A HISTORIAN'S 



The Purvis slave cabin in Greene County is one of the last surviving slave cabins in North Carolina. 



The Book of Nature 



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By David Cecelski Photos courtesy of North Carolina Museum of History 



n 1 895, a popcorn peddler named 

 Allen Parker told the story of his life as a 

 slave on the North Carolina coast. Parker 

 published only a few copies of Recollections 

 of Slavery Times for his friends and family 

 in Worcester, Mass., where he lived after the 

 Civil War. The slim, 97-page book quickly 

 faded into obscurity, unknown even to the 

 leading scholars on American slave narratives. 



Then, two or three years ago, I 

 stumbled upon a copy of this priceless lost 

 memoir at the Illinois State Historical 

 Library in Springfield, 111. How the book 

 ended up in Illinois remains a mystery. But 

 that manuscript turned out to be the only 

 surviving copy of Parker's Recollections in 

 any library or archive in the United States. 

 I do not know if I can put into words 



the excitement, almost the sheer joy, that a 

 historian feels at discovering a document 

 like Parker's Recollections. I find these 

 discoveries just as exhilarating as paddling 

 into a swamp wilderness or exploring a 

 remote barrier island after a big storm. A 

 whole new world opens up before you — 

 you never know what wonders and surprises 

 will be revealed in that uncharted territory. 



For me, this may be especially true of a 

 slave narrative like Parker's Recollections. 

 As I travel along the coast, I rarely find any 

 trace of its slave past. Though African 

 American slaves once made up a majority of 

 the population in many tidewater towns and 

 counties, they are virtually invisible in the 

 historic sites, museums, monuments, and 

 markers that portray coastal life before 



1 865. When Parker decried the fate of his 

 mother, he described that of all slaves who 

 lived and died in coastal North Carolina. In 

 his words, she "now lies buried in an 

 unmarked and neglected grave." 



The scarcity of firsthand accounts of 

 slavery is one important stumbling block to 

 studying slave life. Slaves could not legally 

 be taught to read and write, so they left few 

 written records. To piece together their 

 lives, historians rely almost entirely on 

 accounts left by their masters. The result 

 has been both a planter-centered view of 

 slave life and a fragmented portrait of the 

 antebellum past in general. 



To appreciate the importance of a 

 newly discovered slave narrative like 

 Parker's Recollections, we only have to 



HIGH SEASON 2000 



