I was checking out the upcoming sale at one of my favorite auction houses when I came across a novel by a female slave. I was familiar with William Wells Brown’s novel “Clotel,” but one by a black slave woman, written in the 1850s? How had that gotten past me?
The novel was titled “The Autobiography of a Female Slave” by Martha Griffith. I had to find out more about it and her.
So, I Googled and found an electronic version of the entire novel as part of a digital record of Southern history, literature and culture. Called “Documenting the American South,” it was compiled by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH).
So, I started reading the first chapter:
“I was born in one of the southern counties of Kentucky. My earliest recollections are of a large, old-fashioned farm-house, built of hewn rock, in which my old master, Mr. Nelson, and his family, consisting of a widowed sister, two daughters and two sons, resided. I have but an indistinct remembrance of my old master. … I well remember that, as a token of his good-will, he always presented us (the slave-children) with a slice of buttered bread, when we had finished our daily task. I have also a faint reminiscence of his old hickory cane being shaken over my head two or three times, and the promise (which remained, until his death, unfulfilled) of a good ‘thrashing’ at some future period.”
It seemed pretty idyllic to me, but I didn’t have to wait long to get to the familiar evils of slavery: The patriarch of the family got sick and died, debts had to be paid and the property – including the slaves – had to be sold. The girl telling the story, then about 10 or 12 years old, was sold off alone to an awful overseer for a brutal plantation – leaving behind her mother, an act that Griffith told in wrenching details.
“Surely I was to take my mother with me! No mortal power would dare to sever us. Why, I remember that when master sold the gray mare, the colt went also. Who could, who would, who dared, separate the parent from her offspring? Alas! I had yet to learn that the white man dared do all that his avarice might suggest; and there was no human tribunal where the outcast African could pray for “right!”
I thought I had “discovered” a slave novel by an actual black female. If I had, that would have been a terrific find. But after further research, I was mistaken. Martha Griffith – also known as Mattie – was a white woman who became an abolitionist after growing up in a slave-holding family in Kentucky.
Born around 1833, Griffith was raised by one of her father’s female slaves after she was left an orphan. She freed the slaves that she inherited from her family and took her inheritance to help them with their new start. She moved north and eventually married a former newspaper correspondent with the last name Browne.
Griffith wrote poems and sketches for anti-slavery publications and assisted William Lloyd Garrison in the abolitionist movement. She wrote “The Autobiography of a Female Slave” – for which she would become well known – in 1856, and it was published anonymously in 1857. Garrison printed an extract, revealing it as having been written by a “white southern woman.”
Many thought it was the real thing written by an actual slave. Griffith was actually one of several abolitionists who wrote fictionalized versions of the lives of slaves, including Richard Hildreth’s “The Slave, or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836)” and Jabez Delano Hammond’s “Life and Opinion of Julius Melbourn (1847).” These novels were used in anti-slavery efforts.
The Griffith novel at auction was in rough shape. Part of its spine was missing and its cover was worn. The inside pages had some water spots but appeared to be in pretty good condition. The auction sheet noted that it was an 1874 first edition from the library of Joseph Brinton from Chester County, PA.
The inside page in the actual novel gave an 1857 copyright date. The book got one bid and sold for $500. I found a better copy of the 1857 first edition on a website for $1,950.
While Griffith’s and other books like it played their role in showing the horrors of slavery, William Wells Brown lived it. In “Clotel,” he wrote of a woman who was the fictional daughter of Thomas Jefferson. The novel was written at a time of rumors about Jefferson’s fathering of children with his slave Sally Hemings.
It showed the hypocrisy of men who extolled democracy but lived as slave owners exploiting their female slaves, as noted in the UNC-CH site.
Brown was born a slave in Kentucky in1814 of mixed blood, just as his character Clotel. He escaped in 1834 and made his way into Canada, assuming the name of the man who helped him. He became an anti-slavery speaker, eventually moving to Boston and writing his autobiography “Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself.”
Wells traveled abroad, and became a prolific writer – producing plays, autobiographies and history books. He died in 1884.
“Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States,” published first in London in 1853, is considered the first African American novel.
