From Plantation to Penitentiary

Paper Summary:

This dissertation examines the literary and sociological, (and to an extent political) connections between the slave narrative and contemporary black prison literature. The writer shows a connection primarily between the style and content of slave narratives and prison literature. This includes an investigation into how blacks have created their own literary hero, (stories that are also popular with white children) through the Bre?r rabbit or trickster negro stories. It also shows the adoption of Christianity by slaves both as a religion and reaction to living in the New World, as well as the customising of Christianity. Using the prison literature, the later chapters regard the ratios of black and white prisoners and the connection between race and length of sentence. And an underlying theme both the slave narratives and the prison literature is the problem of education provided by the State for
black children.

Introduction
I. Bearing Witness
II. Numbers and Deuteronomy
III. So This is Prison
IV. Educating Dem Niggaz
V. Looking to Allah
VI. Plantation to Penitentiary
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography

From the Paper:

"Oral histories were and still are the traditional format of story telling in Africa. The slave narrative genre began in the early nineteenth Century to be used as propaganda by abolitionists, (a small number of texts were written before this date, but they tended to argue in favour of slavery.) The education of blacks was extremely limited in antebellum America and to a lesser extent, leaves a lot to desire even today. Before the early Twentieth Century it was very difficult to study the institution of slavery from a black perspective. A lot of the knowledge we have about slavery had come from the testimony of others, white abolitionists, travellers and planters. To write a narrative or autobiography takes a certain dedication; if a person has been denied literacy and education to a basic standard it makes the task even more difficult. Black writers struggled and we now have a number of slave narratives, mostly due to over two thousand interviews conducted between 1936 and 1938 by the Federal Writers Project. The abundance of literature written by whites about slavery, gives us a clear idea of whites various feelings about slaves. But Kenneth M. Stampp notes in The Daily Life of a Southern Slave, that not only did slaves write less, but they seemed determined that no white man should ever know his thoughts.2 This is reiterated by John W. Blassingame in his article, Using the Testimonies of Ex-Slaves Approaches and Problems, when he writes, "Many of the secular songs are lullabies or hunting songs; the white-hating trickster slave Jack almost never appears in the tales. The blacks were carefully editing what they told whites." "

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