Bonds of Citizenship. Hoang Gia Phan
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of the episode wherein he passes on the opportunity to escape, Equiano repeats that principle by which he was governed (“honesty is the best policy”), and adds: “Indeed my captain was much afraid of my leaving him and the vessel at that time, as I had so fair an opportunity: but…this fidelity of mine turned out much to my advantage hereafter” (123). Significant here is that Equiano uses the second of those terms listed as a trait of good character, “fidelity,” and once again characterizes it in the terms not of the slave’s religious or moral self but rather in its material “advantage” to him.
As described by Equiano, the value of this “fidelity” arose from how it gained him credibility with his master. After the ship’s mate accuses Equiano of planning to run away, his master, Robert King, tells Equiano that he must therefore sell him. In response to this accusation and to the threat of being sold, Equiano refers to the several prior opportunities he had to escape, and repeats to his master the declaration he had made earlier to the reader of The Interesting Narrative, of his belief that “if ever I were freed, whilst I was used well, it should be by honest means” (Equiano 124). Equiano is not categorically opposed to escape as the means of becoming free for he qualifies this belief in the “honest means” of becoming free with the condition of good treatment (“whilst I was used well”). Likewise, in the beginning of this chapter he tells the reader he had agreed to serve as a sailor because he thought he might “possibly make [his] escape if [he] should be used ill” (115). And immediately after declaring to his master that he had never intended to escape, Equiano tells the reader, “at that instant my mind was big with inventions, and full of schemes to escape” (125). In this dialogue between the slave accused of infidelity and the master as judge of the slave’s credibility, Equiano distinguishes between what the slave says in the face of the master and what the slave is thinking. What this disjunction highlights is the performative aspect of Equiano’s “good character” of fidelity to his master. The slave does not have to actually believe in the idea of “being freed…by honest means,” yet the value of his fidelity—of not attempting escape despite many opportunities—comes from the credible performance of this trait for the master, as well as for readers debating the practicability of abolition of the slave trade, slave emancipation, and the assimilation of the formerly enslaved into the culture of free (because voluntary) labor subjection.
Equiano elaborates this point further through the corroborating testimony of the captain:
I then appealed to the captain, whether ever he saw any sign of my making the least attempt to run away.…[The] captain confirmed every syllable I said, and even more; for he said he had tried different times to see if I would make any attempt of this kind, both at St. Eustatia and in America, and he never found that I made the smallest; . . . and he did really believe, if ever I meant to run away, that, as I could never have had a better opportunity, I would have done it the night the mate and all the people left our vessel at Guadaloupe. (Equiano 125)
The captain corroborates the truth of Equiano’s claims of fidelity not by reference to anything Equiano has said (e.g., the assertion of his belief that whether he would be free depended on God’s will), but rather through reference to Equiano’s performance of such fidelity by remaining with the ship in the absence of an overseer and passing over his many opportunities to escape.
The episode closes with the translation of this fidelity to the master, as a trait of “good character,” into its economic value to the slave seeking freedom:
[My] master immediately [said] that I was a sensible fellow, and he never did intend to use me as a common slave; and that, but for the entreaties of the captain, and his character of me, he would not have let me go from the stores about as I had done; that also, in so doing, he thought by carrying one little thing or other to different places to sell I might make money. That he also intended to encourage me in this, by crediting me with half a puncheon of rum and half a hogshead of sugar at a time; so that, from being careful, I might have money enough, in some time, to purchase my freedom: and, when that was the case, I might depend upon it he would let me have it for forty pounds sterling money, which was only the price he gave for me. (Equiano 126)
If Equiano’s manumission certificate documents how “chattel has transformed itself into freeman through the exchange of forty pounds sterling,” Equiano’s narration of this transformation highlights that the price Equiano later pays to purchase his freedom is a price originally suggested here by his master, and is represented as the reward for the slave’s honesty and fidelity.67
The dialogue was an especially popular form in antislavery literature. In addition to reminding us that Equiano’s Narrative belongs to a wider literary tradition (not an exclusively Anglo-African, African American, or Black Atlantic one), the dialogic form of this key episode emphasizes that conceptions of freedom, and of its contrasting degrees of unfreedom, were produced through the dialectic of master and bondsman, a dialectic whose very imaginative possibility depended upon both the implicit and explicit recognitions of slave humanity, and of the “mixed character” of the slave as both chattel property and moral person. Equiano employs the narrative symmetry of the dialogue form to emphasize the economic value—to the slave and to the master—of slave fidelity as a “good character” trait. This narrative symmetry is marked by the master’s promise, at the dialogue’s close, to let Equiano purchase his freedom “for forty pounds sterling money, which was only the price he gave for me” (Equiano 126). This dialogue between master and slave had opened, we recall, with Robert King learning of Equiano’s possible infidelity—“he heard that I meant to run away” (124)—and consequently telling him, “And therefore…I must sell you again; you cost me a great deal of money, no less than forty pounds sterling; and it will not do to lose so much. You are a valuable fellow…and I can get any day for you one hundred guineas, from many gentlemen in this island” (124). Whereas in this opening exchange of the dialogue, Equiano’s master, fearing the loss of the forty pounds he had paid for Equiano, threatens to sell him to a West Indian slaveholder, in the dialogue’s conclusion, the master, after having been reassured of Equiano’s fidelity, promises to sell to Equiano his manumission for this same price of forty pounds. The trial of Equiano’s “good character” is framed by these dialogic exchanges between master and slave, and the success of Equiano’s performance of fidelity is marked by the change in the master’s address to his slave from threat to promise, from believing forty pounds too great a sum to lose (“it will not do to lose so much”) if the slave were to escape from his bondage, to considering it an equitable price (“only the price he gave for me”), if the slave could earn it while continuing to serve his master faithfully.
While Equiano mentions his “thoughts of being freed” (119) prior to this moment, he highlights in this dialogue that it is his owner Robert King who initiates the material possibility of this transformation from chattel property to free man—in Equiano’s words, to become “my own master” (137)—by “credit[ing] me with a tierce of sugar and another of rum” (126). The visible character trait of fidelity thus becomes of direct financial value to Equiano, marked by this translation of the credibility of Equiano’s claims of fidelity into merchant “credit”—that is, by the conversion of the social capital of good “character” into economic capital.68
The dialogue form also illuminates the ways in which the master’s promise introduces those very terms later inscribed into Equiano’s manumission certificate and his certificates of good character, thus underscoring the widespread recognition, in the interdependent discourses of the master and the slave, of the continuities between the “moral person” of the slave and the free servant. These continuities are represented here through the combined narratives of assimilation and accumulation contained in the master’s address to his slave at the dialogue’s conclusion. Based on both “the captain’s character of [Equiano]” and Equiano’s own successful performance of the good character trait of fidelity, the master recognizes his slave as a “sensible fellow” and decides to “encourage” his industry. The master ties his promise of manumission to the inculcation of the market’s values: “from being careful, I might have money enough, in some time, to purchase my freedom” (Equiano 126). Through the voice of the master, Equiano represents freedom here as something “earned,” both in its direct economic sense—the