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Printer-Friendly ModeProf aims to dispel beliefs on slavery
August 25, 2005 —
Eric Gardner believes the general assumptions about African Americans living in the slavery era in the United States are mostly inaccurate.
The associate professor of English at SVSU has compiled an anthology that he plans to use to get that point across in his class.
"Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery," an anthology selected and introduced by Gardner, was published this year by Toby Press.
The book is a collection of plays and narratives, mostly written by enslaved or newly escaped African Americans in the 19th Century.
"Not enough folks know about the richness of African Americans from the 19th Century," Gardner explains. "It challenges what we think about African Americans now. It's thinking about how these voices got heard, and what happened to them."
Gardner compiled the anthology, mostly plays, to show the creativity African Americans used to either try to escape from slavery or have their voice heard after escaping.
He also wanted to present what those voices were and what they were trying to say.
"We just don't know enough," he says. "While in court, for instance, when trying to sue for their freedom from slavery, they would have to talk about slavery in ways different than we what we have assumed."
One of the plays in the anthology is "The Escape," the first play by a former slave, William Wells Brown, who escaped in the late 1830s. Also featured is "Peculiar Sam," by Pauline Hopkins, which was written in 1879. Gardner had to transcribe that play, written in Minstrel form, straight from the manuscript.
The fact that the book features mostly plays excites Gardner.
"Drama was a vital force in the 19th Century," he says. "Not a lot of people got to see these plays in actual play form back then, but most of the time they were read aloud so the emphasis was kept. I ask students to think about how books circulated during that time."
Gardner will use the book as one of eight books in English 312: Literature of Great Britain and the United States II.
"These are plays I've wanted to teach for a decade," he says. "Most American literature classes don't teach plays, because it is tougher to teach plays. It's just plain exciting that people are going to read (the plays)."
The book is being sold in the SVSU Bookstore, but Gardner says any money he makes off the sales will go right back to the University, because "it's only fair" to the students.
As a known "expert" on the subject - he has been researching the subject for 15 years - Gardner was contacted by Toby Press for research on another book. The two kept in contact, and Gardner came to them with the idea for the anthology.
Gardner also just finished research trips to St. Louis and Duke University, funded by federal grants, over the summer.
In St. Louis, he researched a string of lawsuits brought against the government by African Americans looking for freedom from slavery, and the ways they found to get their point across inside the courtroom. His trip to Duke was an extension of that.
"A good student recognizes how much he or she doesn't know," he says. "It was a very humbling experience."
He felt the trips and his work on the anthology were similar.
"Both of what the projects have in common is trying to find out what it was like to be an African American in the 19th Century," he says. "It's more about the ways black folks were talking to public audiences at that time."