Native Bondage, Narrative Mobility: African American Accounts of Indian Captivity

The article studies African American narratives of indigenous captivity from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Taking accounts by Briton Hammon, John Marrant, Henry Bibb, and James Beckwourth as examples, the essay charts the development of this body of writings, its distinction from white-authored narratives, and its contribution to North American autobiography. In so doing, the article argues that the black-authored texts strategically employed only certain elements of the Indian captivity narrative and that they blended these with aspects of other types of Western autobiography to claim black people's agency and discursive authority in white-dominated print culture.

Silent Books, Talking Leaves

The watershed for the scholarship on A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785), is Henry Louis Gates’s influential essay on “The Trope of the Talking Book.” But the widespread classification of the episode in which John Marrant presents his Bible to a Cherokee “king” and his eldest daughter as an instance of an Anglo-African “trope” ignores the narrative’s Cherokee ethnohistorical context. This chapter reads Marrant’s account, despite questions about its reliability, as a reflection of the encounter between evangelical literacy practices and Cherokee beliefs about witchcraft and European literacy.