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

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Even though she never got to write her story due to her illiteracy (Trudel 124), she responded to the questions of the prosecutors and jury and publicly voiced the horrors and tragedies of Black slaves in Canada. The first interrogation sets the tone of her confession and inscribes her testimony within the accounts of slavery: “Stated to be named Marie Joseph, aged twenty-nine years, born in Portugal / And to have been sold to a Flemish man who sold Her to the deceased Sieur de francheville, about nine years ago, where she has remained ever since” (qtd in Siemerling 34). After having consulted all the documents and jurisdiction, Siemerling rightly contends that “[t]hese court documents record the words of the accused slave in the third person, revealing her responses under interrogation” and thus, despite this context, “ the transcriptions of the accused slave’s testimony offer elements of a slave narrative, the most detailed account based on a slave’s statements in eighteenth-century New France that we have” (34). That is, Angélique’s testimony and story have come to represent Canada’s first undisputed slave narrative and, definitely, a direct precursor to Benjamin Dew’s A North-Side View of Slavery because, recorded in 1734 by the authorities of New France, “the narrative anticipated in some of its elements the better known narratives of later fugitive slaves, although these were often elicited under more conductive circumstances by more sympathetic listeners, usually in the service of the cause of abolitionism” (Siemerling 35).³