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

49 страница из 90

At last, I found an opportunity to escape, after studying upon it a long time. But it went hard to leave my wife; it was like taking my heart’s blood: but I could not help it – I expected to be taken away where I should never see her again, and so I concluded that it would be right to leave her. [Here Atkinson’s eyes filled with tears.] I never expect to see her again in this world – nor our child.

Throughout the collection we read about mothers, fathers, sisters, or brothers living in different places but feeling close to one another, of male slaves with free wives but also of slaves reared by aunts and grandmothers that cultivate familial values and follow the Christian precepts needed to acquire subjecthood. In this sense, Drew’s abolitionist agenda when composing the testimony of the fugitives draws from an assemblage of techniques used in popular novels and sentimental fiction of the nineteenth century that were ideologically employed to shape up the slave narratives as melodramatic in tone, but at the same time didactic in their appeal to commonly held moral values. In this regard, Edelstein also senses the author’s constraints and concludes that, “when faced by the complexities of slave family relationships, he simplified them and thereby distorted the testimony by making all slave families correspond to the norms of nineteenth-century white society” (xxv). Taking into consideration the abolitionists’ political agenda, Drew performs a kind of literary ventriloquism to display a strong appeal to the religious values of their white audiences, as well as to argue that slavery dehumanized the masters as well as degraded the slaves. Thus, the edition of these narratives sought to expose the slaveholding ideology as religious hypocrisy, and to recognize the slave as the true spiritual pilgrim that needs to be nationally redeemed. Moreover, by appealing to the religious and political values of the white readers, Drew’s slave narratives are turned into arguments that evidence the humanity and agency of Black people.