164 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865hears Washington saying. “I am a slave ... How mean a thing am I. That accursed and
crawling snake ... that just glided into its slimy home, is freer and better off than I.”
“But here am I a man, – yes, a man!” he insists, “ – with thoughts and wishes, with
powers and faculties as far as angel’s flight above that hated reptile.” “My resolution
is fixed,” Washington concludes, “I shall be free.” In the rest of the story, Listwell
continues to listen well to the adventures of the heroic slave: his flight to Canada, his
return to rescue his wife, his enslavement again, his leadership of the mutiny. And the
reader is clearly being asked to listen well too, and draw the appropriate conclusions.
Like Douglass, William Wells Brown was born a slave, in Kentucky. His father was
a white man, his mother a slave woman. He escaped from slavery in 1834 and took
the name Wells Brown from a Quaker couple who assisted him in the course of his
flight. Moving to Boston, he wrote his autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown,
an American Slave. Published in 1847, it was exceeded only in popularity as a slave
narrative by the Narrative of Douglass, and it established Brown’s reputation. It is,
however, very different from the Narrative, or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by
Harriet Jacobs. For that matter, it offers an intriguing variation on the themes played
out in such other notable – and, in their own ways, highly individual – slave narratives
as The Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton
Hammon, a Negro Man (1760) by Briton Hammon (?–?), Life of William Grimes, The
Runaway Slave (1825) by William Grimes (1784–?), A Narrative of the Adventures
and Escape of Moses Roper (1838) by Moses Roper (1816–?), Narratives of the
Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke (1846) by Lewis Clarke (1815–1897) and
Milton Clarke (1817?–?), Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An
American Slave (1849) by Henry Bibb (1815–1854), The Fugitive Blacksmith; or,
Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington (1849) by James W. C. Pennington
(1807–1870), Twelve Years a Slave (1853) by Solomon Northup (1808–1863), Slave
Life in Georgia (1855) by John Brown (1818–?), The Life of John Thompson, A Fugitive
Slave (1856) by John Thompson (1812–?), Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
(1860) by William Craft (1826?–1900) and Ellen Craft (1826–1891), Narrative of the
Life of J. D. Green, A Runaway Slave (1864) by Jacob D. Green (1813–?), and Life of
James Mars, A Slave (1864) by James Mars (1790–1877?). The contrast with Douglass
is particularly striking. Douglass, in his account of his bondage and freedom, uses
rhetorical devices, rhythmic speech, and the conventions of the conversion narrative
to present himself as an exemplary figure, a type of heroic, manly resistance not
unlike the protagonist of his novella. Brown, on the other hand, deploys an
understated plain style, with little appearance of literary calculation or personal
reflection, to depict himself as ordinary, even anti-heroic. He describes how he
assisted one master, “a negro speculator or a ‘soul-driver,’ ” in preparing slaves for
market, making them look younger and fatter than they actually were. He also recalls
how, being sent to the jail for a whipping, he tricked a man he met on the way, a
freedman, into going to the jail and being whipped instead of him. Brown does not
try to excuse or extenuate the part he played as trickster. Rather, he uses his story to
explore the contradiction between the survival ethic of the slave and the dominant
morality of the day – and the way whites use the morally evasive behavior theyGGray_c02.indd 164ray_c 02 .indd 164 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM