Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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Taking into consideration that the slaves were forbidden to be taught how to read and write, in order to get acquainted with the stories of some of those Black Slaves in New France, “we have to rely on newspapers, letters, trial records, census reports, and other documents rather than on fully articulated narratives” (Siemerling 34). This exercise gives access to their untold stories and validates the literary importance of testimonies and interviews as part of, or a model of, slave narratives, just as we shall see when dealing with Benjamin Drew’s collection. Indeed, one of the most remarkable events that revealed the suffocating and desperate lives of slaves came from recorded data, more specifically from eighteenth-century trial documents. In 1734, when, according to Trudel, “around forty or fifty” (86) Black slaves lived in Québec, Montréal-based slave Marie Joseph Angélique became nationally known when she was hanged for allegedly burning down almost half of the city out of revenge.