Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave - Softcover

In the first modern published edition of this classic, Andrews and Mason have combined research detective work with lucid writing to reveal a compelling story of the brutality of southern slavery as well as the burdens of free black life in New England. This is a unique work of historical recovery, humanity, and scholarship. (David W. Blight, Yale University)

If you thought you knew the plot of slave narratives, read William Grimes's version of these stories of bondage and freedom, and think again. If you thought that slavery has no relevance today, consider the contributions of Grimes's living descendant, Regina Mason, and the expert editing and commentary of Professor William L. Andrews, internationally renowned expert on African American autobiography. If you think this is a fantastic addition to our understanding of American culture, you are right. (Frances Smith Foster, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies, Emory University)

A pathbreaking edition...Andrews contributes deep knowledge of antebellum America to the book while Mason, energized by the human passion to discover truths about our complicated ancestries because such truths are essential to our survival, contributes an impressive range of specific historical information about Grimes and the various characters in his life and milieu...The successful collaboration between Andrews and Mason offers a model of how scholars can emerge from the academic fortress to collaborate with nonacademics and engage the world in ways that genuinely matter. (African American Review)

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave is the first fugitive slave narrative in American history. When it appeared in New York in 1825, it was the longest African American autobiography published up to that time. Because Grimes wrote and published his narrative on his own, without deference to white editors, publishers, or sponsors, his Life has an immediacy, candor, and no-holds-barred realism unparalleled in antebellum slave narratives. The famous fugitives of the 1840s and 1850s, even Douglass, Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, all wrote in accordance with an antislavery script that circumscribed their freedom to speak out about what they had experienced as slaves in the South and as quasi-free men and women in the North. William Grimes, however, wrote before this formulaic script had been composed.

Life appeared years before the advent of any organized national American antislavery movement, before David Walker's Appeal (1829), before the first African American newspaper, before William Lloyd Garrison had publicly acknowledged himself an abolitionist, before Frederick Douglass could read the word "abolitionist." Beholden to no one and unschooled in antislavery propaganda, Grimes's Life represents a truly unfiltered and personally authentic account of both southern slavery and the severely compromised "freedom" of the northern states in antebellum America.

This edition of Life of William Grimes represents an historic partnership between a prominent scholar of the African American slave narrative and a genealogist who is also direct descendant of Grimes himself. Regina Mason, the great-great-great-granddaughter of William Grimes, combines her extensive historical research into her family and the text of her ancestor with William L. Andrews's scholarship on the origins and development of African American autobiography. The result is an authoritative, copiously annotated text that features pages from an original Grimes family Bible, transcriptions of the 1824 correspondence that set the terms for the author's self-purchase in Connecticut (nine years after his escape from Savannah, Georgia), and many other striking images that invoke the life and times of William Grimes.