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Death as Freedom
Most enslaved African Americans in North America died enslaved, leaving no documentation of their lives unless listed in a master's will or plantation account book or perhaps remembered decades later in a former slave's narrative. For some, death was the only "emancipation" they could hope for, as we read in these selections. The first is a poem by the published African American poet, George Moses Hoston, who himself remained enslaved until the end of the Civil War. Titled simply "Slavery," it intones "Is it because my skin is black / That thou should'st be so dull and slack, / And scorn to set me free? / Then let me hasten to the grave, / The only refuge for the slave, / Who mourns for liberty." The "thou" of the poem is left ambiguous. A master? God? Fate? Pity? The reader?
How many slaves chose death rather than continue life enslaved? "In the United States today," writes Dr. David Lester, a psychologist and suicide researcher, "suicide is less common among African Americans in general than in whites . . . [which] may represent an African worldview which accepts suicide only as a very last resort in the face of extreme stress."1 Calculating an approximate suicide rate among enslaved African Americans, Lester notes the difficulty of gathering unambiguous data on slaves' deaths, whether natural or at their own hand. Thus, analysis of the number, motivation, and consequences of slave suicide must include anecdotal evidence, i.e., first-person accounts and second-hand reports to supplement numerical data from census and plantation records. The selections below offer a representative sample of this evidence from slave narratives, former slave interviews (as transcribed by the interviewers), and antebellum African American newspapers. To what extent was suicide a form of resistance? to what extent "a very last resort"? (5 pages.)
Discussion questions
- Compare Horton's poem "Slavery" with his poems included in Theme IV: IDENTITY, #5, Artists. How does his tone and theme differ in the poems?
- What is the "tantalizing blaze" in the poem? How is it that the "friend became a foe"?
- Who or what is the "thou" in the poem? A master? God? Fate? Pity? The reader? Why is its identity left ambiguous?
- Does Horton appear to contemplate suicide in his poem?
- Why did slaves attempt or commit suicide in these accounts? From what you can infer, did they view death as a liberator? momentary escape? reward? passage home?
- Compare the suicide accounts with the selections in #7: Resistance. To what extent are the suicides or attempts a form of resistance? to what extent "a very last resort"?
- What different attitudes toward slave suicide appear in these readings? How do you account for the differences?
- Who is the audience for each account? How do the first-person accounts differ from the second-hand reports, as in newspapers?
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Framing Questions
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How did enslaved African Americans construct communities over time? What were their principal characteristics? |
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What obstacles did slaves confront in constructing communities? |
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How did white Americans respond to the collective behavior of African Americans? |
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How was autonomy exercised through community by antebellum African Americans? |
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Printing
| Horton poem: | 1 |
| Suicide as freedom: | 4 |
| TOTAL | 5 pages |
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Supplemental Sites
George Moses Horton, in Documenting the American South, from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Library
- The Hope of Liberty, poetry collection, 1829
- Poems by a Slave, 1837
- The Poetical Works of George Moses Horton, 1845
- Life of George M. Horton, from above title
- "Farewell Address to Prof. Hooper," poem, 1837
- "An Acrostic on the Pleasures of Beauty," poem, ca. 1835
- Biography, from Dictionary of North Carolina Biography
George Moses Horton, digitized manuscript pages, from UNC-Chapel Hill Library
George Moses Horton, letters and poems, in Slavery and the Making of the University, from UNC-Chapel Hill Library
George Moses Horton, biography and poem, from the NC Writers' Network
George Moses Horton on the Internet, from The University of North Carolina Press
The African Burial Ground, from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
WPA narratives, 1930s, full text as digital images, from the Library of Congress
- Ida Blackshear Hutchinson
- T. W. Cotton
- Annie Tate
- Unnamed former slave (Georgia) who recounts an attempted suicide
An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives, by Norman R. Yetman (Library of Congress)
"Should the Slave Narrative Collection Be Used?," by Norman R. Yetman (Library of Congress)
Guidelines for Interviewers in Federal Writers' Project (WPA) on conducting and recording interviews with former slaves, 1937 (PDF)
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Image: African American cemetery, photograph captioned "A red clay Negro cemetery" (detail), Person County, North Carolina, July 1939. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph Collection.
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1 David Lester, Center for the Study of Suicide, "Suicidal Behavior in African-American Slaves," Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 37:1 (1998), 1-13.
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