"The first lick from Mr. Peterkin laid my back open. I writhed,
I wrestled; but blow after blow descended, each harder than the
preceding one. I shrieked, I screamed, I pleaded, I prayed, but
here no mercy shown me. Mr. Peterkin having fully gratified and
quenched his spleen, turned to Mr. Jones and said 'Now is yer turn;
you can beat her as much as you please, only jist leave a bit
o'life in her, is all I cares for.' " In the pages of this putative
autobiography the author poses as a slave for the purpose of
bringing attention to the injustice of slavery. The actual author
Mattie Griffith, passing as a black, wanted her book to horrify and
shame the nation.Identifying herself as Ann, a former servant
woman, she recalls her protected youth and good education as a
nearly-white child. She tells that at twelve she was sold to a
brutal master named Peterkin. On his Kentucky plantation she
witnessed and experienced the cruelty of slave life. After his
death one of his daughters took Ann to the city as her servant. Ann
found new friendships there and fell in love with Henry, a slave
who killed himself after being cheated out of his self-purchase.
After being sold to an elderly Bostonian who emancipated her, Ann
finishes her story as a schoolteacher for black children.
Pseudo-slave narratives like Griffith's appeared over the course of
the abolitionist movement, and this is the only one now in print.
Born in Kentucky, Griffith was by inheritance the owner of six
slaves. As a young woman she went north because she loathed the
"peculiar institution." Living in poverty in Philadelphia, Griffith
wrote Autobiography of a Female Slave to help finance her effort to
emancipate her slaves and resettle them in free territory. She
professed a keen knowledge of a slave's daily life and the brutal
incidents a slave experienced. From this material she created her
fictional story. The novel failed commercially, although it was
hailed within the abolitionist movement. The American Anti-Slavery
Society soon afterward gave Griffith the funds to return to
Kentucky in order to free and resettle her slaves.
Mattie Griffith (c.1826A 1906) has disappeared from American
literary history. She remained a lifelong activist, first for
abolition, and then for women's suffrage and for temperance. Joe
Lockard is a doctoral candidate at the University of California,
Berkeley."
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