Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in a place he called Igbo, an area of Africa that is now southeastern Nigeria and that entered the consciousness of the Western world during the slow and steady ascension of the British nation to military and financial dominance.1 By the year of his birth, the British had been involved in the slave trade for almost two hundred years, ever since the anti-Catholic sentiment and action of Queen Elizabeth I and the unquenchable greed of the ruthless merchant John Hawkyns. Impatient with Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic domination and angry about arbitrary papal rule that had divided the world up between its two ecclesial servant-nations, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I sent Hawkyns to Africa with her blessing.
The Hawkyns family of Plymouth was a powerful, well-established merchant clan. Through his father, William Hawkyns, John had learned the ways of the sea and of trade. He also inherited his father’s lust for power and his comfort with violence as a means to avaricious ends. Three ships under John Hawkyns’s leadership—the Swallow, the Jonas, and the flagship Solomon—arrived on the west coast of Africa in December of 1562. Hawkyns and his men attacked Portuguese traders, coldbloodedly torturing and killing many of them and stealing their cargo, their money, and their human spoils. He stored the human spoils below decks in “rat-infested holds,” his only concern being for their survival until such time as they could be sold.2 The Portuguese claimed Hawkyns stole over nine hundred Africans. Hawkyns’s own count claims fewer than that. His third-person account of this brutal beginning of the British slave trade is telling: “From thence he passed to Sierra Leona, upon the coast of Guinea, which place by the people of the country is called Tagrin, where he stayed some good time, and got into his possession, partly by the sword, and partly by other means, to the number of 300 Negroes at the least, besides other merchandises, which that Country yieldeth.”3 The “trade” born in violence took on an international character thanks to English piracy. Hawkyns proceeded from the west Guinea coast to Hispaniola, where he took advantage of the tensions between the settlers and the Spanish crown. These settlers, who felt abandoned by Spain, eagerly bought the goods, both inanimate and human, Hawkyns was selling. Hawkyns returned to England with money in his pocket and money for the queen’s eager hands. From these hellish beginnings began the most significant phase of the Atlantic slave trade, the British trade, which far surpassed that of the Portuguese and the Spanish. This slave trade brought Equiano into the modern world in British hands.
The 1560s and two centuries more were years of British expansion. British interests ran from Nova Scotia through the colonies of North America to the Caribbean colonies as well as to its African interests along the Ivory, Gold, and slave coasts. Britain was also pressing its way east toward India and toward the east coast of Africa. Between Equiano’s birth and the day of his death in 1797, Britain imported each year millions of pounds of sugar, tobacco, and cotton and millions of gallons of rum. They exported yearly hundreds of thousands of his “sable brethren,” as he called them. Equally important, British war and slave ships were growing in size and firepower, becoming superior to every other nation’s ships. During these years, British military prowess and the British appetite for and consumption of foreign goods, especially sugar, were matched only by its hunger for black bodies to labor in the production gangs of the colonies. From 1707 until 1808, over seven hundred thousand Africans gave their lives to the Atlantic plantation complex, laboring in the British Caribbean colonies. During the same period, more than five hundred thousand Africans perished on the march to the slave ships; four hundred thousand died on board the ships; and a quarter million died shortly after the ships docked.4 Yet during this time Britain was alive, powerfully alive, at sea. This is the world Olaudah Equiano was born within.
According to his own account, Equiano was captured at a young age, separated from his people, forced to march the long journey to the sea, compelled to live aboard British vessels, in the colonies, and in England, and in the midst of all this he became a Christian. What makes his story remarkable is that it became a story, written by himself. An audacious act, the act of writing allowed him to create a self in writing, a human interior. Equiano’s powerful self-portrait of a human, an African, and a Christian presents a pivotal moment in the formation of Christian identity in nonwhite flesh, in colonized bodies. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative is a Christian text, a theological text,5 a spiritual autobiography.6 Yet the acknowledging of his story as Christian invites one to consider the complexities of that existence for the African in modernity. Chronologically, Equiano comes centuries after Henry the Navigator’s chronicler Zurara, and he falls between José de Acosta and John William Colenso. But theologically he comes after them all. We had to see the worlds formed around Zurara and the Jesuit Acosta and that formed around Colenso in order to understand the world Equiano will create through his own words.
In 1789, Gustavus Vassa, now known by his African name, Olaudah Equiano, published his autobiography. The first volume of the original two-volume work begins with an account of his life in his native country. He posits a simplified yet civilized existence for his people before the invasion of Western civilization. The social order was healthy and logical—there were warriors and militia, musicians, dancers, and poets, chaste wives and responsible husbands and hard-working agriculturalists. Priests and magicians functioned as ministers and physicians. There were slaves, but they labored under the humane conditions of the kinship network.
The bonds of kinship played a tremendous role in Equiano’s early life, both as boundaries to stay within and as rules to break. In a poignant episode he talks about his violation of the purity codes of his people during his mother’s menstruation. During menstruation, he tells us, it “was forbidden [for a woman] to come into a dwelling-house, or touch any person, or any thing we ate. I was so fond of my mother I could not keep from her, or avoid touching her at some of those periods, in consequence of which I was obliged to be kept out with her, in a little house made for that purpose, till offering was made, and then we were purified” (Interesting Narrative, 42). For the sake of intimacy, Equiano risks violation of social codes, even if those codes are religious, ultimately demonstrating the elasticity of kinship bonds. Equiano subversively imagines connection.
These very bonds of connection unraveled for him when he and his sister were stolen from their home by two men and a woman employed by slavers (47). While still a child, Equiano was displaced, taken away from all he knew. Then, before his journey enters its most important life-shaping moments, he is separated from the stolen sister. Without parents, land, a place, or a known future to shape his imagination or to focus his desires, Equiano describes the shock waves produced by the slave ships as they spread the Atlantic slave trade across West Africa.
He was also describing “exchange,” a word that now means definitively separating oneself from a product of one’s personal labor, but had very different meanings in African political economy. In that context, people did not think in terms of the potential worth of an object in the context of exchange but saw its immediate value in terms of concrete use. Objects made by a person could be loaned, entrusted to the possession of and use by another, but not parted with. It was the indissoluble association of a person with the thing he or she had created, even after that thing might have passed into the hands of another, that produced the bond that always united givers and receivers, a reciprocal connection in personal terms of the association in material terms that arose out of possessing some material extension of another’s labor.7
Slave traders, however, entered African political economies with a new vision of the relation of material objects to human being and new ways of teasing out the contractual elements of human relations themselves. Africans had viewed human labor as networked and contingent upon longer, more abiding claims to potential service. Given the fragility of life and the tentativeness of human strength and productivity, powerful people sought to solidify their position by acquiring loyalty rather than labor and promise of service rather than immediate payoffs.8 Leaders and laypeople alike sought stability in long-term obligatory relationships out of which came the logics of exchange and the telos of production.9
In a “political economy where human dependence was the most efficacious means of increasing production,” the idea of production primarily for exchange rather than communal use was destructively alien.10 Therefore by manipulating a barter system that was intensely bound to use-value, each agreement, each sale suggested to African peoples engaged in trade the possibility of long-term obligatory relations. However, this communal metaphysic was being slowly eroded by an unbelievably virulent form of contractual individualism underwritten by sheer violence and European technological mastery. Workers were objectified alongside their labor, their products, their land, their animals, their loves, their hates, their hopes, their dreams, and all their everyday practices. This capitalist world of surplus value would introduce vast long-term inflation and the most powerful lever for sustaining uneven exchange ever created: debt. This was not the debt of an individual but of representatives tied to clans and peoples.11 Guns and alcohol, essential parts of almost every “bundle” of goods, also helped to distort the traditional practices of community building. Joseph Miller powerfully captures these disruptive effects:
Beyond the obvious coercive potential of muskets and the political prestige of strong drink, the sheer circulation of imports of any sort nurtured social and political stratification in Africa. Goods from the Atlantic accelerated the rates at which the powerful dislocated the weak and at which people of all sorts were uprooted from their home communities and moved to those of new lords or masters, from villages to kings’ courts, from old patrons to new patrons, or from lineage leaders to merchants… . [T]he increased velocity with which slaves circulated as the flows of material goods intensified meant that slave dependents moved more frequently and spent greater portions of their lives beginning over and over again as helpless, culturally disabled aliens in a succession of new communities.12
Miller notes four exchange strategies growing out of the increased commercialization of black life. The first altered normal patterns of communal consumption by pressing large quantities of foreign goods and services through traditional “domestic circuits of exchange” built on marital alliances, patronage, and tribute. The second strategy encouraged unrelated parties with goods to exchange or “producers with market opportunities among distant populations” to create relationships of alliance, patronage, and tribute, building into kinship networks establishing traditional and semitraditional bonds of obligation and relationship. In this way market opportunities became the underlying reason for the relationship itself. The third strategy involved utilizing trade centers for the “open exchange of material goods between autonomous equals, unbalanced by personal obligation.” This strategy stood in constant tension and struggle with traditional patterns of exchange revolving around community building and obligation. The fourth exchange strategy embodied a “modern commercial economy” that rejected the old political economies in favor of “attribut[ing] basic value to useless tokens of exchange rather than to people.” Africans committing to this exchange strategy were required to fundamentally alter their way of life.13
One can see in these stratagems the slow overturning of native anthropologies of deep human connection that vivify and make intelligible individual actions. The alternative anthropological vision is one that is well known—a vision of individuals freed to draw their own human circle guided by market possibilities. These stratagems served one decisive purpose, namely, to make possible the (hoped-for) eternal enslavement of black flesh. They hoped to make black peoples actors within the global market, peoples of diverse tongues who would now all speak the same language of commerce, knowing its calculation of evaluation. And of course there was one painful difference between actors: Africans could be bought and sold.
The trade entered African dreams and waking consciousness and stayed for centuries, touching every life indirectly and many directly. It slowly drove peoples deeper into alien lands, not only destroying their hopes of returning to ancestral lands in safety, but weaving their designation as aliens into their very being. Miller eloquently summarizes the tragedy of trade’s chaos:
The slaving frontier zone thus washed inland in the sixteenth century and surged east like a demographic wave bearing the sea-borne goods of the Europeans on its crest. It tossed people caught in its turbulence about in wildly swirling currents of political and economic change. Like an ocean swell crashing on a beach, it dragged some of its victims out to sea in the undertow of slave exports that flowed from it, but it set most of the people over whom it washed down again in Africa, human flotsam and jetsam exposed to slavers combing the sands of the African mercantile realms left by the receding waters in the west, displaced from their birth places but not distantly so compared to the faraway destinations of the slaves carried off to America. By the middle third of the nineteenth century, the wave had tumbled population all the way to the center of the continent. There it rose to towering heights of chaos as its force combined with a similar demographic surge flooding the area from the Indian Ocean. Behind it, toward the Atlantic to the west, the turbulence subsided into relatively still demographic pools where quiet-flowing currents of reproduction and debt carried off most of the people sent into slaving, and where only eddies of periodic succession struggles and banditry from the distant sweeping tide continued to disturb the calm surface of politics.14
None of this would have been possible without the slave ship. What began with the guile of exchange led to violence and violent capture and then to the march of exile. Black bodies were driven out from the higher inland forests, plains, and mountains down to sand, ocean, and hungry vessels. The long, arduous journey prepared them, both physically and psychologically, for the slave ship, slowly carrying them away from home through the trading hands of multiple peoples.15
The march was the demonic reversal of a pilgrimage. On holy pilgrimage, those who walk depend on kind, hospitable strangers to offer them food and sometimes shelter. The pilgrimage, step after step, edging exhaustion, reveals the vulnerability of the human creature and humans’ longing for God as companion and destiny. The walking pilgrim calls to God her Creator hoping to be received home again, not in heaven but here on earth in communion with the Holy One. For many in the Christian tradition, there was and is no stronger purifier of Christian identity than the aching journey of a pilgrimage. But the march of black flesh in bonds to the sea mocked that journey through reversal. The march of slaves, greedily hurried black bodies, toward death-filled ports demonically mimicked the divine banishment of the first family from the garden. Slavers would not have imagined this brutal march as a theological act, yet it was so in the most sinister way. African peoples walking together, bound together, first in varieties of rope and finally, as they approached the ships, bound in chains, left a way of imagining themselves when they left their lands.
Equiano marched, with his short legs and small feet. This child journeyed toward a destiny not primarily of place or even time but of identity. His walk toward the water brought him briefly to a chance encounter with his stolen sister, when they would be reunited for a single night: “She and I held one another by the hands across [a slaver’s] breast all night; and thus for a while we forgot our misfortunes in the joy of being together” (51). The image of a slaver sleeping between these two children, a brother and a sister, was a powerful symbol of the disrupting wave of slavery. Morning meant the return of Equiano’s misery as they were separated forever. The morning severed his last connection, reducing him to nothing and returning him to the long journey into nothingness. This is the nothingness out of which he will come to be. Standing in the middle of this nothingness will be the chaos that will order his existence, the slave ship: “The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave-ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, nor the then feeling of my mind” (55).
If the world was recreated, then the sign of that recreation was the slave ship. Out on the vastness of the ocean, where water and wave superintend sight and sound, the slave ship announced the recreation of the world beyond the eyes and ears of much of the world. The life of Olaudah Equiano shows this. The slave ship floats on the sea, suspended between worlds, announcing the power to displace and translate the young Equiano. The child will be born again, born of a new set of relations he cannot easily grasp. He can only draw on the vision of a world of spirits to capture through his imagination what he cannot understand through their language. The hands that had reached all the way to his village and its intimate spaces now drew him close to its collective white body: “When I was carried on board I was immediately handled, and tossed up, to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country” (55).
The new ground on which these Africans would fashion the contours of their identities was the ship itself. The wooden world of the ship delivered them into the colonial world, but first it served as a replacement. The ship replaced the land by reformulating ecologies of identity around bodies, as it were, floating in space. Once they arrived at the shore for departure, a process of evaluation that had been gaining strength since their capture disclosed its logic. At the door of the sea, their bodies underwent a new calculation—size, type, age, gender, tribal background, language, beauty, ugliness, strength, compliance, aggressiveness, viability—all geared to determine market potential. This economic calculation was godlike in character. From the unassailable position of the gaze, slavers generated a process of judging black bodies that would take on a life of its own, growing in discursive power with each century. The frightening newness of the ship in the eyes of the Africans foretold a remaking of their lives without their consultation. The child Equiano sensed the newness signified by the chain but thought this newness meant they were now food to be eaten. A child’s imagination reached close to the truth: they were now commodities: “When I looked around the ship too, and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate, and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted” (55).
The slave ship presents a particular moment when human beings seize limitless possibilities.16 The captain stood at the center of slave ship ecology, representing both the European feudal past and its Enlightenment mercantile future. The captain was, as Marcus Rediker notes, “the monarch of his wooden world” and the “representative of the merchant and his capital throughout the voyage.17 … He hired the crew, procured the ship’s provisions, oversaw the loading of the original cargo, and conducted all the business of the voyage, from the buying of the slaves in Africa to their sale in the Americas. He saw to the navigation of the vessel, tended the compasses, and gave the working orders. On the smaller ships, he ran one of the two watches… . He possessed near-absolute authority, and he used it however he saw fit to maintain social order aboard the ship.”18
Captains came from the upper classes of the Old World, and on their ships they were the educated, articulate authority figures. Slave ship captains, as the harbingers of the new capitalist order, sought to maintain absolute discipline geared to a central goal—maximum profitability. On the one hand, they embodied the emerging vision of a self-made individualist who manifested a true entrepreneurial spirit with its risk taking and business-making possibilities. On the other hand, they also embodied applied Enlightenment knowledge with their fluency in multiple languages and their abilities to engage in speculation, negotiation, and complex international contractual agreements. They were the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century equivalents of the small and midsize business owner of a twenty-first-century franchise. They also exhibited their unbelievable localized power in ways that would establish much of plantation and New World social logics.
The captain not only carried forward the merchant’s sensibilities and interest on the slaving voyage, but also acted out of profound self-interest. A successful slaving voyage would make a captain a very rich man. A captain of a slave ship in eighteenth-century Britain who completed a successful voyage could make the modern-day equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, gaining his own slaves or selling slaves from his own stock. The captain could then invest that money in land, plantation, and farming opportunities. A captain could easily retire after a few voyages to the aristocratic life of a plantation owner or enter a career as a statesman in the New World.
But this was certainly not the case for the sailors. The sailors were in every sense the oppressed proletariat. Few men (and even fewer women) happily or knowingly volunteered for work on a slaving ship. They were driven to the ship by distorted visions of adventure, sheer poverty and financial desperation, or kidnapping or when their debts were manipulatively increased by cunning merchants, landlords, and captains to the point that they had no choice but to sign up for service aboard these dreaded vessels.19 Crimps, labor agents in the employ of merchants, landlords, or captains, would coerce these unprotected souls into service. A crew of sailors on a slaving ship often represented an international and cosmopolitan group of impoverished laborers with peoples from various corners of Europe and the colonies—Indian, Asian, and, of course, African. African sailors served because other employment options were extremely limited; indeed, the only other option was slavery.
Sailors formed a brotherhood of suffering and violence, serving, as Rediker states, “[as] a third party between two much bigger, heavier dancers: the merchant, his capital, and his class on the one hand and the African captive, her labor power, and her class-in-the-making on the other.”20 This middle position made the sailor both the recipient of and the conduit for the violence of the slave ship. Sailors were beaten, whipped, and tortured in other ways in order to maintain discipline and keep them in strict order on ships far from the judicial structures of land.21 Sailors in turn took out their anger on black bodies by beating, whipping, and torturing slaves. Thus the possibilities the slave ship may have provided for ethnic confraternity, for freedom, and for the individuals’ financial success were engulfed in the one reality of violence. The ship’s cosmopolitanism was constructed through violence and on the foundation of the African slave, the one whose body marks the accumulation of profit through time.22
The slave ship distorted the power of joining together many different peoples on a common journey and mission.23 The diverse languages of the crew were subordinated to the voices of the captain and the officers, and the various languages of the slaves were used against them. Slaves of different tongues were often placed together on ships, which both further isolated and individualized them and reduced the possibility of planned rebellion. As one employee of the slave trade stated, “By taking some ‘of every Sort on board [the slave ship], there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel.’”24
The man, woman, and child drawn in pain from their homeland were greeted by violence, stripped down to a nakedness filled with shame, and reduced from names to numbers.25 Loved ones connected by flesh and blood who survived the interior march were often separated from one another. Those fortunate enough to remain together entered the horrors of the ship together. On board the ship, men and women were separated and placed below deck, the men most often chained together by twos. When above deck, slaves were separated from the crew by a barricade, sometimes reinforced by musket or loaded blunderbuss and cannon. From the barricade crewmen could fire on slaves in the event of an insurrection.
Those who resisted in any way were beaten or whipped without mercy. Both women and men whose rebellion was thought to be contagious were tortured and killed as examples of the wages of disobedience. The rape of black women was woven into the very fabric of the social order of the slave ship. The captain and the officers selected the women or, most often, the young girls they wanted in their personal stock, and they then controlled sailors’ access to the “remainders.” That control was without virtue, as sailors shared fully in the brutal rape and torture of women and children.26
Death revealed itself aboard the slave ship as a power, as an antilife form pressing its way deep into the ecology of slave ship life. Captains claimed this power and ruled their crews by fear and intimidation. Sailors shared in this power and drew its use to a fine point in the control of the slaves. One must remember, however, that death surrounded captain and sailors as well in the forms of shipwreck, piracy, mutiny, and financial ruin. The west coast of Africa was for half of the sailors who sought its shore their final unhappy resting place, and for the half that did not die on the coast it was still a dreaded place. For all employed in the trade, exposure to the elements, disease, hunger, thirst, easy loss of life or limb were constant companions. All were bound together in this ecology, captain, sailor, and slave by the fragility that is creation.
The fragile creation is subject to death. Slave ships poignantly displayed the character of this vulnerability. They embodied not only the chaos and violence unleashed by human disobedience, but also gave witness to the contingency of human existence out of nothing. Slave ships played in the nothingness—hung African life out in it and dangled black bodies over it, always seeking to join those bodies to the nothingness out of which existence came in hopes of reestablishing African life as called into existence by market desire and the power of whiteness.
The finality of it all on board a ship suggested the final solution: suicide. For some West African peoples suicide in such cases was considered “an admirable act,”27 a kind of martyrdom, especially for those people who believed that in death they would overcome the nothingness and return home, free and without pain. Yet suicide in this case was more than an option. It was a supreme temptation, a false sign of freedom, and therefore a sign of death’s victory. In this temptation the voice of death spoke louder than the sounds of life, muffled as they were by the groans coming from the holds.
Many were prevented from yielding to the temptation of suicide. Instead they were forced to begin life anew on the ships as slaves. For instance, the simple yet profound act of eating became an occasion of torture. Eating on a slave ship did not carry the symbolic weight of affirming community and of offering thanks to God. Africans who refused to eat, choosing instead a slow death at sea rather than a slow death on the plantation were force-fed, often by use of a horrific piece of technology called the speculum oris, a contraption that forced the mouth open.
This technological advance in forced feeding stood alongside other disciplinary technologies deployed on slave ships. It was usual to find on a slave ship manacles (for the hands and arms), shackles (for ankles and sometimes wrists), various kinds of chains, neck irons, branding irons, thumbscrews, cat-o’-ninetails, and other whips.28 Just as the slave ship destroyed the honor of satisfying labor and its ability to build bonds of respect among different people, so too it turned technological advances malignant.
Bound together by twos and crammed tightly into the ship’s holds, these human beings lay side by side in coffinlike spaces fetid with mucus, vomit, blood, and human waste. The heat, paucity of breathable air, and pestilence meant that many died below deck. The fate of those joined to the dying and dead was to have death chained to them until someone removed the dead body. The fate of the dead reinforced the mutilation of community and the disorder of creation: dead bodies were not buried but thrown overboard to the waiting sharks that followed the slave ships. Sharks fed on black flesh as though it was part of their natural food source, and their menacing presence was a stark reminder of death’s imperial power reigning on board and of a creation in disarray.
As we noted in chapter 1, the geographic displacement established by the colonialist moment meant the body stood in, as it were, for the land. The slave ship reveals the flexibility and global adaptability of race, an adaptability enabled by the market. Everyone who stepped on a slave ship became racialized, white and black. But it was not only what happened to identity once aboard a ship, but what the arrival of a slave ship signified. As each slave ship docked in the new worlds, it further energized the racialization of human existence already underway through the overturning of peoples from their land. The slave ship for its part was the pivotal identity destabilizer that drew peoples into the performance of racial identities. Rediker writes, “It … mattered little what had been the cultural or ethnic background of the sailor, for he would, on the ship and coast of Africa, become ‘white,’ at least for a time, as the ‘vast machine’ helped to produce racial categories and identities. It was the common practice for everyone involved in the slave trade, whether African or European, to refer to the ship’s crew as the ‘white men’ or the ‘white people,’ even when the crew was motley, a portion of it ‘colored’ and distinctly not white. The sailor’s status as a ‘white man’ guaranteed that he would not be sold in the slave-labor market, and it marked him as someone who could dispense violence and discipline to the enslaved on behalf of the merchant and his capital.”29
This world of the slave ship, this remade world, this racial world would now be the world of young Equiano. In this world, he would seek to reestablish that which might make him whole, make him human. He will seek relationships, human bonds that might sustain him. In the third chapter of his narrative, Equiano introduces his readers to his important friendship with the youth Richard Baker, a white youth who befriended him on one of his first voyages after being purchased. A few years older than Equiano and the owner of slaves himself, Dick becomes a true friend. They shared “many sufferings together on shipboard” and laid “in each other’s bosoms when [they] were in great distress” (65). The friendship with Richard Baker ended abruptly with his death in 1759. But Equiano draws his loss to an important point: “[His death was] … an event which I have never ceased to regret, as I lost at once a kind interpreter, an agreeable companion, and a faithful friend; who, at the age of fifteen, discovered a mind superior to prejudice; and who was not ashamed to notice, to associate with, and to be the friend and instructor of one who was ignorant, a stranger, of a different complexion, and a slave!” (65). With remarkable candor and vulnerability, the writer suggests a white exemplar of friendship even within the hostile wooden world of the slave ship. Equiano is once again grappling with the death that stalks his bonding, his village, his sister, the fragment of his people at the slave market, and now his closest childhood friend, Richard Baker.
These efforts to create intimacy help one grasp the complexity of the master-slave relation as it is played out in Equiano’s life. Although he was bought and sold several times on the west coast of Africa, the significant slave masters emerge in the New World. On June 13, 1754, Equiano arrived in Virginia as a “refuse” slave, having been rejected in Barbados by West Indian buyers and having parted there with the few slaves to whom he had some connection.30 His slave odyssey would be shaped primarily by four men: Mr. Campbell, his first master; Michael Henry Pascal, his most significant master; Captain James Doran, a transitional master; and Robert King, the master who would eventually set him free. Though Campbell was first and introduced young Olaudah to the new world of slave existence in Virginia, it was Pascal who was most determinative of the life he would live and preferred to live. Pascal was a seaman, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and in 1754 he purchased the African boy for thirty or forty pounds sterling from Campbell. Most important, as Vincent Carretta notes, Pascal would give him access to surrogates: “He was still a slave, but because of his youth and status as an officer’s servant his was a relatively privileged position. He had lost one family but found another, he thought, in his fellow seamen. Most important, he once again appeared to be in a stable relationship with an adult male figure of authority. The orphaned little boy quickly attached himself emotionally to the man who had bought him and who, Equiano assumed, reciprocated that emotional attachment. In Equiano’s eyes Pascal filled the role not only of adult, master, and superior officer but, more significantly, of substitute father.”31
Before Pascal, though, Daniel Queen, the captain’s attending sailor, befriended him and taught him some of the rudimentary skills that would be necessary for financial self-sufficiency on and off a ship. Queen taught him how to attend to the captain, how to read and write, and how to buy and sell small items to the crew. Queen also taught him to read the Bible. They would spend countless hours reading and discussing the Bible. As Equiano says, “In short he was like a father to me; and some even used to call me after his name; they also styled me the black Christian. Indeed I almost loved him with the affection of a son” (92). Queen gave the young Olaudah the idea that he could be his merchant apprentice, which greatly fueled his fires of freedom.
Exchange networks became the point of cohesion and in some cases substituted for abiding kinship relationships, just as he was being introduced to Christian ideas. Christianity performed as an exchange network and, understood within categories of capital, would become a severely limited Christianity. It is not clear from the narrative whether Pascal became jealous of the relationship between Queen and Equiano or whether he sensed that the boy (whom he named Gustavus Vassa after the sixteenth-century Swedish king and emancipator) was being led to anticipate freedom. Whatever the case may be, Pascal abruptly and without warning, without allowing him to gather his things, without farewells to the crew, loaded Equiano onto a small boat, took him to another ship, the Charming Sally, and sold him to Captain James Doran. Heartbroken by yet more loss and by what he perceived as a deep betrayal, he tried to argue for his freedom with his new master and Pascal: “I told him my master could not sell me to him nor to any one else … I have served him … many years, and he has taken all my wages and prize-money, for I only got one sixpence during the war; besides this I have been baptized; and by the laws of the land no man has a right to sell me” (93–94).
Captain Doran told Gustavus that he “talked too much English,” and if he continued talking he would be tortured in the manner captains inflicted on insubordinate crewmen. The attempt to offer a rational argument against slavery in the face of a captain was ridiculous from the captain’s vantage point. What was also unseemly was English in the mouth of a slave, not to mention a slave speaking to white men as though he was their equal. Equiano in this conversation faced the limitations of relationships construed within networks of exchange, even as he tried desperately to deploy those networks to his advantage. We also see the symbol of Christianity’s fundamental limitation, the inefficacy of baptism in the presence of a racial calculus. As performed in the slaveholding Christian West, baptism enacted no fundamental change in the material conditions of Christian existence.
Even if at this point Equiano claims he had not fully understood the way of salvation, he attributed a Christian perspective to his younger self in this moment of betrayal: “In a little time my grief, spent with its own violence, began to subside; and after the first confusion of my thoughts was over, I reflected with more calmness on my present condition: I considered that trials and disappointments are sometimes for our good, and I thought God might perhaps have permitted this in order to teach me wisdom and resignation; for he had hitherto shadowed me with the wings of his mercy, and by his invisible but powerful hand brought me the way I knew not. These reflections gave me a little comfort, and I rose at last from the deck with dejection and sorrow in my countenance, yet mixed with some faint hope that the Lord would appear for my deliverance” (95–96). This is a beautiful statement of divine providence, a reflection one might attribute to a seasoned Christian whose spirituality reflects a disciplined interpretive practice. Equiano places such reflection in the mind of his younger self. This revealed to his white readers that even if the appropriate social relations promised by Christian faith were thwarted by the exchange networks constituted within slavery, his connection to God would not be so thwarted or compromised. Yet this mangled Christian social reality imposed on Equiano produced fissures in his theological vision.
A man whose intuitions and longings moved him toward a communal existence was forced to try to imagine Christian community in the face of its deepest social ruptures. The result was a Christian faith that struggled mightily against its social contradiction, yet one that resigned itself to the society constituted by the exchange networks of mercantile capitalism. This Christian faith imagined and sought belonging but was repeatedly thrown back by the dominant racial calculus to a theological isolationism in which God’s providential care had to substitute for communal care. There is a difference as well as a connection between providential care and the care of others performed as ecclesial community. However, when providential care is deployed in substitution it indicates an absence, a kind of recapitulation of Gethsemane, of isolated agony where Jesus’ disciples failed to help him. But he was sustained in his life mission only by his relationship with his Father, God (Matt 26:36–46). So too Equiano attempts to act faithfully toward God and imagine community in the face of its unrelenting absence. In Equiano’s case, visions of providential care had to be stretched to distortion, stretched to cover absurdity after absurdity.
Equiano was keenly aware of the absurdity of faith’s performance in the remade world. The biting sarcasm that runs through the narrative is evidence of this. He repeatedly ties the designation of Christian to people whose brutal actions belie this claimed identity. He notes Christian masters who brutally tortured their slave for the slightest offense (108), the ubiquitous rape of women, including very young girls (104), and the theft from slaves who had little or nothing (118, 128, 214). The writer assumed a prophetic position as one who spoke from within the Christian tradition, arguing through its internal logics and utilizing its scriptural wisdom. However, what he was not fully aware of was how far down the absurdity reached into Christianity’s performance in the new worlds.32
This slow disclosure is understandable given the fabricated moral universe within which he articulated his faith. Contained within the world of white judgment, young Equiano accepted having his life evaluated on the continuum between disobedience and obedience. The African as slave, unlike the sailor, must be made a radically obedient body, one that eats what is given, goes where he is told, submits willingly to rape, works without end, and lives. Good and evil are calibrated to this telos. This white judgment in the construction of good and evil grew out of the form of evaluation administered in the exchange and sale of the African on the shores of Africa, where obedience was joined to market calculation. This meant that the judgment of good and evil tied to black obedience and disobedience overrode considerations of the immorality of black murder and enslavement.33
Once Equiano arrived in Montserrat he was sold to Robert King, with whom he would, under the tutelage of King’s employee, the captain Thomas Framer, cultivate his skills as a merchant. King’s rationale for buying “the slave Gustavus” seemed both convincing and flattering to the young man: “Mr. King, my new master … said the reason he had bought me was on account of my good character; and, as he had not the least doubt of my good behaviour, I should be very well off with him… . I was very thankful to Captain Doran, and even to my old master, for the character they had given me; a character which I afterwards found of infinite service to me” (99–100). One could interpret Equiano’s comments as yet expressing his continued longing for a father figure. But he is articulating a moral sensibility in the midst of a grotesquerie. He attempted to execute this theological sense not only in the middle of slavery but also refracted off the myopic judgments of white masters. That is, he exercised a faint hope of being able to draw out from their evaluative control over his life discursive fragments that would be marketable. He learned that “character” existed for black flesh in the New World as an aspect of use-value, of commodification itself. And he admonished slave masters to treat their slaves well because they in turn would be “faithful, honest, intelligent, and vigorous” in their work, to the benefit of the master (112).
Equiano is a self constituted under the conditions of exchange networks and thus reflects the limitations placed on the imagination for self-fulfillment. One of the most amazing occurrences of these limitations in the narrative is his negotiating the possibility of buying himself back, buying his freedom. King, who was, according to Equiano, by far his kindest master, made him the extraordinary deal that if he could earn through entrepreneurial efforts the exact sum King originally paid for him, he would be allowed to buy his freedom. This is an amazing situation not because of its rarity but because it signifies the best possible relationship between blacks and whites under the conditions of chattel slavery and mercantile capitalism: economic confraternity. It also signifies a stunning narrowing of options for the slave Gustavus—become a “businessman” or remain a slave. The sum of “forty pounds sterling” was agreed on by King and his slave. The slave Gustavus then made every human effort to build up capital. One of the most powerful passages in the narrative is Equiano’s description of the day he approached King with the agreed-upon sum and the request that King honor their agreement:
When we had unladen the vessel, and I had sold my venture, finding myself master of about forty-seven pounds I consulted my true friend, the captain, how I should proceed in offering my master the money for my freedom. He told me to come on a certain morning, when he and my master would be at breakfast together. Accordingly, on that morning, I went, and met the captain there, as he had appointed. When I went in I made my obeisance to my master, and with my money in my hand, and many fears in my heart, I prayed him to be as good as his offer to me, when he was pleased to promise me my freedom as soon as I could purchase it. This speech seemed to confound him; he began to recoil; and my heart that instant sunk within me. “What!” said he, “give you your freedom? Why, where did you get the money; Have you got forty pounds sterling?” “Yes, sir,” I answered; “How did you get it?” replied he; I told him, “Very honestly.” The captain then said he knew I got the money very honestly, and with much industry, and that I was particularly careful… . “Come, come,” said my worthy captain, clapping my master on the back, “Come, Robert … I think you must let him have his freedom; you have laid your money out very well; you have received good interest for it all this time, and here is now the principal at last. I know Gustavus has earned you more than an hundred [pounds] a-year, and he will still save you money… .” My master then said, he would not be worse than his promise; and taking the money, told me to go to the Secretary at the Register Office, and get my manumission drawn up. (135)34
Crucial to this event was the mediating necessity of whiteness seen in the actions of Captain Farmer. Farmer’s intercession with King with a necessary summation of the economic advantages of the slave Gustavus was the decisive leverage needed to secure his freedom. The irony of this aspect of his journey toward manumission confirms the underlying reality of white control of the networks of exchange. It also confirms the superficiality of the fabricated moral universe within which white judgment functions. The moral self in this situation functions ideologically, calibrated racially as an aspect of the slave-master relation. Without white intervention it was doubtful that the clear faithfulness of Equiano would have been sufficient support for his words, even accompanied as they were with the symbols of exchange, money.
Equiano’s honesty in acquiring the money was confirmed by the captain, and with his freedom secured he in reverent gratitude thanked God and thanked his “worthy friends.” He then “rose with a heart full of affection and reverence, left the room in order to obey [his] master’s joyful mandate [to go obtain manumission documents] …” and commented, “As I was leaving the house, I called to mind the words of the Psalmist, in the 126th Psalm, and like him, ‘I glorified God in my heart,’ in whom I trusted” (136). He continued in the employ of King out of a sense of love and duty, but he began planning immediately how he could return to England and, as he said, “surprise my old master, Capt. Pascal, who was hourly in my mind, for I still loved him, notwithstanding his usage of me” (138). These events in the narrative reveal Equiano’s continuing attempt to imagine belonging and relationship beneath the guiding hand of God through relations that are fundamentally diseased and reflective of the remade world.35
This is Christianity performed within the horizon of an exchange network. Equiano, as Houston Baker notes, “realizes, in effect, that only the acquisition of property will enable him to alter his designated status as property.”36 The profound irony that unfolds in the life of Olaudah Equiano was his realization that the central means through which he would move from property to becoming one who would obtain property was precisely by making his body appear in textual display. He would have to move from one commodity form to another commodity form, from a slave on a ship to a slave in a text. He would secure his transformation by telling his story and thereby re-creating himself in the text just as he had been recreated on the slave ship. In so doing, he would also continue to display his desire to create relationship and to form intimacy.
The slave ship positions itself next to creation, next to the creating act as creation’s recapitulation. It is a moment of metaphysical theft, an ambush of the divine creatio continua, the continuing creative act. The creatio continua is first the gracious gift of God’s providential care and preservation of the world, a preservation in which humankind participates. If the slave ship is an inversion of that participation, then Equiano will improvise inside that inversion. He will in effect seek to capture the energy of the slave ship and redirect it away from death toward life. By inscribing the horror of the ship inside the writing of his life he will attempt to subject that horror to the power of narration, turning its telos toward a good end, the flourishing of his own life.
The slave ship, however, performs translation, displacement, and disordered creation. It embodies a new story of creation, one in which the first family will be reborn as familia oeconomicus. The economic family is not a family structuring its own economic realities, but one being formed by them. The original story is refashioned on the slave ship through the bodies that lay within its holds and the bodies that suffered on deck. The slave ship also captures all other forms of translation: translation of languages, of spaces, of life to death, of innocence to guilt, of joy to unrelenting sorrow. This means that Equiano must also contend with the power and performance of colonialist translation. This proved to be a far more formidable challenge than he understood, because Equiano writes after other words have been spoken and written about black bodies. For Equiano and millions like him, the world he entered was inscribed decisively by others’ words regarding his people.37
The Interesting Narrative was published in 1789, three months before the French Revolution. It followed the important Black Atlantic texts of Briton Hammon, A Narrative of the Most Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (1760); James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of … an African Prince, as Related by Himself (1772); Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); Francis Williams, History of Jamaica (1774); Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1782); John Marrant, A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preaching the Gospel in Nova Scotia) Born in New York, in North America (1785); Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa (1787); and also the earlier, little-known but important texts of Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, Dissertatio politico-theologica, qua disquiritur, Num libertati Christiane servitus adversetur, nec ne? (1742), and Anton Wilhelm Amo, De jure Maurorum in Europa (1729) and Tractatus de arte sobrie philosophandi (1739).38
The Interesting Narrative differs from these earlier works in its representational depth in two senses. First, Equiano writes free of the editors that greatly shaped many of the works of his predecessors. He writes beyond an enslaved self, beyond the repression of voice, and beyond the concealment of slavery’s horror through emphasis on a sinful self made moral by the intervention of whiteness. He also witnesses the contradictions in Christian culture by disrupting the ideologically evacuated spiritual autobiography.39 Second, as his premier biographer, Vincent Carretta, notes, Equiano called himself not an African but “the African.”40 He speaks not only for the many (Africans) but also directly to the many (white readers). His goal is to take his readers with him through the journey of his life, not simply as spectators but as those who will by the end of the story claim Equiano as one of their own. Equiano articulates the vulnerability of a human creature in need of relationship in the way he describes his need for acceptance, justice, companionship, and even love: “Soon after this, the blacks who brought me on board went off, and left me abandoned to despair. I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore” (56).41
Equiano must make sense of his life no longer in a village configured in ancient space, but on ships configured by global commerce and the calculus of exchange. His narrative is translation. As translated, his narrative is also a product. And Equiano is a businessman. He will offer himself for relationship by offering himself for purchase, not from the hold of a ship but from the free market in a text. Equiano is caught up in the trajectory of English commerce, which was becoming the currency of relationship. During Equiano’s lifetime, Britain would eventually rule the Atlantic economic circuit in the eighteenth century and would through that circuit define the lives of millions of Africans.42 Europeans were not the progenitors of global economic circuits. Yet they built in new and comprehensive ways on that earlier system of world trade so that the commodifying of African bodies flowed seamlessly with the manufacturing and distributing practices of other goods.43
The well-known yet crude triangle model for understanding the pathways of Atlantic trade remains helpful as a reminder that the trade circuit determined more than product placement and exchange mechanisms. Textiles, firearms, alcohol, tobacco, and metalware, all of diminishing quality and varied availability, were shipped to West Africa. Africans were traded for these European products and then sent to the Old World and the Americas to work until death. Born of that labor, staple commodities were shipped to the Old World.44 The circuit constituted the cosmopolitan and the disaporic in their most basic senses. On the one hand, the circuit gestured toward realizing a universal displayed in the possibility of free “peaceful” exchange of goods and services between nations.45 On the other hand, the extraction of peoples and their surplus labor and goods for profit constituted the deepest sense of exile. Not only would they be peoples in strange lands but their alienated labor would be put to estranged purposes.
Unbridled European consumption and production transubstantiated African bodies. Black bodies juxtaposed to such things as East Indian textiles, Swedish bar iron, Italian beads, German linens, Brazilian tobacco flavored with molasses, Irish beef, butter, and pork, Jamaican rum, and North American lumber announce ownership. In godlike fashion, merchants and traders transformed African bodies into perishable goods and fragile services.46
Equiano understood that life beyond slavery will be made possible by the very market that brought him to the New World as property.47 Thus he seeks by means of his narrative to master the market. A keen reader of the times, as Carretta notes, “[Equiano] understood that what the abolitionist cause needed now and what readers desired was exactly what he had positioned himself to give them—the story told from the victim’s point of view.”48 With an eye to the times, Equiano published his book only a few weeks before William Wilberforce masterfully argued against the Atlantic slave trade in the House of Commons, May 12, 1789.49 Equiano’s behind-the-scenes efforts to bring this publication to life were nothing short of brilliant. Drawing on all the economic survival skills he had honed on slave ships and in slaving ports, working to care for captains and masters alike, Equiano solicited subscribers (that is, investors) for his manuscript, asking for partial advance payment to cover his cost. He also, in an act extremely rare for an author and unheard of for an African writer, kept control of his copyright, thereby always owning his literary self. And most important, he began an entrepreneurial odyssey that wove tightly together abolitionist energy and political activism to his own efforts to thrive in the modern world.
Equiano attracted more subscribers as the number of abolitionists grew. As the abolitionist cause spread, so too did the African take its message with his book throughout the British Isles, initiating what was arguably the first actual book tour. It would be a cheap criticism to call him an economic opportunist; he was simply a shrewd businessman. What is observable in Equiano’s actions is far more complex than market reflex. Here one encounters black life forcibly formed inside the market.50 By keeping each of the nine editions of the book in his constant care and holding complete oversight of his literary project, “acting as his own publisher and principal distributor,” Equiano was exposing the echoes of commodified existence, but even more he was lodging within it the protest for intimacy, for acceptance, and relationship for his people and for himself.51
It was a subtle but powerful protest, one which first showed itself in the way his face looked out on the world from his book. Unlike any other of his black contemporaries pictured on the cover of their narrative, always looking away from the powerful white gaze, Equiano stared directly at his readers.52 His black face joined the reader’s face, hinting at equality through connection. As noted earlier, Equiano offers the architecture of a hoped-for new kind of intimacy, one between the races. Equiano, however, is forced to imagine intimacy with and against the master-slave relation. The narrative is certainly spiritual autobiography, yet it also draws the reader into a frustrated spiritual longing, an unresolved longing.53 This means that his narrative carries the demand for humanizing relationships as central to the performance of Christian identity, the very identity claimed by his white readers. It is in the light of this demand that one can understand his comments concerning Israel.
Equiano draws an analogy between Jewish ways of life and those of his own people. They shared purification rites, circumcision, offerings and feasts, the significance of naming, and the “law of retaliation,” as he called it. His drawing attention to these cultural analogies sets the reader up for his more serious conclusion: “that the one people had sprung from the other” (43–44). His people came from the Jews, directly from the seed of Abraham. By drawing the black body next to the Jewish body, Equiano suggests a reorientation for his white readers —toward kinship. He then “environmentalizes” race, here understood as skin color. Peoples like the Portuguese, after intermarrying with Africans, became “perfect negroes.” Spaniards “darken” after generations in foreign places, and as he says, “surely the minds of the Spaniards did not change with their complexions!” (45). His theological conclusion is powerfully aimed at Europeans: “Let such reflections as these melt the pride of their superiority into sympathy for the wants and miseries of their sable brethren, and compel them to acknowledge, that understanding is not confined to feature or colour. If, when they look round the world, they feel exultation, let it be tempered with benevolence to others, and gratitude to God, ‘who hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth; and whose wisdom is not our wisdom, neither are our ways his ways’” (45, emphasis added).
Equiano asserts a portrait of the creation against the false image of superior white/inferior black beings based on intelligence. Following Anthony Benezet’s use of the same Scriptures in his Some Historical Account of Guinea (1772), he draws together these two counterhegemonic texts, the first from Acts 17:26–27, which challenges notions of Greek superiority, and the second from Isa 55:8–9, which announces the supremacy of God’s wisdom and ways above the human mind.54 Read together these texts suggest a radical equality but, more important, a familial connection for Europeans with their sable brethren. It is also not coincidental that he aligns Jewish identity with the African for his white readership. From the earliest moments of the age of discovery, the question of human origins was an obsession. Having read the theologians John Gill, Granville Sharp, John Clarke, and Hugo Grotius through Clarke, Equiano was doubtless aware of the discussions of Noah’s sons and human ancestry.
Protestant Christianity stood in the legacy of biblically generated theories of human origins which focused intense interests on the sons of Noah. Centrally, the discussions circled around the so-called curse of Ham, or more precisely the curse on Ham’s progeny, Canaan. That curse was seen by many as the source of blackness and the true justification of enslavement.55
Equiano understood that by placing the black body in the womb of Abraham’s mate, he circumvented some of that discussion and drew the African into a direct salvific line. This bio-logic would be deployed countless times by future Black Atlantic writers trying to assert a black biblical presence. The point of this biblical presence, for Equiano, was a historical one. It allowed him to make European superiority fully contingent, that is, to undermine its perceived ontological status. European advantage was for him an occasion to be of service to the world. He weaves the story of his white readers into his story, opening up the possibility for them to see their strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, all the while presenting his story as exquisite human interiority.
The story of his sister brought his readers inside not just his pain of losing his sibling but the brutality women suffered as chattel. Equiano’s words, spoken from his adult present to the sister of his childhood past, are within view of the white readers and for their benefit:
Yes, thou dear partner of all my childish sports! [T]hou sharer of my joys and sorrows! Happy should I have ever esteemed myself to encounter every misery for you, and to procure your freedom by the sacrifice of my own. Though you were early forced from my arms, your image has been always riveted in my heart, from which neither time nor fortune have been able to remove it; so that while the thoughts of your suffering have damped my prosperity, they have mingled with adversity, and increased its bitterness.—To the heaven which protects the weak from the strong, I commit the care of your innocence and virtues, if they have not already received their full reward; and if your youth and delicacy have not long since fallen victims to the violence of the African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea ship, the seasoning in the European colonies, or the lash and lust of a brutal and unrelenting overseer. (51–52)
This memory with a lesson teaches his white readers the four stages of enslavement. Capture by African traders, life on the slave ship, the mind-bending labor of the colony, and rape await his sister, that is, if she does not meet death along the way. His soliloquy also brings the reader into the tapestry of loss that gives shape to his life. It is exactly the account of loss that centers his famous account of an actual sale of slaves in the slave market: “In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again. I remember in the vessel in which I was brought over, in the men’s apartment, there were several brothers, who in the sale, were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting” (61). The similarity between Equiano’s account of 1789 and Zurara’s account of 1457 is striking. Both capture the pathos of separation, but Equiano stands in the same position as the slaves observed by Zurara. He is among the enslaved looking out in condemnation—over against Zurara. Unlike the slaves, who looked to heaven speaking an unknown tongue, he speaks with indignation the language of his captors:
O ye nominal Christians! Might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God? who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice? Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear by their separation from their kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery with the small comfort of being together and mingling their sufferings and sorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery. (61)
Equiano’s narrative with its powerful protest did draw responses from his white readers. Those responses, however, revealed the deep chasm that existed between the vision of what Equiano hoped would be possible and the vision through which his black body was viewed. The responses did not evaluate the possibility of relationship, but the viability of black humanity gauged through a textual display of intelligence. Take, for example, the review comments about Equiano’s narrative by Richard Gough from the Gentleman’s Magazine of June 1789: “Among other contrivances (and perhaps one of the most innocent) to interest the national humanity in favour of the Negro slaves, one of them here writes his own history, as formerly another of them published his correspondence… . These memoirs, written in a very unequal style, place the writer on a par with the general mass of men in the subordinate stations of civilised society, and prove that there is no general rule without an exception. The first volume treats of the manners of his countrymen, and his own adventures till he obtained his freedom; the second, from that period to the present, is uninteresting; and his conversion to methodism oversets the whole.”56
While Equiano describes in ways heretofore unknown in print the horrors of enslavement, especially on the slave ship from the inner life of a slave, the reviewer finds fault in the quality of the writing—the style is unequal. It is not simply the negativity of the reviewer that is crucial here but also his position as evaluator and his supposed knowledge of the African type. In the Interesting Narrative one meets the political struggle of representation in its first, most powerful scenario. Equiano in writing gains no help from the words about black flesh that have gone before him and surrounded him as he wrote. Equiano understands that he must write against the racial image, black and white, write against writing.
This writing against writing was by Equiano’s time writing against texts, philosophical, theological, and scientific, that posited black intellectual inferiority by drawing forward the trajectory of comparative anatomy of earlier centuries. Eighteenth-century scientific investigations of the new worlds yielded an even more viciously derogatory portrait of the black intelligence. These classificatory schemas drew the entire known world into grand metanarratives of development. The taxonomies of Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78) in his Systema Naturae (1735) and of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) in his De generis humani varietate nativa (1775) and his Collectis craniorum diversacrum gentium (1790) are two powerful examples of classificatory systems that placed the comparative practices of the previous centuries on a new level of philosophical and theological speculation.57
The alleged intellectual inferiority of the African was working its way into the imaginations of Europeans, as evidenced by the words of Mary Wollstonecraft, who reviewed Equiano’s work in 1789. She noted that a “favourite philosophic whim [was to] degrade the numerous nations, on whom the sun-beams more directly dart … and hastily … conclude that nature, by making them inferior to the rest of the human race, designed to stamp them with a mark of slavery.”58 Yet even her affirming responses illumine the limited reach imposed on Equiano’s life story. She concludes that the Interesting Narrative may not disprove that philosophic whim, but it does have evidential benefit for Africans: “We shall only observe that if these volumes do not exhibit extraordinary intellectual powers, sufficient to wipe off the stigma [of black inferiority and subhumanity], yet the activity and ingenuity, which conspicuously appear in the character of Gustavus, place him on a par with the general mass of men, who fill the subordinate stations in a more civilized society than that which he was thrown at his birth.”59
Wollstonecraft’s comments support the inclusion of Equiano and those like him in the human community but still reveal at most a middle position for this African, probably below those with extraordinary intellectual powers but yet firmly within the general mass of men. That is to say, Equiano is a usual human of subordinate station, although, as she notes later in her review, he is too pious for her taste. This in effect sounded like what Equiano hoped for by writing his narrative, namely, approved humanity. This, however, was a flawed reward. It was flawed because it was a step further inside the logic of white evaluation, an evaluation that joined the slave market to the book market. Yet even if lower class and too pious for Wollstonecraft, the Christian Equiano is clearly visible through his narrative.
In Olaudah Equiano’s masterwork Christian identity and colonial identity speak to one another. Inside this dialogic, Equiano yields space to divine agency and divine speech. In Equiano, God speaks but under constrained conditions.60 What Equiano dramatizes in his narrative is precisely the vulnerability of real and possible further rejection. Christ’s rejection and Equiano’s rejection establish the intertextual Christian reality of his narrative. One can understand only this by remembering what Equiano shares with his Savior in his narrative display: they are both the one for the many. Christ is the new creation, the new humanity calling and pleading with the old humanity. Equiano is the racial recreated, the African calling and pleading with the European to accept Africans as human companions. The reality of suffering and possibility of continued rejection looms for both the Christ and the African. The crucial difference is that Equiano also dramatizes the mangled intimacy that flows out of the dialogic between Christian and colonial identities. In this way, Equiano foreshadows some of the greatest possibilities and one of the deepest problems of Western Christian life.
The problem one encounters in Equiano’s narrative display of his Christian life is one that intensely focuses the tragedy of Christianity performed within the colonialist imagination. How does one articulate the coming to faith, a life saved by God, in light of having been made a slave and then having been set free from human slavery, that is, in light of a far more determinative transformation of one’s life? In this regard, it is crucial that one read his account of salvation in relation to his account of freedom. By holding these two accounts together one can begin to see the dilemma Equiano inherited. He inherited a vision of salvation evacuated of material consequences for identity and for patterns of human belonging. What Equiano envisaged as salvation obtained was not merely captured within mercantile sensibilities, but it carried forward the struggles of his social imagination with its deep sense of loss and its hunger for belonging. Equiano’s efforts were marvelous yet contained inside a great tragedy; he was saved, but to whom was he saved?
Equiano writes, “[The dangers of my last voyage] … caused me to reflect deeply on my eternal state; and to seek the Lord with full purpose of heart ere it be too late. I rejoiced greatly; and heartily thanked the Lord for directing me to London, where I was determined to work out my own salvation, and in so doing, procure a title to heaven; being the result of a mind blinded by ignorance and sin” (179).
The voyage referred to here was to the North Pole, where he served as the personal attendant for the famous inventor Charles Irving. The voyage sought a passageway to navigate as close as possible to the North Pole, but it was unsuccessful and nearly cost the crew their lives. It also led Equiano into a spiritual crisis (161). Before his spiritual crisis and the ensuing spiritual quest for salvation, Equiano had already been baptized in the Anglican church and taught the Scriptures piecemeal within the context of learning his merchant skills. Like so many others, the language of the Scriptures had become his language, and knowledge of the Bible became his obsession.
Scripture patterned Equiano’s thought. It did not just give him access to such ideas as the equality of all humanity in the presence of God, but also a way to explicate the world.61 Equiano did more than simply read his life in the light of Scripture.62 He, like the many who would follow him, read the entire world into the broad scriptural narrative. He read the world scripturally. The result was a world captured within the broad sweep of biblical history, from sin to salvation to judgment. This scriptural imagination drives the entire narrative and especially his account of his quest for salvation.
Equiano captured in his narrative the power of rendering life theologically. The language of spiritual autobiography sometimes conceals the more profound subject position illumined by this interpretive practice. Such a subject position does not release the self or others to space outside the divine drama. It resists the bracketing of theological reflection from the world created within the master-slave relation: “One Mr. Drummond told me that he had sold 41,000 negroes, and that he once cut off a negro-man’s leg for running away. —I asked him, if the man had died in the operation? How he, as a Christian, could answer for the horrid act before God? And he told me, answering was a thing of another world; but what he thought and did were policy. I told him that the Christian doctrine taught us to do unto others as we would that others should do unto us” (104–5). Some commentators would attribute this subject position to an African intellectual framework that operates with theological holisms that shun secular/sacred dualism. It could also be the result of the intensity of the scriptural imagination at work in Equiano. What is important here is the synthetic character of Equiano’s imaginative gestures. This propensity to join things that others kept distinct will reemerge repeatedly in expressive cultures of disaporic peoples. It is precisely the position of the black body as a social connector that fosters this thought form. From their emergence from the holds of slave ships, black bodies were positioned between technological advances in the West, economic developments with their concomitant reconfigurations of space, and the multiple discursive practices of Europeans inscribing their New World within the logics of hegemony. These various realities crisscrossed black bodies. Synthetic thinking arose “naturally” out of being forced to contend with the various forms of power interacting on their bodies.
This means that Equiano’s drama of conversion already carries inside it a synthetic character. It already holds the actions of God and the vicissitudes of life within the exchange networks created by the master-slave relation. However, it also exposes a soteriological vision robbed of significant transformative possibilities. His vision of salvation touches the ground, but it cannot do anything about the ground it touches because that ground has been recreated racially. The theological idiom he inherited, that of evangelical piety, was not merely an inheritance of a theological past, it was also an innovation of a Protestant/slavery present. That is, it was language being quickly adapted to function on top of the more decisive transformation of the multiple peoples of Africa into black slaves, leaving little room to imagine salvation as the transformation of the social order of things.63
If the social order and the processes of commodification are not transformed in relation to the body through salvation, then salvation becomes hyperlocalized to a single relationship: God and the one being saved.64 One must remember that this is the Christian Equiano recounting his entrance into “a more excellent way.” That is, he offers his readers a theological account of his missteps toward understanding what it means to be a Christian. Without a spiritual guide in his search to direct him to salvation, he inquired among the Quakers, Roman Catholics, and Jews, all to no avail. All this was played out against the backdrop of the horrors of slavery and the vulnerability of his own life as a free black. Equiano realized that the social status of a free black was even more precarious than that of a slave because a free black had no legal protections and no master to protect him from assault, robbery, or reenslavement. Fears of dying attended him while he remained in what he called “nature’s darkness,” that is, the natural state of fallen humanity.
Help for his spiritual quest came in the form of an “old sea-faring man, who experienced much of the love of God shed abroad in his heart” (183), and a dissenting minister of the Church of England who invited him to a love feast. Equiano enjoyed the feast but was frustrated by the participants’ clear confidence in their salvation, that is, in “their calling and election from God” (184). His quest at this point in his narrative reveals the anatomy of what would emerge as a classic order of salvation in the slave narratives.65 This order of salvation refers to the states one experiences in receiving redemption. There is the slow but sure conviction of sin, in which all our efforts to overcome sin and attain salvation become only a greater burden to the soul. This conviction is joined by a sense of abandonment and dread, that is, something similar to the dark night of the soul, and then finally there is the moment of relief and release that accompanies true knowledge of salvation. Equiano’s tumultuous experiences culminate on board a ship named Hope bound for Spain. There on board the ship he arrives to “saving knowledge”:
It pleased God to enable me to wrestle with him, as Jacob did: I prayed that if sudden death were to happen, and I perished, it might be at Christ’s feet. In the evening of the same day, as I was reading and meditating on the fourth chapter of the Acts, twelfth verse, under the solemn apprehensions of eternity, and reflecting on my past actions, I began to think I had lived a moral life, and that I had proper ground to believe I had an interest in the divine favour; but still meditating on the subject, not knowing whether salvation was to be had partly for our own good deeds, or solely as the sovereign gift of God: —in this deep consternation the Lord was pleased to break in upon my soul with his bright beams of heavenly light and in an instant, as it were, removing the veil, and letting light into a dark place, Isa xxv. 7. I saw clearly, with the eye of faith, the crucified Saviour bleeding on the cross on Mount Calvary: The Scriptures became an unsealed book, I saw myself a condemned criminal under the law, which came with its full force to my conscience… . I saw the Lord Jesus Christ in his humiliation, loaded and bearing my reproach, sin, and shame… . It was given me at that time to know what it was to be born again… . Christ was revealed to my soul as the chiefest among ten thousand. (189–90)
There is a characteristic singularity to the Christian spiritual journey, so one would expect Equiano’s account to echo this intensely personal divine work. However, the singularity in his account carries a different valence. His helpers along the journey are given important roles, not by how they guide him but by how they reflect back to him that which he must find for himself. The climax of his search was the knowledge that salvation was a gift from God. He was born again. The place of his conversion, a slave ship, is crucial. The ship is where he became black, became slave, and now it is where he became a “first-rate Christian.” The three operations are similar, all riding on white hegemony. The racial and slave transformations precede the Christian and stand at a more decisive level. Equiano, however, drew the first two processes of transformation into the third. He brought the remade world into the world created by the God who saved him: “Now every leading providential circumstance that happened to me, from the day I was taken from my parents to that hour, was then, in my view, as if it had but just then occurred. I was sensible of the invisible hand of God, which guided and protected me, when in truth I knew it not: still the Lord pursued me although I slighted and disregarded it; this mercy melted me down. When I considered my poor wretched state, I wept, seeing what a great debtor I was to sovereign free grace. Now the Ethiopian was willing to be saved by Jesus Christ, the sinner’s only surety, and also to rely on none other person or thing for salvation. Self was obnoxious, and good works he had none; for it is God that worketh in us both to will and to do” (189–90, emphasis added).
Equiano draws the horrors of his life into theology. The divine hand superintended his life, holding back the forces of death and seeking relationship with him. The self he describes was wholly a soteriological construct, the prideful self, the self constructed of hubris that resisted the mercy and presence of God. At a more decisive level, Equiano certainly aimed at the self that resisted the divine order and rested comfortably in the master-slave relation and the world it had created. Equiano here enters the logics of Christian belonging at its most fundamental christological root. He drew intense connections between himself and the suffering Jesus, whom he envisioned “in his humiliation, loaded and bearing [his] reproach, sin, and shame.” Now, “in salvation,” he understood that his name Equiano, which meant fortune, signified the personal predestination of a God “that worketh in us both to will and to do” (190). A new self emerged —one that was courageously against the fallen world, contra mundi, filled with missionary zeal and clarity of purpose but lacked the fear of death: “I felt an astonishing change; the burden of sin, the gaping jaws of hell, and the fears of death, that weighed me down before, now lost their horror… . I viewed the unconverted people of the world in a very awful state, being without God and without hope. It pleased God to pour out on me the spirit of prayer and the grace of supplication, so that in loud acclamations I was enabled to praise and glorify his most holy name” (190–91).
Equiano’s account of his conversion was paradigmatic for the salvation testimonies of slaves for generations. However, his spiritual quest with its salvation episode also pointed to a sense of belonging that normalized loss. The loss here is not primarily of family or people, of his mother or sister, of his homeland or a life there. The loss here is an absence of Christianity constituted in community, a Christianity that joins all the people who claim to be Christian. In this regard, loss connotes not memory of a presence now gone missing, but an implied presence centrally woven into Equiano’s scriptural imagination and insinuated by his Christian practices. That implied presence could not materialize in the remade world. Equiano entered a Christianity constituted without belonging. So he was left to perform a Christian life filled with the surrogates for that loss, God and the Scriptures: “Every hour a day until I came to London … I much longed to be with some to whom I could tell of the wonders of God’s love toward me, and join in prayer to him who my soul loved and thirsted after. I had uncommon commotions within, such as few can tell aught about. Now the Bible was my only companion and comfort; I prized it much, with many thanks to God that I could read it for myself, and was not left to be tossed about or led by man’s devices and notions. The worth of a soul cannot be told” (191). It may seem counterintuitive to suggest a relationship with God and a strong desire for the Scriptures as surrogate forms, given their constituting centrality for the Christian life. But here one must grasp the deepest tragedy for the formation of Christianity in the racial West: belonging was racialized. Equiano could not overcome this and therefore imagined Christian belonging along the only lines of thought available to him: he belonged to God, and the Scriptures belonged to him. The true worth of his soul was established between those boundaries.
The slave ship solidified a victory over Christianity. Those who descended from the tortured, tainted decks to the pain-filled ports of call, those who ascended from the diseased and fetid holds to be groomed and polished for sale, those who turned bodies into profit and became gentlemen and political leaders, each were tied in bonds of connection which nothing on heaven or earth could separate. Toward the end of his groundbreaking narrative, Equiano offers his white readers a strangely placed vignette: “Soon after my arrival in London, I saw a remarkable circumstance relative to African complexion, which I thought so extraordinary that I shall beg leave just to mention it: A white negro woman, that I had formerly seen in London and other parts, had married a white man, by whom she had three boys, and they were every one mulattoes, and yet they had fine light hair” (220). This brief account seems to come out of nowhere. By this time in the narrative, Equiano is driving toward his abolitionist denouement, showing that the logic of his life renders the slave trade a clearly monstrous injustice. That the slave trade is also hopelessly inefficient and illogical are the judgments he hopes his readers will make for themselves as they enter the final chapter. Yet here he detours them to notice a black woman’s body made white, “a white negro woman.” She married a white man and together this couple produced three mulattoes, each with “fine light hair” (220). This announcement is not the first time Equiano had been captivated by interracial coupling. Earlier in his narrative he has a similar detour: “While I was in this place, St. Kitt’s, a very curious imposition on human nature took place:—A white man wanted to marry in the church a free black woman that had land and slaves at Montserrat: but the clergyman told him it was against the law of the place to marry a white and a black in the church. The man then asked to be married on the water, to which the parson consented, and the two lovers went in one boat, and the parson and clerk in another, and thus the ceremony was performed. After this the loving pair came on board our vessel, and my captain treated them extremely well, and brought them safe to Montserrat” (119). These two events jut out of the line of the narrative because they do not fit easily into the world he narrates, just as his own interracial marriage found no place in any of the early editions of his story.66 The St. Kitts story captures the contrast between bondage and freedom. Life together for this couple began not in a church but at sea on their way home to Montserrat. The fact that returning home meant returning to life as slaveholders seemed not to draw Equiano’s attention. He is captivated by the possibility of love and lovers, even in the midst of the remade world. The story mirrors much of his own sense of where his possibilities for freedom and transformation were found—on the sea. A minimal white Christian presence dots this event, a parson and a clerk performing a very precise function. This too mirrors much of his Christian walk. White Christian presence was certainly crucial but completely episodic and not characteristic of the narrative.
There is far less Christian presence with the shorter vignette near the end of his story, but it has an eschatological character equally as strong as that of the earlier story. This is an eschatology of assimilation. The second couple marries and, like the earlier couple, enters fully into the remade world. The former couple assimilated economically, and the latter couple assimilated racially. Three boys born of this couple suggest possible portents—bodies that are clearly black but look white. Equiano is drawing his white readers to the irrefutable fact that love and relationship and a future together are possible, but under hegemonic conditions. But these possibilities do not fit easily into his story or the Christianity that shapes that story. He does, however, suggest near the end of his text the future he would envision for Britons and Africans, a future consistent with the narrative: economic confraternity: “If the blacks were permitted to remain in their own country, they would double themselves every fifteen years. In proportion to such increase will be the demand for manufactures. Cotton and indigo grow spontaneously in most parts of Africa; a consideration this of no small consequence to the manufacturing towns of Great Britain. It opens a most immense, glorious, and happy prospect—the clothing, &c. of a continent ten thousand miles in circumferences, and immensely rich in productions of every denomination in return for manufactures” (235).
Like a merchant missionary, Equiano proposed a relationship constituted by the exchange networks in which he was formed. His commentators are correct to find in him capitalist desire that has transmuted his vision of his home and the many different peoples he encountered into the land of just “black people” filled with untapped potential for missionary activity and manufactures. Equiano comes to this hoped-for conclusion as a viable option, a separate and unequal collaboration, but one that would hold back the power of death by ending the slave trade. It is his preferred option because his Christianity cannot make anything else possible, either as an option or even as a dream. It could be that our author in the end holds interracial coupling as a dream, a hope. If so, then it is the final surrogacy for Christianity itself because it is a depth of love between peoples that the Christianity he has inherited cannot imagine.67
Equiano lived under the stark conditions of assimilation. It could be argued that such conditions make his Christianity itself suspect as simply psychologically forced faith. There is no doubt his is Christianity presented in violence and within European hegemony. And as such it is first cousin to Christianity coercively presented under threat of death. But his Christianity was neither parrot nor parody. The man who styled himself “The African” was of his own desire a Christian, a lover of Jesus. He is a powerful witness not only to the Christian origins of black intellectual life in the modern West, but also to the pained joining of black life to the life of the crucified one. This is not the pain of joining with Jesus, but the frustration and pain of being like Jesus in his rejection. Equiano dramatizes this rejection.
Equiano comes before the advent of the black church and precedes the phenomenal rise of the black preacher. He writes before the genius of the black literary tradition begins to take visible shape, before diasporic expressive cultures will wage war against yet live inside Western intellectual traditions. Equiano will offer up his own courageous salvo. But underlying the before is the Christian. One must recall the Christian not as an act of romantic retrieval in order to demand a reorientation of wayward intellectual trajectories back to the true path of Christian faith. Nor should one recall the Christian in order to cajole appreciation for its resourcing the virtues of Western civilization, Western democracy, and the possibilities of ethical critique. One must recall the Christian for the sake of Christianity itself, recall the Christian in order to capture the pathos of its translation and the grotesquerie of its collective performance.
The Christianity given to “The African” imagined social life racially and therefore executed its intellectual life racially. Olaudah Equiano must speak for his own because his own now designates a possessive vastly more powerful in its imaginative reach and its existential connectivity than any Christian possessive at hand then or now. The Christian possessive here has been dislodged from any significant material connection. Equiano must for the sake of his own people gather them in his mind as one people, black people, and argue as strongly as he can for the end of their displacement, the end of the slave trade. And yet Equiano is pressed to work inside a Christian vision that lacks the ability to imagine multitude, different peoples joined together in love, and thus lacks the desire to reconstitute its life through the many.
He gains a vision of salvation that heightens the sense of belonging to God alone, but it also intensifies the localization of belonging along cultural and racial lines. The poverty of desire continues to live inside Christian intellectual life and especially Christian theology. Its historic colonialist trajectory with its pedagogical imperialism and its epistemic insularity makes the problem difficult to see. The problem is not simply in what or how theologians write, although the writing is a serious problem. The problem is not one of contextuality or insensitivity to situatedness; or of attending to difference, otherness, or alterity in the writing of theological texts; or of determining the true object of theology, God or our perceptions of God, or both. The problem is in imagining whom we theologians belong to as we write, as we think, as we pray. This problem has fundamentally to do with a world formed and continuing to be formed to undermine the possibilities of Christians living together, loving together, and desiring each other. Such a desire is not a narcissistic longing for self to be seen in others, or an indulgent seeking for the comfort of like-minded doctrinal confessors. It is the necessary beginning for overturning the remade world.
Black Atlantic Christianity comes into being with this painful truth. The Christianity it works with is necessary, powerful, and living but not very appealing. It lacks appeal because, enamored of the power and beauty of whiteness, this Christianity presents itself to no one but itself and tragically invites “nonwhite” peoples to do the same. An intellectual life formed in so unappealing a setting becomes crushingly insular. It is exactly the insularity of Christian theology and all its identifiers (for example, orthodox, liberal, conservative, and so on) and the insularity of its Christian contextual responses and all its identifiers (for example, African, Asian, feminist, womanist) that repeatedly show Christians the missed opportunities of Christian intellectual life. I am not dismissing the important parental legacy of Christianity in nurturing key intellectuals of the modern West, and especially intellectuals of the Black Atlantic. But we must not allow this legacy to blind us to the aching absence of a truly Christian intellectual community at the heart of church life in this world. Such a Christian community would reflect in its work the incarnate reality of the Son who has joined the divine life to our lives and invites us to deep abiding intellectual joining, not only of ideas but of problems, not only of concepts but of concerns, not only of beliefs and practices but of common life, and all of it of the multitude of many tongues.
Black Atlantic Christianity has been marked by this absence. Its would-be intellectuals have often had to go it alone, trying to think out through their faith in a world that rejects them, their words, their intellectual contributions, and their faith. It has also been marked by the myriad of intellectuals who, having been raised in the church, have left the church, finding its ways of thinking in the world trapped in a crushing insularity. Many of them had become impatient with its willingness to live life under the conditions of the remade world. Equally poignant has been that other set of black intellectuals who live in the church, stay with the church but in secret silence find its Christianity necessary, powerful, living, but so unappealing. For them, even in the remade world, the intellectual life lives in a space much freer, much more hopeful than their church life. Yet we call them all back to a moment of hope and a moment of power, when a man taken from a place far beyond the recognized world wrote a word that challenged the world.
There is power in the word. The power of the word can break open a world and overturn worldly desire. Olaudah Equiano knew this. He also knew that the world constituted on the slave ship needed to be overturned, even if the overturning he envisioned was a limited one. Limitation most certainly makes him a man of his times. From the attitude of his face on the cover of his famous work, a face that stares directly at the white reader and thereby connotes equality; to his brilliant skills of self-promotion, initiating one of the first book tours; to his genius at cultivating rich and powerful sponsors to underwrite the publication and many editions of the book; to his political savvy in aligning the book and its promotion with the abolitionist cause; to his maintaining the copyrights to his work, he was also perhaps a man ahead of his time. He is crucially important to us in the modern world because he is also a man of our time who uncovers the perils of our remade world and yet spies the possibilities of its unmaking. But he can only quickly glance at those possibilities because, like ships at sea, they disappeared over the endless horizon.