The story of American slavery has to include the ills of the system, the changes wrought in the aftermath of emancipation and the precipitous slide down into the sins of segregation. In this book we have the complete story, wrapped around two authentic slave narratives. Because both writers, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, escaped from bondage and lived through the end of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation and an America reunited and struggling with racial animosities and tensions, the book's author, David W. Blight, has used their accounts to paint the broad landscape.
Blight is the director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. He wrote, among other books, RACE AND REUNION, winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize and the Bancroft Prize. He is dedicated to the principle that slavery has no benign aspect and that the sufferings and trials of men like Washington and Turnage to attain freedom are testament to the absolute brutality of the Southern system. With frequent quotes not just from the two narratives (which are included in their totality in the book, Washington and Turnage being uniquely credited as co-authors of A SLAVE NO MORE) but from the writings of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs among others, Blight illustrates what privations the Southern slave was willing to endure in the pursuit of the prize of freedom, a prize that brought no property, no wealth and few rights, but secured the right to pursue wealth and eventually own property.
Wright extols the sacrifices of the Union Army and the efforts of good souls who helped to manage "contraband camps" where ex-slaves gathered in their thousands to pray, practice their new vocations and get a start at life as free human beings. He has found scant evidence of the largely mythological kindly slave owners and records that after the word of the Emancipation Proclamation spread, mostly by hearsay amongst the illiterate "property" of the embattled South, "good slaves" in their droves left "good masters." As one slave owner admitted, "Those we loved best, and who loved us best --- as we thought, were the first to leave us."
John Washington was an urban black living in northern Virginia whose treatment was not as animalistic as that of Turnage, a North Carolina fieldhand sold first to an owner in Virginia and then to Alabama. Washington was taught to read at an early age, and by the time the war broke out, he had a free black woman for a wife and various well-paid jobs for the Confederates. He slipped into Union territory at great risk and assisted the Union Army, identifying Confederate traitors in his hometown. His story very poignantly highlights the sorrow of a young person who longs for the simple joys of freedom. Eventually he and his descendants became professional people.
Turnage did not fare so well in the aftermath of the war, his continuing "persecutions" as he put it, probably owing to his lower social status, as were his savage beatings at the hands of sadistic overseers and masters as a cocky teen. It was the refusal to accept being whipped that caused Turnage to try five times to escape. He hid from patrols, sentinels, police and even other slaves who fearfully would report escapees in order to avoid bloody reprisals. Through the two ex-slaves' eyes and Blight's extensive research, we see the repugnant details of slave marketing and exploitation. Both men were almost certainly the offspring of their white masters, and both revered their enslaved mothers and helped bring them into freedom's light.
Neither man ever knew the other. The diaries were presented to Blight almost simultaneously but separately. Both accounts are short, obviously composed so that generations to come would understand the impulse and the effort to attain freedom, and are truncated at the point when freedom was gained. Blight has filled in as much as possible the biographies of Washington and Turnage in the post-war years, a super-charged time when African Americans were both elated and dubious about their new status, and whites both North and South were trying to solidify personal and public attitudes about race.
Wallace Turnage, upon finding himself at last among friendly Yankees, wrote, "I now dreaded the gun, the handcuffs and pistols no more. Nor the blewing (sic) of horns and the running of hounds; nor the threats of death from the rebel's authority. I could now speak my opinion to men of all grades and colors, and no one to question my right to speak." John Washington underlined these words twice: "It was the First Night of my freedom" and declared, "It was Good Friday and the Best Friday I had ever seen."
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott