To Be a Slave by Julius Lester
**Overview of "To Be a Slave" by Julius Lester**
"To Be a Slave," published in 1968, is a seminal work by Julius Lester that provides a poignant exploration of the African American experience during slavery through firsthand accounts. The book draws heavily from primary sources, presenting verbatim transcripts of narratives from enslaved individuals and their observers in the antebellum South. These firsthand stories are interwoven with Lester's commentary, which is clearly distinguishable in the text. By focusing on the voices of those who were often overlooked in traditional historical narratives, Lester emphasizes their significance in shaping history.
The work is notable for its accessibility to young readers, filling a gap in literature that offers authentic and compelling insights into slavery. It received critical acclaim and was recognized as a runner-up for the Newbery Medal, highlighting its importance in children's literature. Additionally, Lester's approach to modernizing the language while preserving the essence of the original narratives makes the text readable and engaging. It serves as an educational resource, complementing other notable works on the African American experience and remains a critical text for understanding the history of slavery in America.
Subject Terms
To Be a Slave by Julius Lester
First published: 1968; illustrated
Subjects: Race and ethnicity
Type of work: Biography
Time of work: From the seventeenth century to the 1860’s
Recommended Ages: 10-15
Locale: Western Africa, the Jamestown colony, and the antebellum South
Principal Personages:
Charles Ball , an American-born slaveJosiah Henson , a former slaveSolomon Northup , a black man who was born free in the North but who was kidnapped and enslaved before regaining his freedom
Form and Content
Decades after its publication in 1968, To Be a Slave remained among the relatively small number of books that draw heavily from primary sources to provide young people with history of the African American experience.
The dedication, a brief note quoting an unnamed former slave, a table of contents, an author’s note, and a prologue precede a text which is so moving that readers who skipped these introductory features will probably be compelled to go back and read them as well. Similarly, the epilogue is also likely to be read and the bibliography studied. All these components contribute greatly to the text itself by providing background, authenticity, and documentation.
In seven chapters, To Be a Slave presents verbatim transcripts of disclosures made by Africans and African Americans who were enslaved in the antebellum South and a few others who were firsthand observers of slavery. All these contributors are specifically identified when possible, immediately after their words are presented. Background information and commentary are offered by Julius Lester and are presented in italics so that they are easily distinguishable from the transcripts. These vivid threads of history are woven into a most revealing tapestry made more compelling by the fact that these are the first-person narratives of minor figures who were, in the view of Lester, the true movers of history, the bedrock of black history—those whose actions are symbolically represented by the famous. The accounts are dramatic—sometimes bitter, always poignant.
In the author’s note, Lester avers that one of the greatest overlooked sources of information about slavery has been the slaves themselves. He explains how he drew from the words of those who had been enslaved to create the book, using two large databases. Before the Civil War, narratives of former slaves became a literary genre through the efforts of abolitionists who wrote down the stories of thousands of those who had escaped. After the Civil War, interest in such narratives dwindled until the 1930’s, when workers for the Federal Writers Project took down the stories of those former slaves still living. Lester also explains that these databases differ in one significant way: language. The abolitionists sometimes rewrote the stories to meet literary standards and to avoid giving the opposition fodder, based on the former slaves’ language, for the grist mill on black inferiority. In contrast, Federal Writers Project workers were as interested in preserving the former slaves’ speech patterns and language as the stories themselves. Lester notes that in order to make his book more readable, he modernized punctuation and the dialect spellings that resulted from white writers’ attempts to transcribe the former slaves’ speech.
Critical Context
To Be a Slave, one of Julius Lester’s first books for young people published by a major publisher, is a milestone. Prior to its publication, few books on the subject that provided such documentation existed for young people. With it, Lester became one of the few African Americans writing for young people in the 1960’s to enjoy mass marketing and high literary acclaim.
In 1968, when To Be a Slave was published, Lester also had published Look Out, Whitey!: Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!, a history and explication of the Black Power movement in the United States, and was serving as the field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization about which the Establishment and much of the American public had strong reservations.
Attesting the veracity of the literary community, critical response to To Be a Slave was good. In 1969, it was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal. Major textbooks on literature for young people and literature reference sources have consistently praised the work. It is often described as forceful, well constructed, and important.
Subsequent works by Lester continue to illuminate the African American experience in varied ways. In Long Journey Home, which tells the stories of six slaves and freedmen, Lester again drew from primary sources, interviews, and such footnotes to history as letters, bills of sale, and marriage registers. Lester’s work for young people conveys much about the African American experience, and his sense of morality speaks to all.
In an educational context, Lester’s To Be a Slave and Long Journey Home correlate beautifully with Paula Fox’s Newbery Medal-winning The Slave Dancer (1973), Feelings’ profoundly moving wordless book The Middle Passage, and the volume of Milton Meltzer’s trilogy In Their Own Words: A History of the American Negro (published in 1964, 1965, and 1967, respectively) that covers the years from 1619 to 1865. Also worthy of note is that Caedmon produced a sound recording derived from To Be a Slave, with Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis in the roles of various slaves telling their own stories and Lester himself presenting the narrative framework to make the work whole.