A Memoir of Enslavement Reveals the Meaning of Freedom
A 1789 book sparked abolitionist sentiment by describing the brutality of the slave trade. But today the story tells us so much more than that.
There is a painting in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in England that tends to make onlookers stop. It is a portrait of a Black man from the late 1700s in England. The sitter looks youthful and bright-eyed. He is dressed in fine clothes: white collared shirt, striking red overcoat. His hair is pulled back like a Founding Father’s. He stares out at the world with curiosity and a hint of judgment.
“Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit” was once presumed to portray Olaudah Equiano, perhaps the greatest, yet least well-known, former slave who rose to glory. Equiano wrote in a 1789 memoir that he was born in what is today Nigeria around 1745; as a young boy, he was snatched from his tribe and sold into slavery. He endured the harrowing ordeals of slave ships to the West Indies and America and enslavement by multiple owners, one of whom renamed him Gustavus Vassa. On his journeys, Equiano saw Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, Halifax, and other ports of the English colonies. He would purchase his freedom in 1766, serve as a navigator on naval expeditions, going so far as the Middle East, and would later settle in London and become a renowned writer and opponent of slavery.
His memoir, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” was an instant success, going through nine editions. To this day, Equiano’s work shimmers as a literary masterpiece — part autobiography, part travelogue — that foreshadowed Frederick Douglass by a generation. Equiano’s book is also thought to be the first recorded personal account of the Middle Passage, the gruesome central route of the transatlantic slave trade. After achieving acclaim as a writer and public speaker, Equiano built his own estate and died wealthy enough in England to leave a will.
In some ways, Equiano’s story is remarkable — the ex-slave who studies the master, liberates himself, masters the English language, and then ascends into the realm of the English intelligentsia. In other ways, Equiano was merely one of many formerly enslaved people who took to quill and parchment or to public advocacy, musical composition, religion, or education to convince the (white) public that slavery was a horrific crime that should be eradicated. His writings were some of the earliest testimonies in the battle between multiracial democracy and an enslaver’s regime.
Equiano’s life story presents a few mysteries. The first is whether Equiano is actually the man in the red suit; scholars are now reasonably sure it is not him. The other is where Equiano was born. Though most historians accept Equiano’s own recounting of his birthplace as Africa, one historian has suggested, citing a baptismal record, that Equiano may have been born in South Carolina. The details of the Middle Passage in his memoir suggest that he experienced these horrors himself, but Equiano was also taken aboard slave ships so many times in his young life that it’s possible some details he gives of his early life were imagined or composites of other people’s stories.
What is certain is that Equiano was enslaved as a young boy and that he spent time in America. His story — from enslavement to riches, from illiteracy to literary genius — may reveal some clues about how America can better understand its past as it works toward a better future.
Astonished By The Cruelty
Among the greatest horrors that humans have visited upon each other — the Holocaust, China’s Great Leap Forward, Stalin’s gulags — is the Middle Passage. The transatlantic slave trade was one of those unmentionably cruel human crimes that exploited the people it had captured. Historians estimate that over 12 million enslaved persons were forcibly transported — and tortured — in this system.
Equiano saw his origins in Essaka, in present-day Nigeria, and describes in his memoir how he made multiple journeys to America as an enslaved person. He writes about going to Barbados, to St. Kitts, through the Caribbean, and on to Virginia and Georgia. He describes how all the bodies of the enslaved were chained together under the decks of the ship, in wretched conditions. “With the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat. . . . I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me.” He accurately defines slavery as war. Many enslaved persons died from heat and disease on the ships; others jumped into the sea, and the enslavers came up with new methods to keep them below decks. As a boy, he believed the whites had used dark magic to snatch him from his land. “Without scruple, relations and friends are separated, most of them never to see each other again.”
He says the slave conditions in the West Indies and the colony of Georgia were the worst. In Savannah one evening, he was so badly beaten by a random white man that his captain had to procure special medical care. Equiano vowed never to return to Georgia. (In contrast, the Quakers of Philadelphia treated him with respect.)
At every step, young Equiano feels his worst fears growing, hopelessness gnawing at him: He is repeatedly astonished by the “cruelty of the whites,” including toward one another. Slavery was so malevolent that as with all truly evil human inventions, it corrupted everyone it touched: the kidnappers, the overseers, the sailors and captains, the pirates and plantation owners, the British and American bankers who provided capital to finance it, and the African tribesmen who captured thousands of people, marched them out to the West African coast, imprisoned them there, and then sold them to white men speaking a foreign tongue. Slavery demanded such trickery and violence. No one was innocent in this inferno; all except for the enslaved were responsible. (Indeed, after Equiano won his freedom, he participated in a project where he would have become an overseer of a Caribbean plantation, though he left this venture and became an outspoken opponent of slavery.)
When Equiano bought his liberty — a decade before the American republic declared its freedom — he moved to London. He became an accomplished free hand on ships, even participating in one of the earliest voyages headed toward the North Pole. A convert to Christianity in his boyhood, Equiano wonders in his memoir how his fellow self-described Christians could descend into such ungodly barbarism. His writings contributed to the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. But Equiano’s brethren in America would have to wait another 60 years, and even then, the struggle for equality would remain unfinished.
A Flame That Couldn’t Be Extinguished
One of the unique features of Anglo-American slavery was the attempted murder of the intellect, the annihilation of hope itself. In most jurisdictions in America, enslaved persons were not allowed to read. They could be flogged or shot for reading, even for speaking “too well.” Literacy was a threat to the enslavers’ regime. This violence to the mind was coupled with the systematic destruction of the Black family, gratuitously multiplying the brutality of an already brutal system. And this may be why in the period after Emancipation, formerly enslaved people hurried to do two things: reunite with their families and educate themselves. They looked to the future — but the forces of reaction and white supremacy had their own plans.
While targeted reparations today would help tackle the residual legacies of slavery, including disparities in education for Black Americans, that would not fill the narrative void that exists. Teaching an accurate history of slavery, perhaps for the first time, is important — and this begins by reading the stories of the enslaved themselves, like Equiano’s memoir. It is crucial that narratives of redemption and true mastery and achievement sit alongside stories of enslavement, so that no one gets the impression that Black history was only one of bondage. To reduce the Black experience in this solemn month to largely one of enslavement or to only examine the “enslaved” part of a person’s identity is also a mistake. This equally takes away from an individual’s humanity.
More stories of heroism amid great peril are needed; they are the accurate rendition of history. Two hundred thousand Black Americans fought in the Civil War to destroy slavery. And the first enslaved person to set foot in America, who was known as Estevanico the Moroccan and arrived in 1528, would travel all across the southwestern United States, the first explorer to do so, seeing more of contemporary America than all of the eventual Founding Fathers. These stories should be told and retold.
Enslaved persons had hopes and accomplishments in their own lives, big and small, some recorded but most unremembered. Equiano became an exceptional literary figure, but he voiced the plight of millions. His story can be elevated in our national consciousness as a shining example of how a man once in chains became an author and emancipator in his own right. He demonstrated extraordinary willpower, a keen brilliance, an insatiable curiosity about the world. Through luck and some good decisions, Equiano bought his freedom and then unleashed his intellect on a more cosmopolitan London that was ready for him. “I had a great curiosity to talk to the books,” young Equiano says. Given even a little breathing room to be free, Equiano made himself into something and then fought for the freedom of others. That part of his story is also important.
And it offers hope for the future. The flame of Equiano’s intellect could never be fully extinguished. And he was not alone. Returning to the portrait in London: It is plausible that the man in the red suit is another genius from that era, Ignatius Sancho, who became a distinguished writer and composer of music. Or he may be an ordinary Black boy in London, possibly a paid laborer for an upper-class family, making his way. We may never know. One part of history was obliterated, but the struggle to write the next chapter goes on. As the man in the red coat looks outward, the struggle for genuine liberty continues — and will only be achieved when everyone is free.
This essay originally appeared in the Boston Globe on February 25, 2024.
© 2024 Omer Aziz
Omer Aziz is a contributing writer to Globe Ideas, the author of “Brown Boy: A Memoir,” recent Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, Host of the Minority Views Podcast, and Publisher of this newsletter. Thanks for reading!