ABSTRACT

Historians have long been reluctant to use slave narratives as primary sources. Because they were written (or dictated) by the victims of the “peculiar institution”, antebellum slave narratives were not considered as reliable sources for writing the history of slavery; they were suspected of having been altered or even invented by abolitionists willing to serve their cause. Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave was published in 1893, almost 30 years after the abolition of slavery, at a time when Black historians and activists sought to (re)construct the archives of their community in order to (re)integrate African American history into American national history, while the country was sinking body and soul into a system of institutional segregation, and Blacks were relegated to the margins of American society. But is Isaac Mason’s narrative more reliable than antebellum narratives? Can it be considered as a source for writing the history of slavery? This chapter will attempt to show that this postbellum slave narrative is both a source for writing the history of slavery—and Black freedom—and a militant testimony whose aims were to preserve a written trace of the history of the community as well as to vouch for the capacities, the agency, the dignity, and the honor of the Black man.