ABSTRACT
Drawing on eighteenth-century testimony by enslaved Africans in French colonial Louisiana, and the 1764 interrogatory of Marguerite in particular, this chapter argues that such court records can be seen as a form of autobiographical narrative. The words of the enslaved, meticulously recorded according to French court procedure, show that deponents constantly redirected the court’s focus away from the crimes being investigated and the questions asked, veering off subject and offering details that seem extraneous at first glance but are, in fact, deeply revealing and very often riveting. Less concerned with whether testimony can tell us whether the events described actually took place, this analysis focuses instead on the medium of testimony as an opportunity for individuals to construct a narrative, one that reflected the spontaneity of oral speech, that was anchored in their own experiences, and that brimmed with character, personality, wit, emotions, and ways of knowing, one that was autobiographical because it expressed how they looked at their world and how they evaluated it and made sense of it at that moment in time.
