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xxxviii INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE

challenges Gates's and Davis's assessment of the postbellum black voice and
slave narrative, arguing instead that both remained strong after 1865, reveal-
ing a deepened understanding of the experience of enslavement, enriched by
the context of emancipation. For the many postbellum black authors who
realized their freedom as a result of the Civil War, the slave narrative genre
remained a fresh and dramatic instrument for writing about and grappling
with the contradictions with which their bondage, liberation, and its after-
math were fraught. Their narratives were no longer in service to abolition per
se, but postbellum black authors routinely asserted their loathing of slavery,
detailing their struggles against it at length. For example, John Lindley
Smith wrote, "From a child I had always felt that I wanted to be free. I could
not bear the thought of belonging to anyone."⁵⁶ Although writing in 1894,
George Henry dedicated many pages to describing his days in slavery and
the patient, deliberate steps he took to free himself. John Malvin stated
bluntly, "so great was my abhorrence of slavery that I was willing to run any
risk to accomplish the liberation of a slave."⁵⁷ Assertions by African
Americans in the late nineteenth century about their desire for freedom and
their determination in seeking it during slavery carried considerable force
and political value at the moment when a host of racist theories contended
that they could not thrive in freedom. After emancipation black Americans
still needed to prove they wanted freedom, and it was within the enduring
slave narrative tradition that they continued to make their case.

Andrews argues that the slave narrative enjoyed undiminished relevance
after 1865 because the authors grounded their narratives in their slave past
while exploring their new opportunities in the circumstances of emerging
freedom. Postbellum authors sought repeatedly to determine "what, if any-
thing, the slave past had to give to a self-respecting, forward-looking black
man or woman in the late nineteenth century."⁵⁸ Even in writing of slavery,
many narrators asserted their dignity and high ambitions. George Henry
testified, "I was determined to do none of their mean, low, occupations
around houses, I aspired to something higher.... My body was fettered but
my mind was always free and aspiring."⁵⁹ In freedom, Henry became an
overseer on a plantation with thirty hands and, later, a ship captain on the
Chesapeake. His life story demonstrated that slavery did not attenuate his

^{5656. Smith, Autobiography, 29.}

^{5757. Malvin, North into Freedom, 44 .}

^{5858. William L. Andrews, "Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass and
Elizabeth Keckley." Black American Literature Forum, 23:7 (Spring 1989).}

^{5959. Henry, Life, 8- 9.}