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

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Nonetheless, although this recollection of U.S. ex-slaves has not been granted the necessary critical acknowledgement, some scholarly and historical voices have fittingly pointed to its ideological blemishes. In his reading of Drew’s book, Frank Black centers on the ideology that permeate the transcriptions and, more concretely, on the sentimental strategies and the politics of domesticity. He believes that “[p]erhaps more genuinely troublesome than the number of marriages recorded by Drew is the strength of marital ties suggested by the proportion of fugitive couples who escaped bondage together” (287). Marriage was not only central to religious creed and civil mandates of the nineteenth-century North America, but it was also a crucial issue around the limitations of the slave’s humanity and sexuality.

In the nineteenth century, the tenets of family law held that marriage and family were natural, sacred, and morally compelled. This law was deemed to be based both on God’s plan and command, and on natural law which is but itself a reflection of divine law and of morally accepted behavior. If ex-slaves wanted to be humanly recognized creatures of God, they needed to be consistent with the values of the legal system and, accordingly, marriage became a form of social respectability and attachment. In Drew’s book, the discourse on marriage and domesticity follows the accepted prospects of acceptability. That is why out of the twenty-five male fugitives indicating they were married at the time of their escape, ten fled with their wives, and six others became reunited with their wives in Canada. And to put things even clearer, two of those who left their wives in bondage had already been separated from them. Thus, the marriage discourse bespeaks the legitimation of the personhood of the male and female ex-slave. Most possibly, as Black astutely realizes, “Drew was attracted or directed to those Canadian fugitives who approximated most closely that conduct and family composition consistent with what abolitionists hoped to find among slaves and former slaves” (288). In fact, when, due to the cruelties of slavery, families were ripped apart, Drew resorts to sentimentality to exonerate the slave’s solitude and to explain why there is no possibility to harbor familial values. For example, when the fugitive Henry Atkinson describes his desolation for reluctantly leaving his wife behind, Drew inserts a parenthetical comment so that it can be read by the white readership: