Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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I quote this passage at length here because it may well have served as the impetus to all of those formerly enslaved African Americans who penned the stories of their lives. They all wrote with a purpose, as Chesnutt avowed, and their compositions were designed to effect the greater good of the African American communities of which they were a part. They were, in other words, conscious activists. Consider Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), for example. This text, which has become the standard by which all other narrations by those formerly enslaved are judged, was designed to assist in the abolition of slavery. Indeed, Douglass perfected the style in his narrative by lecturing on the abolitionist circuit in New England once he had escaped from slavery in Maryland. Time and again, Douglass told the story of his experiences in slavery. As a result of those repeated tellings, his narrative achieved the polished status for which we praise his published life story.