My Father's Night Table

I think it may have been the introduction to the Charles Chestnut reader where Henry Louis Gates Jnr. mentions the core curriculum in his introduction to African American literature class.  One of the texts mentioned, was new to me and yesterday I finished: “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” published in 1789 by the selfsame individual. 

Equiano, aka Gustavus Vasa, was fully cognizant at the age of eleven when neighboring tribes captured, he and his sister in the greater Kingdom of Benin and sold them through a series of trades that led him to Barbados and then on to Virginia.  And as I can easily remember the town and the life I lived until the age of ten when I moved, rather more peacefully to a nearby suburban town, this is distinct from many of the “slave narrative” genre in that Equiano can vividly recall his family life in Benin and the unspeakable tragedy of the Middle Passage. 

And with extraordinary fortitude and a bit of luck, Equiano manages to learn a trade in shipping and through shipping understand the art of trade wherein he eventually manages to save enough money to buy his own freedom.  And then we follow the course of his remarkable life as a freeman, for a time as an overseer, a crew member, as cast away, as he travels between the Caribbean, the North American colonies and his preferred location, back in London.  Even before he pens his narrative, he manages to save a small fortune, marry and buy an estate in the English countryside. 

I left the book out on the table in hopes that my girls might become interested.  I can remember seeing books on my father’s night table that intrigued me that way.  The haunting portrait of Equiano by the Scottish painter Allan Ramsay which hangs in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, Devon on the cover of the Penguin Classic edition is an uncanny invitation, to befriend this exceptional person, this even though a quick look suggests that this portrait may have actually been done of Ignatius Sancho who was another African of distinction in Georgian Britain at that time.  

Sunday 7/05/20