74 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodsin Africa. The manner of living in the place where he spent his childhood, Equiano
explains, was “simple” and “plain”; he and his family and community lived “in a
country where nature is prodigal of her favor” and where wants were “few and easily
supplied.” Just in case the reader does not grasp the point, Equiano then makes it
clear. There is a “strong analogy,” he suggests, between “the manners and customs of
my countrymen,” the companions of his childhood, “and those of the Jews before
they reached the land of promise, and particularly the patriarchs while they were yet
in that pastoral state which is described in Genesis.” This is Eden, a prelapsarian
world of innocence, simplicity, and bliss where people enjoy a natural freedom and
equality and nobody wants for the fruits of the earth.
Then, as Equiano tells it, came the fall. At the age of 11, he was seized from his
family and sold into slavery. Taken to the African coast, he was terrified by the sight
of white people. “I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits,”
he remembers, “and that they were going to kill me.” And the strange complexions
of those into whose hands he had come, “their long hair, and the language they
spoke,” all united to confirm him in this belief. He feared he would be eaten, Equiano
tells the reader, ironically throwing back upon its authors a common European myth
about other peoples; and, when he is not eaten but “put down under the decks” on
ship and then transported across the ocean, his distress is hardly alleviated. Beaten
savagely, chained for most of the time, gradually learning all the hardships of capture
and the “accursed trade” of slavery, Equiano becomes convinced that his new^ masters
are “savages.” Preparing the ground for later slave narratives, Equiano memorably
traces the major events of his enslavement and the miseries he shared with his slaves:
the breaking up of families, the imposition of new names, the strangeness and
squalor, the fear of the black and the brutality of the whites. He also interlaces the
narrative with a series of powerful declamatory statements. “O, ye nominal
Christians!” he declares while describing a slave market, “might not an African ask
you – learned you this from your God, who says to you, Do unto all men as you
would men should do unto you?” There are, certainly, moments of relief. Aboard
one ship, Equiano befriends a white man, “a young lad.” Their close friendship,
which is cut short by the white man’s death, serves as an illustration of the superfi-
ciality of racial barriers, indicates the possibility of white kindness and a better way
for free blacks and, besides, anticipates a powerful theme in later American writing –
of interracial and often homoerotic intimacy. Gradually, too, Equiano manages to rise
up from slavery. He learns to read. He manages to purchase his freedom. Finally, he
experiences a religious vision and, as he puts it, is “born again” to become one of
“God’s children.” But the horror of Equiano’s capture and enslavement, the long
voyage to America and the even longer voyage to escape from the “absolute power”
exerted by the white master over his black property: that remains indelibly marked
on the reader’s memory. The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano is the first in
a great tradition of American narratives that juxtapose the dream of freedom with
the reality of oppression, the Edenic myth (of Africa here, of America usually
elsewhere) with a history of fall and redemption – all the while telling us the story of
an apparently ordinary, but actually remarkable, man.GGray_c01.indd 74ray_c 01 .indd 74 8 8/1/2011 7:54:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 57 AM