Contemporary Authors

• Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 1816-1861 University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 2015

• Rutgers - http://english.camden.rutgers.edu/faculty/keith-green/

  Keith Green

  Keith Green’s main research and teaching interests lie in African American literature, with more specific investments in the study of the antebellum era, self-referential writing, African-Native American literature, and slave narratives. He has delivered papers on Nat Turner, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and William Wells Brown. His current book project, Not Just Slavery: African Americans Write Captivity Narratives, Too: 1816-1879, explores the various kinds of bondage and confinement–specifically Indian slavery, Barbary captivity, and state imprisonment–African Americans experienced and recounted in the nineteenth century.

Green, Keith Michael. Bound to respect: antebellum
narratives of black imprisonment, servitude, and bondage,
1816-1861
E.R. Crowther
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1166.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
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Full Text: 
Green, Keith Michael. Bound to respect: antebellum narratives of black imprisonment, servitude, and bondage, 1816-1861. Alabama, 2015. 211 p
bibl index afp ISBN 9780817318833 cloth, $49.95; ISBN 9780817388874 ebook, $49.95
(cc) 53-3398
PS217
MARC
Green (Rutgers) contextualizes antebellum African American bondage narratives obliquely, in contrast to their typical linear arrangement as mile markers along a progression from slavery to freedom. He offers a fresh reading of the narratives of Briton Hammond, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, Harriet Wilson, and Robert Adams, confirming that a major purpose of the bondage narrative was to establish the fundamental humanity of the bound person and legitimize the protest against bondage. Green augments the scholarship by refashioning the familiar ex-slave narrative--typically a flight-to-freedom story about a refugee from the US South--and comparing it to other types of bondage narrative. Hammond's narrative features Caribbean slavery and is silent about bondage in New England. Jacobs links chattel slavery with incarceration in southern jails. Bibb deconstructs the benign nature of Cherokee slavery. Wilson connects slavery with domestic service. And Adams's exotic capture tale reveals that he was motivated in part by pecuniary gain and temporary fame. The intersection of diverse bondage narratives and states of "unfreedom"
3/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1489517173132 2/2
defines antebellum understandings of blackness and slavery, even as African Americans employed these tropes to effect personhood and liberty. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.--E. R. Crowther, Adams State University
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Crowther, E.R. "Green, Keith Michael. Bound to respect: antebellum narratives of black imprisonment, servitude, and bondage, 1816-1861."
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1166+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661529&it=r&asid=5c7b666e678ba9d18db3d50b4d480cfa. Accessed 14 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661529

Edward Colimore
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA). 04/15/2014.

Rutgers professor's book examines full scope of slavery

Edward Colimore
April 15--Henry Bibb was just 10 the first time he ran away.
In the antebellum South, Bibb fled slavery many more times, eventually finding his freedom and becoming an author and abolitionist.
"Believe me when I say that no tongue, nor pen ever has or can express the horrors of American Slavery," he wrote in 1849. "I despair in finding language to express adequately the deep feeling of my soul as I contemplate the past history of my life."
His story -- one of thousands of surviving slave narratives -- is part of research by Rutgers-Camden associate professor Keith Green, who uses it to help dissect and expand the meaning of slavery.
The word covers many forms of suffering, he says in a forthcoming book, Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Imprisonment, Servitude and Captivity, 1816 to 1861.
"It's eye-opening to realize the full scope of what was happening at that time," said Green, 37, of Lindenwold. "It's like walking past a building that you've seen before but then you go inside and see it in a whole different light."
Bibb, Green said, was a slave but he also was a prisoner in a so-called slave prison in Louisville, Ky., which was used to hold people, including whites, who had committed misdemeanors. The lockup was part of a system of prisons, workhouses, and penitentiaries in the 19th century. When Bibb wasn't in prison, he was being held by various slaveholders, including a Cherokee.
"There were instances of imprisonment, indentured servitude, and captivity that more fully explain what blacks were experiencing," said Green, a member of Rutgers' English department who teaches African American literature. "I wanted to break out of slavery as that one word, that one category, which encapsulates all of that."
Especially cruel was the treatment of children who were separated from their parents and siblings, Green said.
"I was born February 11, 1783, at Cape May, State of New Jersey," Jarena Lee wrote in her 1849 narrative, Religious Experience of Mrs. Jarena Lee. "At the age of seven years I was parted from my parents, and went to live as a servant maid, with a Mr. Sharp, at the distance of about sixty miles from the place of my birth."
Lee, one of the first women authorized to preach in the 19th century, had been "bound out" -- sent to live as an indentured servant because her parents could not take care of her, Green said.
Servitude involving children of all races may have been the most widespread form of coerced labor besides the enslavement of blacks during the antebellum era, Green said research suggests.
"My book's title, Bound to Respect, refers to the claim for respectability," Green said. The former slaves "use their narratives to demand respect."
"They affirm their personhood," he said. "Though they have been through these experiences, they are fellow human beings."
Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl describes her slavery and imprisonment in North Carolina, Green said.
"I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse," Jacobs wrote in 1861. "I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is.
"Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations," she said.
The imprisonment of Jacobs' children was once used to bring her out of hiding after she escaped her master. "When I heard that my little ones were in a loathsome jail, my first impulse was to go to them . . . ," she wrote. "The thought was agonizing."
Forced servitude was not just an American institution, though, Green said. It was a worldwide problem.
In The Narrative of Robert Adams, A Barbary Captive, Adams described his bondage in North Africa to Moors, Arabs, and indigenous Africans. He was shipwrecked off the coast of Africa near Senegal in 1810 and spent several years as a captive.
"They were continually occupied in tending the flocks of the Moors," he wrote in 1816 of slaves. "They suffered severely from exposure to the scorching sun, in a state of almost utter nakedness; and the miseries of their situation were aggravated by despair of ever being released from slavery."
The value of such narratives is undeniable, said Paul W. Schopp, a professional historian who lives in Riverton. "If we didn't have them, we would lose the basic history of that time period, but in larger context, we'd lose having a greater understanding of what these people went through as slaves and what they had to do to get free, the ingenuity and stealth.
The narratives "are a treasure," he said. "These first-person accounts are the most accurate representation we have of both slavery and the quest for freedom."
That quest is universal, Green said. It drove Henry Bibb to escape his masters, then try to free his wife, Melinda, and daughter, Mary Frances. He was unsuccessful and was enslaved again.
"I believe slaveholding to be a sin against God and man under all circumstances," he wrote in 1849. "I have no sympathy with the person or persons who tolerate and support the system willingly and knowingly, morally, religiously or politically."
The stories of slaves, including many revealed for the first time in Green's research, display "the bravery and ingenuity that black people had to exercise to maintain their spirit," he said. "They had to fight and be strong and think creatively about how to achieve freedom.
"Bibb sacrificed his freedom, but chose bondage in order to give his family a chance for freedom," he said. "It shows how committed he was to being a father and husband that he would risk his own freedom so his wife and daughter could be free. It shows the integrity of Bibb and people like him."
ecolimore@phillynews.com
856-779-3833 InkyEBC
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• Rutgers-Camden News Now
  http://news.camden.rutgers.edu/2014/04/researcher-explores-slave-narratives-in-forthcoming-book/
  Word count: 712

  Researcher Explores Slave Narratives in Forthcoming Book

  As a graduate student, Keith Green became well-versed in the more than 6,000 surviving slave narratives. However, as he researched these stories, he realized that the word “slavery” insufficiently explained the various forms of suffering that people of African descent were enduring in the New World.
  “There were instances of imprisonment, indentured servitude, and captivity that more fully explain what blacks were experiencing,” says Green, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden. “I wanted to break out of ‘slavery’ as that one word, that one category, which encapsulates all of that.”
  Green’s comprehensive focus has now culminated in his forthcoming book, Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Imprisonment, Servitude and Captivity, 1816 to 1861. Examining firsthand and dictated accounts, the text explores distinct forms of black bondage and confinement in the 19th century, such as enslavement by Native Americans, Barbary captivity, state imprisonment, and child indentured servitude. More than half the book includes previously undocumented research, contributing to a more thorough understanding of what blacks, both enslaved and free, endured.
  “It’s eye-opening to realize the full scope of what was happening at that time,” says Green, a Lindenwold resident. “It’s like walking past a building that you’ve seen before, but then you go inside and see it in a whole different light.”
  While the book isn’t due out until early 2015, Green is already garnering literary praise. His manuscript has been awarded the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature from the editorial board of the University of Alabama Press. According to the publisher, the award recognizes a manuscript that, in the opinion of the board, “represents outstanding scholarship in the field of American literary studies, and which has been accepted for publication in the given calendar year.”
  Bound to Respect begins with the narrative of Briton Hammon, regarded by many scholars as the oldest slave narrative in existence, and a critical case study for Green’s analysis. As the Rutgers–Camden researcher explains, Hammon was a “bondsman” living in New England. In December 1747, he was sent by his master to Jamaica and the Bay of Campeche as part of an expedition to collect logwood. What followed was a 13-year odyssey of servility as Hammon is held captive by Native Americans and later the Spanish, forced to work as a house slave for the governor of Cuba, ordered to serve on a Spanish ship, jailed for nearly five years in a dungeon, and then forced to join an expedition escorting a Spanish bishop throughout Cuba.
  According to Green, although Hammon’s account is regarded as the first slave narrative, and a model for all others to follow, it illustrates the inadequacy of classifying such distinct forms of oppression under one umbrella. “How could this man go through all of these different types of captivity, and we call his narrative a ‘slave narrative’?” asks Green. “It doesn’t even begin to account for everything that he’s been through. One word has to do so much work.”
  With Hammon’s narrative written in 1760, the book segues into a discussion of slave narratives and other accounts of black bondage from the antebellum era. Green notes that the selected texts introduce readers to various forms of confinement and servitude that aren’t commonly known or discussed. For instance, Henry Bibb, a former slave who later became an abolitionist and author, wrote about being held in what his text calls a “slave prison” in Louisville, Ky. However, the prison was also used to hold people who had committed misdemeanors, including whites, and was part of a wide-reaching system of prisons, workhouses, and penitentiaries in the 19th century.
  “When we think about slavery, we don’t typically think about prisons, about actual structures and cells,” says Green. “It would seem that this slave prison was just another aspect of slavery, but it points to other mechanisms that were at work in the antebellum era.”
  In another chapter, Green examines Harriet Wilson’s autobiographical novel, Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. According to the Rutgers–Camden scholar, the account is significant for being the first sustained depiction of black child indentured servitude.