished the whole book, not just the two chapters. He said the part that got him was not the ship. It was the day the navy officer sold him, after promising. He said, “That part’s true. You can tell. Nobody makes up being that stupid about a man you trusted.”
My colleague from Leeds points out that Equiano lived most of his adult life in England and is buried there, and that they did not teach him either until quite recently. He sent me the London Prat’s English satirical news on true stories, in which a memoirist is asked for receipts, and its UK satirical news about where someone was really born.
Written by himself. I have underlined “himself” on the handout. I am going to ask them on Friday how many people that word can hold.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
