"Not my mother, not my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing …": Alice Walker's "The Child Who Favored Daughter" as Neo-Slave Narrative - Critical Essay

While Jacobs is certainly in the best position to tell the story of her life as she has fashioned this creation, she nevertheless signifies her own self-empowerment by telling and writing, by writing and telling her story.

Harriet Wilson offers this same humility in writing her story in her Preface to Our Nig (1859): "In offering to the public the following pages, the writer confesses her inability to minister to the refined and cultivated, the pleasure supplied by abler pens. It is not for such these crude narrations appear" (3). What Wilson attacks in her novel/autobiography are social ills that well-meaning northern abolitionists would not think appropriate for "refined" and "cultivated" public discussions--miscegenation, a mother's abandonment of her child, ineffectual abolitionists, female sexual liberation, modern views on marriage, economic differences along race and gender lines.

W. E. B. DuBois writes in The Forethought to The Souls of Black Folk (1903): "I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there"(xxxi). DuBois seems less apologetic about the fact that he has written than on the nature of what he writes, clearly a gender difference here as the women apologize for writing altogether.

Perhaps the most illustrative example of a slave apologizing for her literacy is the case of Phillis Wheatley on the occasion of publishing her first volume of poetry. After being examined orally by a roomful of white male dignitaries and men of state, she writes in her Preface to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773):

   As her Attempts in Poetry are now sent into the World, it is hoped the
   Critic will not severely censure their Defects; and we presume they have
   too much Merit to be cast aside with Contempt, as worthless and trifling
   Effusions.... With all their Imperfections, the Poems are now humbly
   submitted to the Perusal of the Public. (iv-v)

Notice that Wheatley is not even privileged to speak in first-person, for to have an individual personal identity, despite having created sophisticated allusory poetry, is to challenge overtly her prescribed social position of"a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa" (vii). After Wheatley's oral examination, the men's statement "To the Publick" concludes: "She has been examined by some of the best judges, and is thought qualified to write them" (vii).

WORKS CITED

The AME Hymnal. Nashville: AME Sunday School Union, 1954.

Braxton, Joanne M. "Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: The ReDefinition of the Slave Narrative Genre." The Massachusetts Review 27 (1986): 379-87.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1845). The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Gen. ed. Maynard Mack. New York: Norton, 1985. 649-719.