A Slave No More by David W. Blight

Author:David W. Blight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

In 1865 John Washington buried his infant son, Johnnie, in the free soil of the District of Columbia, and Wallace Turnage followed a Maryland regiment back to the now free city of Baltimore. John was trying to make a family and a life as he anguished over how to remember his dead son; Wallace was trying to imagine a new life and a way to locate his lost family in North Carolina. Both were desperate for a sense of home. Both had so much to forget in order to build their new lives. But they would do so in two extraordinary acts of remembering. Perhaps they could never quite realize their tomorrow until they had told the story of their yesterday. The American writer Richard Rodriguez, himself the author of an autobiographical journey across boundaries of nationality and ethnicity, may have best captured the reasons why former fugitive slaves who had found some version of secure freedom might turn to first-person narrative: “Autobiography seems to me appropriate to anyone who has suffered some startling change, a two-life lifetime; to anyone who is able to marvel at the sharp change in his life: I was there once, and now, my God, I am here! (. . . was blind but now I see.)”48 Turnage and Washington had been lost. But now, as they surely wished, they are found.

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