SOURCE: “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” in Callaloo, No. 20, Winter, 1984, pp. 46-60.

In the following excerpt, Olney provides a list of slave-narrative conventions and considers the impact of white amanuenses on the construction of slave narratives. Olney also compares the narratives of Frederick Douglass, Henry Box Brown, and Solomon Northup.

Anyone who sets about reading a single slave narrative, or even two or three slave narratives, might be forgiven the natural assumption that every such narrative will be, or ought to be, a unique production; for—so would go the unconscious argument—are not slave narratives autobiography, and is not every autobiography the unique tale, uniquely told, of a unique life? If such a reader should proceed to take up another half dozen narratives, however (and there is a great lot of them from which to choose the half dozen), a...