5. Community

Community Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (1857)Approaching Austin Steward (1793-1865) begins with a paradox.While he has been set on par with "the key black nationalist leaders of the antebellum period" such as " [Frederick] Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and James McCune Smith" (Hodges xxvii), he has also been called a more marginal, "lesser-known" figure (Pease and Pease, Introduction ix).Historiographical scholarship has dominated this critical reception of Steward.The introduction to the 1969 Addison-Wesley edition (merely reprinted with minor changes in 2004) by Jane Pease and William Pease might serve as an example here.They recognize the narrative's importance as a historical source but fail to identify its literary value.They struggle with the fact that Steward was an "exceptional black man" (xv) who did not, however, correspond to the image of a typical fugitive.Troubled by his autobiography, which lists "[ex-]slave" and "freeman" to describe the same existential condition (liberty), their language represents a conceptual restriction to envision Blacks claiming their identities as freemen-free men-men, when they can still be instrumentalized as ex-slaves-ex slaves-slaves.Graham Russell Hodges's 2002 introduction, while it realizes that freedom for Steward was not merely a disguise, offers little more in in terms of recovering the literary value of Steward's text.He does not resolve the central issue that Steward is part of a nonliterary category, i.e. black political and intellectual leadership, yet chooses a literary expressive mode, the "jeremiad" (xxvii).This chapter attempts to offer a more coherent connection between Steward's narrative as a multifaceted literary text and his cross-border life and activism.More than a chronological narrative of his own life, Austin Steward's narrative represents a mosaic of many different stories.John Ernest, eminent scholar of the slave narrative and African American literature, has described a change in Twenty-Community | 153 identify, in problematic ways at times, the possibilities of alliances with indigenous people for Blacks in a new country.Others still seem to follow goals for the black community that are more complex: in these stories, Steward gives testimony of, becomes a witness to, and works to uphold the memory of black life in slavery and freedom.In this way, these stories reflect diverse experiences on both sides of the border and show the importance of meaningful individuals for the creation and maintenance of a community.The chapters' final section demonstrates how the motif of storytelling can be applied not simply to human individuals but to more abstract entities like Great Britain and Canada West.Steward's numerous border crossings between the United States and Canada West shape the very contradictory impressions of British North America and its suitability for Black fugitives in the pursuit of freedom.While Steward's experiences in the Wilberforce settlement leave him frustrated and prompt his return to his former home in Rochester, NY, his participation in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Conferences on both sides of the border a few years later lets him re-experience Canada West under a different vantage point.The visit as part of a religious convention focuses on prominent Canadian symbols of, particularly, Canadian nationalism and pride, without however referencing Steward's previous Canadian years.This curious gap leaves an unresolved picture of Canada West as the "Promised Land" for black settlers as well as of Steward's own changing alliances.

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