Recovering Voices of the Enslaved in Colonial America

It has long seemed a given that we cannot access the voices of the enslaved in colonial America. The few whose voices we do hear are those who created autobiographical slave narratives, starting with that of Olaudah Equiano in 1789, and which were produced in the context of Anglo-American Protestant abolition movements. But in fact, those published life stories are not the sum total of our legacy of narratives produced by enslaved individuals in the eighteenth century. In colonial Louisiana, the archives are brimming with the voices of African and African-descended individuals, within narratives overflowing with personality, character, subjectivity, and humanity in which they seem to quite literally spring to life. These voices are not found within the pages of published slave narratives but in court depositions, and as autobiographical texts they are valuable and evocative, as I show in my recent book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana and in my digital humanities website on the testimony of enslaved people, intended for classroom use. [1]

Louisiana was until 1769 under French control, and French colonial law allowed the enslaved to testify in court (most English colonies did not), to be as expansive as they wanted in their testimony, and further required that their depositions be meticulously recorded. The result is an extraordinary archive at the Louisiana Historical Center of more than eighty trials dating from 1723 to 1769 that preserve the voices of close to 150 enslaved Africans and a handful of enslaved American Indians. A wide spectrum of individuals testified, as defendants, witnesses, and, more rarely, victims. For enslaved women in particular, these interrogatories constitute rare material. This archive rings with the sound of their voices and their concerns, showcasing a multiplicity of voices that offer precious glimpses into real lives lived under the weight of slavery in all its cruelty and violence.

This kind of evidence from court testimony does not meet standard definitions of autobiography, but perhaps it is time to reorient and expand our notion of what a slave’s autobiographical narrative can look like. The rewards in doing so are many, for testimony offered an opportunity for individuals to construct a narrative, one that reflected the spontaneity of oral speech, with passages containing dialogue, colloquialisms, metaphors, and even creole, that was anchored in their own experiences. Testimony brimmed with character, personality, wit, emotions, and ways of knowing, and was autobiographical because it expressed how they looked at their world, how they evaluated it, how they felt about it, and how they made sense of it at that moment in time. The lives of these deponents bear writing about, and their lives must be thought about, not least because their own words help us do so. Thanks to Louisiana’s archives, which encompass testimony but also a multitude of other sources that can help us track the biographies of those who testified, the fragments are often enough to bring these lives back to the surface, even when we have only snapshots to work from. This astounding trove is unique in scope among colonial North American archives in allowing the enslaved themselves to let us hear their thoughts and their pronouncements. For in their narratives, it was they, ultimately, who chose what they wanted to reply in answer to interrogations, and their depositions overflow with details about daily life, and especially, about inner lives and emotional ties.

We hear for example how François-Xavier had come upon a soldier in a lewd act and how “seized with horror at such an act, wanted at first to throw himself on him but that, since he could not do this, he slipped away very quietly.” The enslaved man knew he could not confront the White soldier, that he, a slave, was supposed to show deference, but his disgust and outrage ring loudly. As for Jannot, he recounted his interactions with his mistress: “A long time ago, about four years ago Madame wanted to beat him because he had reproached her for having beaten his wife several times without reason, and notably when she gave blows to his wife for having said she had a bad toothache, the said Dame took an axe, threatening that she would hit them. She left however and went to break the door of their cabin. It is since that time that he told her that if she carried on, he would set fire to his cabin.”

This is rare, and often moving, information. And as we can see in these examples, clerks aimed for immediacy in writing down testimony, their goal to produce an accurate written version of what the deponent said. The challenge, then, becomes one of interpreting that testimony, a task magnified when the testimony is that of enslaved persons “testifying while black,” and against whom all the decks were stacked.

Analyzing speech given in court requires us to recognize that, though deponents could have planned what to say, the act of speaking is first and foremost a spontaneous performance that happens on the fly, shifting course along the way. As such, speech is also impulsive, subject to different rules and imperatives (not least the effect of adrenaline) than written autobiographical narratives such as that of Equiano, since it happens in the moment, without knowing ahead of time what questions would be asked or what a prosecutor had uncovered during his investigation. Though defendants could not speak entirely freely, and their answers might put them in jeopardy, the evidence suggests that many found in the act of testifying motivations other than a single-minded focus on pure self-preservation, and in heeding their words and interpreting them, we must honor their complexity as sentient and emotional beings. Even when a court appearance was coerced or coached, there was room for redirecting the narrative away from the crimes being investigated—the clerk explicitly acknowledged as much when recording what one enslaved witness “said, without being asked” and then “said, again without his being asked” or what yet another enslaved defendant in a different trial “said, on her own initiative.” If not all enslaved deponents who appeared before the court in Louisiana were particularly forthright or expressive, they did go off on tangents, veering off subject and offering details that seem irrelevant at first glance but are, in fact, deeply revealing and very often riveting. And when they did, in place of straightforward answers to questions posed about the court case, they offered instead hints about their worldviews and gave glimpses of who they were. In other words, appearing before the court provided individuals with an unexpected opportunity to narrate their own stories, to digress, to redirect questioning, and to introduce unrelated matters in an arena where, commanding full attention, they had to be heard.

Voices of the Enslaved is centered on the narratives of eight enslaved individuals, with the testimony of many others included. Louison was an enslaved woman belonging to the Ursuline nuns, and in her 1752 testimony we hear her insistently communicating her response to a violent act of aggression: first, in her outraged words to her attacker and, second, in her retelling to court officials. The 1748 testimonies of Marie-Jeanne, a pregnant woman of African descent, and Lisette, a young Indian girl, allow us to hear their stories of loss, interspersed with references to work roles, conflicts over authority, and their conceptions of motherhood. Francisque, an outsider who described himself as an “Englishman from Philadelphia,” had led a peripatetic life by the time he was arrested in New Orleans in 1766. But it was his flashy dress at assemblies of enslaved people that got him into trouble when he upset local rivals fighting over the same women. Finally, in 1767, we have the love story of Kenet and Jean-Baptiste and their search for a way to be united. They belonged to different owners, and their testimony illuminates the steps they took over at least fourteen years to secure a future together. Many of these deponents centered their testimony on intimate matters and their emotional worlds, and they enrich our understanding of the experiences of African and African-descended people in the Founding Era.

In seeking to recover the voices of the enslaved, we must acknowledge the many for whom there is no evidence. We must also recognize that there is no ideal or complete archive, nor do we have the luxury to imagine one. Instead, we need to let our guard down, shake off the presumptions that can mar our view, and rethink received wisdom—for example, about what constitutes a slave narrative or what determines the gold standard for autobiography.

The records of trials in which the enslaved testify are far from perfect, and their voices are not perfectly free, yet this archive allows us to glimpse a space where the enslaved narrated their own stories, with immediacy, with urgency. Over and over again, the deponents found ways to implicitly condemn a system that sought to reduce them to chattel. Their courtroom narratives tell us that much, and yet so very much more, for they lift these individuals from anonymity, even as their stories bring to the fore the heart-wrenching cruelty of slavery.

In bringing to the fore their character and personality, and at times their emotions, inner thoughts, and intimate worlds, the individuals who testified rebutted slavery’s intent to silence them, to dehumanise them, and to render them anonymous. Mostly we only glimpse these individuals for brief moments in time. Yet here were real people who lived full lives. We are richer for having encountered them, however fleetingly. And whenever they did have the opportunity to speak and have their words recorded, we owe it to them to listen and to try to hear.