The New York Times ran a front-page story in September reporting a scholarly discovery pertaining to American slavery and its nineteenth-century literature. The Times recalled that, back in 2002, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the literary historian, announced that he had purchased at an auction a book-length manuscript called The Bondwoman’s Narrative, which bore the coolly sensational byline “Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina.” Gates published the work, and contributed an introduction recounting everything he knew about the manuscript and its author.

He knew that a previous owner of The Bondwoman’s Narrative was a well- regarded librarian at Howard University, who, by relying on her instincts, judged the manuscript to be authentically what it seemed to be. Gates wanted proof, however, and he assembled a team of curiously specialized investigators, who examined the manuscript from several angles: its paper, which appeared to be from the 1850s (in the judgment of a specialist on paper); and ink, evidently from the same period (in the judgment of an ink specialist); and the text itself, its prose, historical references, assumptions, and ideas. The several inquiries converged on a single conclusion, namely that the manuscript had indeed been written by an escaped slave from North Carolina, who must have been a woman and must have composed it sometime between 1853 and 1861.

Gates's discovery of the novel was brilliant and dramatic.

The publication of the manuscript with Gates’s explanatory introduction made for a dramatic event, and not merely on antiquarian grounds. Great oppression is always surrounded by a cordon of silence, and, in the case of Southern slavery, the cordon was exceptionally tight. Even the slaves who escaped to the North and managed to compose autobiographical exposés discovered that, once their memoirs had gotten into print, the books themselves fell under attack, as if pursued by a breed of bloodhounds skilled at hunting down texts. The slave narratives were said, by the apologists for slavery, to have been doctored by white abolitionist editors, or to be outright hoaxes—documents manipulated or invented by the militants of the abolitionist cause for the purpose of maligning the philanthropic nature of Southern slavery, or for the equally deplorable purpose of defending, by means of invidious comparison, the unjust capitalist depredations in the North.

Something about these accusations ought to strike us as familiar. A couple of generations ago, people who escaped from the Soviet Union and wrote up their experiences came under vaguely similar attacks—accused of being dishonest agents of the CIA or the bourgeois reactionaries. Dissidents who get out of Cuba make a lot of people nervous even in our own time. There is the spectacle of people who flee the Islamists of Iran or East Africa and publish sober accounts of what they have undergone—only to find themselves reproached in the democratic countries as fakes or fanatics or imperialist agents. This does make a pattern, doesn’t it? An eloquent refugee has always seemed a guilty person in the eyes of the world. But the nineteenth-century accusations against the slave narrators—those accusations seem, by comparison, more aggressive still, and nastier, and it is easy to see why that was the case, if you recall the circumstances.

Everybody during slavery times recognized that virtually the entire white population of the slave states was engaged in a conspiracy to prevent the slaves from acquiring even a basic education, let alone the kind of literary sophistication that is generally needed to write a good book. The slave narratives demonstrated that, even so, some of the slaves had ended up at least modestly educated. The authors of those narratives appeared to be Houdinis who had made a double escape—from bondage and from enforced illiteracy. They were people of superior talent. Only, how could that be so, if the slaves belonged to an inferior race? Nor could their achievement be dismissed merely as the feat of isolated individuals. Gates observes—he makes this comment in the introduction to his anthology called The Classic Slave Narratives—that if you study a large number of the narratives, you will notice that somehow or other, the authors appear to have read one another’s books. And they have drawn inspirations from one another, as if their project were collective and not just individual, and the collective project required storytelling conventions and innovations all its own, which they duly invented.