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Lutheran Writers Book Club

Discussion Materials (by Carol Gilbertson)

The Freedom Business, Including a Narrative of the Life & Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa

Poems by Marilyn Nelson

Art by Deborah Dancy

Introduction

The Freedom Business is a different kind of text from the fiction of our previous Book Club selections. It is a hybrid text, a beautiful combination of an original early slave narrative (1798) by Venture Smith (born Broteer Furro, a prince of Dukandarra, Guinea, circa 1729); new poems by poet Marilyn Nelson that subtly voice the emotional life of the narrative’s stoic speaker episode by episode, with these two texts printed on facing pages surrounded by beautifully evocative collages of watercolor, ink, and acrylic paint by artist Deborah Dancy. Another difference from former selections is that this text is considered a young-adult book and was in fact awarded a Best Young-Adult Book Award from Kirkus Reviews in 2008 as well as being a Junior Library Guild Selection. But this creative project--artbook, poetry collection, and historical document—is a feast for young and old.

Venture’s slave narrative, published in various forms in New England throughout the past two centuries, is unlike some of the more celebrated later works in this genre, which have found their place in the American literary canon. Frederick Douglass’s highly learned and eloquent Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) details his emotional struggle to regain his essential humanity, despite his brute treatment, and celebrates his earning of his freedom. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), by Harriet Jacobs, is a rhetorical triumph as well as a gripping story of a young slave woman’s noble determination to maintain her integrity despite her master’s continual sexual harassment; part of Jacobs’ account is her harrowing description of her seven years in hiding in the cramped garret of her free black grandmother’s house, where she could watch her children play through a tiny hole, but not touch or speak to them for fear of revealing her hiding place.

The British slave narrative by Olaudau Equiano (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, 1789), the earliest known account in the genre which was published nearer in time to Smith’s, was influential in turning British public opinion against the slave trade and helped to bring about its abolition by act of Parliament in 1807. Smith’s experience of slavery was more like Equiano’s than like either Douglass’s or Jacobs’ experience. Whereas both Douglass and Jacobs were born in the United States, both Equiano and Smith describe their life in West Africa before their capture as young boys, their time at sea, their struggle to prove themselves responsible and trustworthy servants to their masters, and their purchase of their own freedom through their hard work. But Equiano’s is a fuller story with rhetorical flourishes, and he includes both declarations of his Christian belief and his condemnation of Western Christians who are complicit in the evil slave trade—neither of which are included in Smith’s narrative.

Unlike these other examples of the genre, Venture Smith recounts the details of his story matter-of-factly, with little stylistic flourish, emotional appeal, or self-revelations. He makes few references to God, and he does not discuss his beliefs or attribute his small bits of good fortune to divine intervention. In her preface Nelson admits that she had a hard time comprehending Smith, whom she calls “very much a man of his times:an eighteenth-century rationalist for whom everything—including himself and his wife and children—had a price.” The freed Smith did not go on, as did Douglass and Jacobs, to work for the abolitionist cause: after purchasing his freedom and that of his family members, he lived in relative prosperity, fishing, whaling, and farmingwith his wife Meg on his 300-acre Connecticut landuntil his death in 1805. In 1798 Smith recounted his life to Elisha Niles, a local schoolteacher, who published the narrative.As with many slave narratives, people criticized the work as ghost-written, or at least manipulated by its editor.

Venture Smith’s account includes all the phases of a slave’s life: his early years in West Africa as the son of a great prince; his dramatic capture and enslavement at age 6, including witnessing the torture and murder of his father by his captors; his middle passage on a slave ship, where he is purchased by the ship’s steward; his experience as a slave in the United States under three different masters; his marriage and three children; his industry in working to earn his freedom (at age 37) despite being repeatedly duped and cheated; and his family life after purchasing his freedom. At one time he himself owned two slaves, one of whom ran away—in fact, Smith’s narrative is sometimes used as evidence that some freed blacks owned slaves. Because of Smith’s enormous size (an exhumation of his grave by a team of scientists in 2006 revealed that he was more than six feet two and weighed over 300 pounds), he has been called the black Paul Bunyan, though this Paul Bunyan was a historical figure rather than a legendary character. For a detailed chronology of events of Smith’s life and of later events related to his life and work, see:

Marilyn [Waniek] Nelson, the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut, is the author or translator of twelve volumes of poetry and three chapbooks. She has received many awards, including the Annisfield-Wolf Award, the Poets’ Prize,the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry, and the American Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize; she has three times been finalist for the National Book Award. Carver: A Life in Poems (2001) won the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and was named both a Newbery Honor and a Coretta Scott King Honor book. A Wreath For Emmett Till won the 2005 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor Book. Nelson is a professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut and founder/director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony.

Deborah [Muirhead] Dancy has been a Professor of Painting at the University of Connecticut since 1981. She earned her MS in printmaking and her MFA in painting from Illinois State University. She has been awarded numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New England Foundation for the Arts/NEA Individual Artist Grant, and a Yaddo Fellowship. Dancy has had more than a dozen solo exhibitions at galleries, and her work is included in permanent collections of many major museums around the country. She is represented by Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, G.R.N’Namdi Gallery, Chicago and Charles Young Fine Prints and Drawings, Connecticut.

Nelson’s poems in The Freedom Business are restrained and understated, mostly simple declarative sentences that match the voice of the narrative.But the lines of the early poems evoke both the beauty of the West African landscapes and the sudden discoveries of childhood.“Forty-two Perfect Days” includes the parenthetical “(I saw my parents openly kiss!)” and Venture’s philosophizing: “Six weeks of bliss, in a whole life. / And all the rest a chart of grief / islanded here and there with joys” (19). The slavers come “like a wave of fire,” “like a plague of locusts” (19).The narrative and the poems highlight Venture’s integrity, despite slavers’ deception of his father, who trusted their word and who could not be forced to reveal the location of his treasure despite being tortured to death.As Venture tells the story, he hints at rather than expresses his grief:“Sometimes, remembering, I am overcome” (“A Treasure Buried” 23); “Hopes shriveled in the glare of the distant bright / whitewashed castle’s acrid glitter in sunlight” (“Pestilence” 25).A continuing theme is the need to be true to your word, despite all: “He is richest whose honor outlives him” (“Keeper of the Keys” 35); “All of life’s business is centered in trust” (“Two Masters” 39).Occasionally, the poetic voice of Venture expresses the resentment that goes understated in the narrative:“I seized the whip and hurled it on the fire. / It sizzled like a slave-owner’s soul in hell” (“Fat on the Fire” 45); “No recourse, no justice for the African / taunted with insult on sea as on land” (“The Incident of the Clams” 67).

Discussion Questions:

  1. First read Smith’s slave narrative straight through without looking at the poems.What is your overall impression of the historical person Venture Smith?How does Smith reveal his character by his actions and his method of telling his story and revealing his ethos (his self-presentation as a narrator)?
  1. Now go back and read the narrative, interspersing the story with the poems. Consider how the narrative’s speaker and the poem’s speaker dovetail. To what extent does Nelson transform Smith’s language to make it more lyrical (i. e., “poetic” or “songlike” and including more images) and/or emotionally expressive?To what extent does she let Smith’s straightforward prose speak for itself in the poems?In what senses is the poems’ speaker more expressive than the narrative’s speaker?
  2. Locate the places where Nelson invents features of Venture’s story. Why might she do that? What is the effect of the additions—what do they add to the narrative? Do her additions help to humanize the character of Venture Smith, and if so, how so?
  1. Locate some of the most dramatic moments in the narrative and the most lyrically expressive passages in the poems.In what cases do they coincide and in what cases do they appear in different locations in the texts?
  1. Consider Dancy’s explanation of her method of creating the artwork (“A Note on the Art” 71). She claims that she highlighted particular lines and phrases that spoke to her and then let her “visceral response” to these passages lead to her creative choices. Point to some pages where you think the artwork is particularly evocative of the poem’s or the narrative’s content or language.
  2. What kind of character of Venture Smith emerges in this book—how would you describe him?How does Smith gain his strong character, given that he had little parental guidance, having been violently parted from his parents at age 6?How do you interpret Nelson’s assertion that for Smith, “everything—including himself and his wife and children—had a price” (“Preface to the Poems”)? How would you put his industriousness together with his trustworthiness?
  3. What incidents in Venture’s life could be attributed to luck (good and bad) and what incidents to his physical strength or his own initiative? Consider, for example, the case of his master’s son, James Mumford, who attacks him for not obeying his orders (which would have meant disobeying his master’s orders; 33-39).
  4. What kind of brutality does Smith suffer and/or witness during his slavery? What is his response to the brutality? To what extent is his crushed by it, and to what extent strengthened by it, and why?
  1. Many slave narratives portray the dehumanization of the institution of slavery on both master and slave. Does Smith’s account include some study of how slave-holders are transformed by their ownership of human beings? Consider also Smith’s treatment of his own slaves in the later part of the book. Does Smith treat his slaves better than he has been treated?
  1. How do you explain Smith’s decision to return to his master when his escaped slave partner Heddy steals from him and his friends?
  1. Nelson’s poem “Meg” is subtitled “after Léopold Senghor.” Senghor (b. 1905) was the first president of Senegal—a politician, writer, and poet, and one of the creators of the philosophy of Négritude, an assertion of African culture distinct from Western influences. This is the most intimate of Nelson’s poems in this volume, and the one that most clearly calls up the African past. What features of African culture does the speaker call up here? In what sense is Venture’s love for Meg in this poem tied to their African pasts?
  1. In some senses, Smith shares some characteristics with frontier explorers who sought to move on, claiming land as they went. Look at “Sailing to Saybrook” (51) where the poetic speaker considers buying an island and transforming its forests to sellable timber, or planting a “scrap of cloth as a flag, / and claim[ing] a new land, in the name of Meg” (51).Elsewhere he looks around his farm and declares: “I own everything I scan” (61). How does Smith gain and use his “can-do” frontier spirit throughout his life, and how does it help him in certain situations?How do you explain his materialism?
  1. Many slave narratives include testimonies of faith in God, despite or because of life’s difficulties. To what extent does Smith believe in God? Look at the few references in the poems--one reference to “our Almighty protector” (14); when talking of a Pequot village wiped out by the pox, he remarks, “Surely they must have thought God died” (57); once he refers to “God or gods” (61); and in a later poem he asks himself, “Who is this, giving my thanks for being alive?” (67)—and consider what they reveal about Smith’s faith (as Nelson presents it).How would you describe Smith’s religious position?
  1. Consider Venture’s last statement in the poems: “Freedom’s a matter of making history, / of venturing forth toward a time when freedom is free” (69). How do you interpret this statement?To what extent is Venture true to his adopted name? Compare this final comment in the poems to Smith’s final comment in his narrative; after bemoaning his sons’ choices and subsequent deaths, he ends with this comment: “O, that they had walked in the way of their father.But a father’s lips are closed in silence and in grief! Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” (68).