Slave Narrative Maintains a Unique Station in Book Review

slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutional racially-motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on the author, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people in a society where antediluvian pseudo-science had deemed them to be mere animals. These works, although they provide us a keen insight into the nature of the period, all but disappeared following emancipation and the end of the Civil War. As black liberty was thought to be a vindicated cause, the accounts of former slaves lost their general appeal and were party only to a cultural heritage attended to only by other freed black slaves. However, black writers of both fiction and non-fiction in the 20th came to reflect the work of Frederick Douglas and others in the style in which they wrote. Anne Moody and Malcolm X reflect this legacy of struggle and redemption through literacy, which they share with other authors of the 20th century such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

In the early 1960's, James Baldwin, a homosexual black man writing in self-imposed exile in Paris, made the observation to his nephew that in the last hundred years since the Emancipation Proclamation, nothing much had changed for black people. Whether in the Jim-Crowe afflicted communities in the south or the ghettos of the urban north, black people were outside American society. This idea resonated with blacks in the United States, who started a protest movement designed to foster inclusively. This movement included Anne Moody, a young woman in Mississippi, and Malcolm X, a former prisoner and convert to Islam in the north. These writers were quick to realize that blacks in the United States needed to develop a positive identity for themselves, or would always be underneath white society in terms of economics and perception.

Anne Moody portrays Mississippi of the 1950's and 1960's as a land of oppressive whites and complacent Negroes.As an activist affiliated with the NAACP, Moody attempts to break this cycle by involving herself in a number of sit-ins and other forms of non-violent protest. Her account is part testimonial and part journalistic; she seeks both to inform her audience of the events that transpired and of the personal effect that it had on her as a young woman.

Moody portrays her crowd as that of rational, intelligent Christian activists. This differs from many of the accounts of black men growing up in the same environment - many of the narratives portray the lives of young men as being successive attempts to hide from the violent feelings that accompanied oppression. Moody turns to God and to her friends for strength in hostile situations. Of her experience in a sit in where she and several other young women refused to leave their seats at a restaurant, Moody writes:

We kept our eyes straight forward and did not look at the crowd except for occasional glances to see what was going on. All of a sudden I saw a face I remembered -- the drunkard from the bus station sitin. My eyes lingered on him just long enough for us to recognize each other. Today he was drunk too, so I don't think he remembered where he had seen me before. He took out a knife, opened it, put it in his pocket, and then began to pace the floor. At this point, I told Memphis and Pearlena what was going on. Memphis suggested that we pray. We bowed our heads, and all hell broke loose. A man rushed forward, threw Memphis from his seat, and slapped my face. Then another man who worked in the store threw me against an adjoining counter.

Although Moody's reaction to the violent actions of her white oppressors is instinctively angry and hostile, she attempts to resolve matters in peaceful ways designed to make her look more like the victim of an endemic social ill than like….....