Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave is the first fugitive slave narrative in American history. When it appeared in New York in 1825, it was the longest African American autobiography published up to that time. Because Grimes wrote and published his narrative on his own, withoutdeference to white editors, publishers, or sponsors, his Life has an immediacy, candor, and no-holds-barred realism unparalleled in antebellum slave narratives. The famous fugitives of the 1840s and 1850s, even Douglass, Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, all wrote in accordance with an antislavery scriptthat circumscribed their freedom to speak out about what they had experienced as slaves in the South and as quasi-free men and women in the North. William Grimes, however, wrote before this formulaic script had been composed. Life appeared years before the advent of any organized national American antislavery movement, before David Walker's Appeal (1829), before the first African American newspaper, before William Lloyd Garrison had publicly acknowledged himself an abolitionist, before Frederick Douglass could read theword "abolitionist." Beholden to no one and unschooled in antislavery propaganda, Grimes's Life represents a truly unfiltered and personally authentic account of both southern slavery and the severely compromised "freedom" of the northern states in antebellum America. This edition of Life of William Grimes represents an historic partnership between a prominent scholar of the African American slave narrative and a genealogist who is also direct descendant of Grimes himself. Regina Mason, the great-great-great-granddaughter of William Grimes, combines herextensive historical research into her family and the text of her ancestor with William L. Andrews's scholarship on the origins and development of African American autobiography. The result is an authoritative, copiously annotated text that features pages from an original Grimes family Bible,transcriptions of the 1824 correspondence that set the terms for the author's self-purchase in Connecticut (nine years after his escape from Savannah, Georgia), and many other striking images that invoke the life and times of William Grimes.

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) and To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1986). He is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997) and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2003), and general editor of The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998).
Regina E. Mason, Grimes's great-great-great-granddaughter, has spent fifteen years exploring the life and times of autobiographer William Grimes, his wife, their children, and the communities in which they lived. She enjoys genealogy and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.