The House of Bondage: or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves

by Octavia V. Rogers Albert, Frances Smith Foster (Introduction)

Overview

Setting out to correct the inadequacies of many written accounts of slavery, teacher and social activist Octavia Albert added her own incisive commentary to the personal narratives of former slaves. Her early interviews, like many antebellum slave narratives, depict cruel punishments, divided families, and debilitating labour. Seeing herself as a public advocate for social change, Albert called for every Christian's personal acceptance of responsibility for slavery's legacies and lessons. As well as its historical value, the book has many merits as a work of literature, using dialogue and experiments with dialect, and incorporating songs and poems in the text.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195052633
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/14/1988
Series:	The ^ASchomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.26(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.78(d)

Editorial Reviews

"One of the most interesting volumes...is also one of the most eclectic. The House of Bondage or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves by Octavia Rogers Albert is a fascinating piece of literature partly because it is so experimental in its attempt to blend an interview format with slave narratives, biographical accounts, historical information, and even her own personal commentary. Published in 1890, House of Bondage is an example of the black oral tradition in process. The reader becomes an eye-witness to black culture and history in formation...Albert skillfully moves the dialogue between the black vernacular of the slaves and the standard English of the black middle-class narrator....Frances Smith Foster in her introduction to House of Bonage argues that the narrative authority of Albert's personal experience makes her book more authentic in its portrayal of slavery [than Uncle Tom's Cabin]."—The Women's Review of Books

"The personal narratives, especially a group narrative like Octavia Albert's 'House of Bondage' (1890), were a means of perserving fragile antebellum life history as the slave generations grew old and died. Just as important, they provided a counterweight against the plantation myth and the denigration of black freedom being generated by respected white novelists such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, and historians such as James Ford Rhodes."—Eric J. Sundquist in The New York Times Book Review quist

From the Publisher