Addendum to July Update

I wanted to note another book I read during the interval between updates, the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.  By his own account Equiano was born around 1745, probably in what is now southeastern Nigeria, and was captured by slave traders as a ten year old child and carried to what is now that . Even I was shocked at the cruelty and inhumanity of that story in the book, though there has been some credible recent scholarship suggesting that he may actually have been born in South Carolina and not Africa. As a boy he was sold quite frequently and ended up serving primarily on ships running between England and the West Indies, especially Barbados and Montserrat, becoming adept at navigation as well as trade and enduring, as seamen do, numerous calamitous voyages, including one shipwreck on an uninhabited and waterless island off the coasts of the Carolinas. He was able to buy his freedom when he was around twenty-two and moved to England, which was a safer and more congenial environment for a free black man than anywhere in the Americas--he pointedly named the West Indies as the worst of the worst for being abused, robbed, risk of re-enslavement without any hope of appeal to the white authorities, though he had a dangerous episode in Savannah, Georgia also. Though the book is mostly about his travels he also became prominent in the abolitionist movement in England in the 1780s and 90s.


I recommend it. It is quite short, only around 160 pages, but the travels are interesting, and it certainly covers a strain of that period of history that was of major importance but tends to be underrepresented in the canonical literature and history of that time. I am sure anybody reading this will already be much more attuned to and fired up about the injustice and cruelty of North America's history than any outrage I would be able to summon in behalf of this, but that is in the book too, and at a time when it was a living, active force. Equiano as a writer is interested in relating the facts and making his points, and is not given much to expansiveness, which sometimes makes the writing come off flat. No more time.


I wanted to report also that the Salman Rushdie book I got from the library has a beautiful shimmering golden dust jacket. I love it.


I can't find any good pictures on a quick search. Maybe next month.