SOURCE: "Self-Knowledge, Law, and African American Autobiography: Lucy A. Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light" in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, Stanford University Press, 1993, pp. 104-24.

In the following essay, Barrett explores the definition of self and authority in African-American autobiographies through an examination of the writings of Lucy A. Delaney.

The autobiographical text this discussion considers is a recollection of antebellum slave life and of release from chattel slavery. Published some 25 years after the Civil War, Lucy A. Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light, subtitled Struggles for Freedom, recalls as its climax events from 1844, the year in which Delaney's mother, Polly Berry, sued successfully for Delaney's freedom in a Missouri courtroom.¹ The legal case and judgment for Delaney's freedom turned upon the status of Delaney's mother, who was born free in Illinois, kidnapped as a child, and taken to...