Equiano’s TriflesJohn Bugg

ELH, Volume 80, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp. 1045-1066 (Article)

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1045ELH 80 (2013) 1045–1066 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

EqUiano’s TriflEs

by JoHn bUgg

Midway through The Interesting Narrative (1789) olaudah Equiano learns that as a commodity he is worth £40. but as a commodity, Equiano is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtle-ties and theological niceties, a commodity whose grotesque thoughts include the desire to purchase himself. and so he spends four years trading small goods, from glass tumblers to citrus fruits to gin, in order to accrue a manumission fund, though, as ross Pudaloff has pointed out, he does not angrily denounce this exchange (as would frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs).1 but Equiano does subtly register the perversity of the transaction in his description of the processing of his manumission at the Montserrat register office: “When i got to the office and acquainted the register with my errand, he congratulated me on the occasion, and told me he would draw up my manumission for half price, which was a guinea.”2 a “guinea” refers to a gold coin worth just over one pound sterling, so-called because it was minted to mark the establishment of the “Company of royal adventurers Trading to africa,” the outfit granted a monopoly over the british slave trade in 1662.3 in contemporary discussions of the trade, the word “guinea” was used variously to signify the west coast of africa, an african slave, or the coin itself. Marketplace, commodity, money: the exchange nexus collapsed into the slippery term “guinea.” Hence Equiano’s wry comment that, upon entering the world as a free man, he at last receives fair value: purchasing his own freedom, Equiano gets a guinea for a guinea. not unusual in The Interesting Narrative, Equiano’s play on “guinea” is characteristic of his taste for agile rhetorical turns that carry a political charge, an aspect of his style that has yet to receive sustained critical attention.

but what of Equiano’s style? Critical regard for the form of The Interesting Narrative has been overawed by its status as a historical and political document—a direct testimony of a Middle Passage survivor, a story of identity formation through the slave trade and the world of the revolutionary atlantic—and by the published book’s own subten-sion of the long history of the british abolition movement. With an eye to these issues, critics have often treated The Interesting Narrative

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as a transparent discourse written by an author naïve about his own figurative language.4 Vincent Carretta, for instance, has wondered how aware Equiano is of his own rhetoricity. “a question the prince of the Mosquito indians asks in chapter 11,” Carretta writes, “subtly reminds the author (although he does not seem to notice) and his readers just how far Equiano has come in the process of his british acculturation: ‘at last he asked me, “How comes it that all the white men on board, who can read and write, observe the sun, and know all things, yet swear, lie, and get drunk, only excepting yourself?”’ (my emphasis).”5 The emphasis may be Carretta’s but the irony is Equiano’s. gérard genette coined the phrase “external focalization” to describe a mode of narration restricted to what characters do and say with no indication of what they think or feel.6 in genette’s schema, this reticent style assumes that the narrator is not one of the characters being depicted, but in Equiano’s text external focalization is subsumed within a homodiegetic narrative. This is the narrative effect of a historical cause: Equiano was writing for a specific market, during a specific time, in a specific part of the world, in a specifically perilous juridical status. The narrative mode of The Interesting Narrative is historically sensitive and cultur-ally strategic—call it first-person-muzzled. Perhaps under different circumstances Equiano would have paused to explain his complexly layered ironies, but The Interesting Narrative was written to find an audience in britain in the revolutionary summer of 1789.

if a sense of authorial naïveté has hindered considerations of the form of The Interesting Narrative, attention to Equiano’s literary craft has been virtually annulled by the famous birthplace controversy. “gusto, hyperbole, and emotional excess.”7 so Cathy Davidson char-acterizes the critical whirlwind that arose from Carretta’s suggestion that Equiano may have been born in Carolina rather than africa, as though he were not the first ex-slave to document the Middle Passage but the original gatsby, forging a new identity while gazing shipward from american shores. To Davidson’s string of descriptors we could append as many more. it is difficult to think of another writer whose critical heritage has been so contoured by an unproven hypothesis. but what has been missed in the attention given to Carretta’s sugges-tion is the very promise he wished us to see: “[o]ne could argue that the author of The Interesting Narrative invented an african identity rather than reclaimed one. if so, Equiano’s literary achievements have been vastly underestimated.”8 rather than trouble Carretta’s implied arrangement of poiesis and mimesis, we might welcome the invitation to interpretive venture.

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Equiano’s “literary achievements” have been less “underestimated” than understudied. The Interesting Narrative’s documentary relation-ship to the abolition campaign that helped to shape late-Enlightenment britain naturally has occupied a good share of attention. but running alongside (and occasionally within) this criticism is an interpre-tive thread concerned with the constructedness of The Interesting Narrative. in the earliest reviews, attention to form pointed to the text’s apparent rough edges. “Throughout, a kind of contradiction is apparent,” Mary Wollstonecraft remarked, for “many childish stories and puerile remarks, do not agree with some more solid reflections.”9 for another contemporary critic, this antinomy signed ghosting: “[i]t is not improbable that some English writer has assisted him in the compilement, or, at least, the correction of his book.”10 Modern critical attention to the formal effects of The Interesting Narrative has usually turned to genre to assess the text’s modal array of travelogue, mili-tary tale, adventure story, tourist narrative, and, most often, spiritual autobiography. With reference to this last, for instance, adam Potkay offers a “tropological” reading of The Interesting Narrative, arguing that Equiano’s life story follows the “movement of biblical history from the old Testament to the new,” so that he presents his life as “redupli-cating the pattern of salvation history found in the Christian bible.”11

Potkay is not alone in finding a structural logic overarching Equiano’s generic patchwork. Henry louis gates, Jr. has pointed to a pattern of rhetorical and conceptual “chiasmus” in The Interesting Narrative, while Davidson has furthered gates’s work to identify a repeating narrative sequence that she refers to as “the existential rug-pull”:

any time the author enjoys a transcendent seascape, the interesting customs of a new country, a handsome profit on a transaction, or the seeming kindness of a new (white) master, we can be sure that, in the very next scene, he will be cheated, extorted, beaten, “mortified” (one of Equiano’s most frequent and powerful emotions), accused of lying about his free state, and threatened with recapture, violence, or humiliation.12

There is indeed a kind of vanishing horizon in The Interesting Narrative, as each instance of salvation seems merely to prelude another fall, with the “mortified” Equiano having to resuscitate himself after each fatal disappointment.

beyond this attention to structural dynamics, the metaphoricity of The Interesting Narrative first received serious consideration in gates’s discussion of the effects Equiano achieves through the traditional split

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focalization of autobiography. recalling his first encounters with a watch and an oil painting, for instance, Equiano not only describes the wonder experienced by his younger self, but also characterizes these appurtenances as symbolic agents of surveillance: of the watch, he “was quite afraid it would tell the gentleman any thing i might do amiss,” and he was “still more affrighted” by the painting, “which appeared constantly to look at me” (63). as gates points out, the “painting is a surrogate figure of the master’s authority” that tracks Equiano’s every move.13 gates is nicely attuned here to Equiano’s dual representation of childhood fear and the larger technologies of surveillance. but his most influential reading of Equiano’s craft involves another of The Interesting Narrative’s metaphorical passages, what gates has referred to as the “trope of the talking book,” an episode he places at the heart of an intertextual colloquy within the african american literary tradi-tion.14 gates refers to the moment in which the young Equiano is confused because books do not “talk” to him: “i have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and i have been very much concerned when i found it remained silent” (68). as gates and others have pointed out, the mature author’s use of present perfect implies that the adult, literate Equiano continues to find the “text” of Western culture silent.15

This attention to the “talking book” is an important and influential engagement with Equiano’s craft, but we still require a more sustained study of his formal experiments and their agglomerative charge. To the twin critical attention to the structural patterns and tropologics of The Interesting Narrative, i would like to draw notice to one of the text’s structuring tropes: the trifle. Throughout his autobiography, Equiano constructs brief, cryptic episodes in which he generates temporal and spacial stases before describing an ostensibly irrelevant incident in conspicuous detail, and then, without explanation, he leaves us to sort out the metaphorical pulse of the proffered vignette. read together, these textual disruptions form a counterplot that runs through The Interesting Narrative, a subtle cluster of episodes that limn Equiano’s own status in the imperium.

i. rEaDing for THE TriflEs

Equiano offers us a map of this counterplot in his text’s final paragraph. reflecting on his work as an autobiographer, he ends The Interesting Narrative in the deferential register in which he began, but he now faces the challenge of ending rather than beginning. in

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expected ways we cannot ask Equiano to be a good aristotelian: his story’s opening lingers uneasily within a ruptured childhood; its middle is the redacted text he offers; and its end, whether political, profes-sional, or ontological, is yet to come. Equiano died in 1797, while the abolition of the british slave trade was not achieved for another decade. The Interesting Narrative, in terms of its political and autobiographical objectives, is unable to bring its plots to completion. but what Equiano can do at his text’s close is offer clues for how his story, as it stands so far, might be read. in the final paragraph Equiano does just this as he announces that everything he has described, however large or small, has contributed to who he is. The post-hoc fallacy’s importance to narrative logic has been emphasized from aristotle to roland barthes, and seems particularly vital to autobiography (a genre for which, in our post-freudian world, it appears less fallacy than axiom).16 Here is the final paragraph of The Interesting Narrative, in which Equiano draws a reading map:

i am far from the vanity of thinking there is any merit in this narrative; i hope censure will be suspended, when it is considered that it was written by one who was as unwilling as unable to adorn the plainness of truth by the colouring of imagination. My life and fortune have been extremely chequered, and my adventures various. Even those i have related are considerably abridged. if any incident in this little work should appear uninteresting and trifling to most readers, i can only say, as my excuse for mentioning it, that almost every event of my life made an impression on my mind, and influenced my conduct. i early accustomed myself to look at the hand of god in the minutest occurrence, and to learn from it a lesson of morality and religion; and in this light every circumstance i have related was to me of importance. after all, what makes any event important, unless by its observation we become better and wiser, and learn “to do justly, love mercy, and to walk humbly before god!” To those who are possessed of this spirit, there is scarcely any book or incident so trifling that does not afford some profit, while to others the experience of ages seems of no use; and even to pour out to them the treasures of wisdom is throwing the jewels of instruction away. (236)

Equiano begins with a curious sleight of hand. He first claims that the version of his life he has just provided is “considerably abridged,” that an experiential surplus has made elision necessary. We might say that he has too much sjuzet to squeeze into his fabula, but we could say this about anyone’s life. More importantly, in defending his logic of inclusion Equiano imbues every narrated incident with equal vitality: out of the wide range of experiences he might have told us about, these

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are the episodes he has selected to narrate. it is here that Equiano turns to the language of the trifle to reveal how his autobiography works. yes, he’s a superb storyteller who declaims on the battle of louisburg, the north Pole, and so on, but the moments that seem trifling or insignificant also have a meaningful place in his life.

The trifling episodes of The Interesting Narrative depart in both theme and figuration from the conventions of the two modes of contemporary writing with which Equiano is usually associated: the emerging genre of the slave narrative and abolitionist discourse more broadly. Writing about just how formulaic slave narratives sometimes seem, James olney comments that the reader of a dozen such texts “is sure to come away dazed by the mere repetitiveness of it all: seldom will he discover anything new and different but only, always more and more of the same.”17 olney assembles the traits that render slave narratives “so invariant, so repetitive and so much alike”:

[T]ypically [they] include any or all of the following: an engraved portrait or photograph of the subject of the narrative; authenticating testimonials, prefixed or postfixed; poetic epigraphs, snatches of poetry in the text, poems appended; illustrations before, in the middle of, or after the narrative itself; interruptions of the narrative proper by way of declamatory addresses to the reader.18

Equiano’s autobiography can be aligned with many of these elements, for this is a tradition that The Interesting Narrative both drew upon and helped to coalesce. although it comes early in the history olney traces, Equiano’s work clearly is invested in the repetition of established ways of presenting a slave’s life, and beyond this textual pedigree, aspects of The Interesting Narrative draw from the wider body of contem-porary abolitionist writing. We might think of Equiano’s portrayal of an african family torn apart by slave traders, of the torture inflicted at Caribbean plantations, and of “a poor Creole negro” he meets at Montserrat, whose dialect lament recalls the forlorn slaves of William Cowper and ann yearsley (110).

but the trifles break new ground. We see Equiano experimenting with new modes of expression to sketch ideas, complaints, and para-doxes not easily accommodated by conventional abolitionist discourse. The trifles absorb the vexed thoughts and emotions that arise from Equiano’s telling of his life story, including anger, revenge, suspi-cions of the value of freedom, and meditations on the prospect of a black community in britain. These were difficult subjects, ones that contemporary abolitionist discourse, perhaps for obvious, strategic

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reasons, had not fully dwelt upon: anti-slavery writing preferred clear answers and strict binaries, and could little afford to contemplate the knotty questions that an ex-slave in late eighteenth-century london might have troubled over. in the trifles, we see Equiano essaying an ambiguous, searching, metaphorical mode to consider issues on which he was himself not fully decided. The trifles show us Equiano at his most serious and his most thoughtful. They demand our attention.

according to the textual economy Equiano sets up in his final paragraph, a trifle is a narrative jewel, but what exactly is a trifle? The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to the old french trufle, which it aligns with “moquerie” and “tromperie,” essentially a “false or idle tale,” or more simply, a “joke.”19 from this etymology, the OED offers the broader and more familiar definition of trifle as a “matter of little value or importance,” citing the entry in samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (“a thing of no moment or value”) and elaborating, “a trivial, paltry, or insignificant affair.” That the subjective perception of value is at stake here is made clear in the OED’s inclusion of a passage excerpted from Johnson’s Idler: “There is scarcely any man without some favourite trifle which he values above greater attain-ments.” if to the rest of the world a trifle is “a thing of no moment,” we must recognize that the trifle is in the eye of the beholder. The significance of this contingency expands onto a geopolitical register as the OED moves from Johnson to Daniel Defoe, for whom trifles can center imperial exchange: one may “purchase . . . for Trifles . . . not only gold Dust . . . Elephants Teeth, &c. but negroes.”20 in a world in which slavery is legal, one person’s trifle is another person’s human being. and so, too, for Equiano: according to the final paragraph of The Interesting Narrative, trifles have had a constitutive importance in the making of his life.

To gauge the narrative status and thematic significance of Equiano’s trifles, the basic narratological distinction between plot and story is of some use. This binary necessarily functions diegetically for fictional narrative, leaving us to project what “really happened” (and in what order) from the plot we are given. The difference between plot and story is most pronounced in fictional works that foreground narra-tive disjunction, though, as Peter brooks reminds us, it is central to narratological study of even the most conventional texts.21 but what changes in the study of autobiography is the encroachment of the extra-diegetic. This is no less the case with the issue of the narrator’s reliability, which becomes more complex in autobiography because readers are privy to extra-diegetic information that may complicate or

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even refute the narrator’s account. We can think of this as the agon between autobiographer and archive, between self-presentation and archival registration. Turning to the technology of registration (birth certificates, school files, civic and national records), alain Corbin could find many of our lives already scripted in the archive like so many modern-day louis-françois Pinagots. our own accounts of our lives may be read against the story the archive tells about us, leaving auto-biographers shadowed by the brute force of registration. This is the very issue that has energized studies of Equiano in recent years: How are we to understand the dissymmetries between his life as it is written in the archive and his life as it is written in The Interesting Narrative? i do not mean to rehearse a debate that has been thoroughly engaged by Carretta and Davidson, as well as george boulukos, Paul lovejoy, and others. instead, i wish to redirect attention to the potential the archival agon has for helping us to think about Equiano’s narrative shaping.22 in the plot-versus-story dynamic, autobiography presents the interpretive challenge of the extra-diegetic, as sources outside the work both help us piece together what “really happened” and force us to arbitrate between this information and the autobiographer’s elisions. This is not quite the same as narrative reliability, for here the question is one of the autobiographer’s logic of inclusion and exclusion rather than of the veracity of the material that does make the cut.

Consider, in this light, Equiano’s description of the 1780s, when looking back on the decade from its final year, he writes, “my life has been more uniform, and the incidents in it fewer than in any other equal number of years preceding” (220). if the sjuzet sounds uneventful, the fabula holds the most important event in the early british abolition movement, the Zong Massacre. This episode was a defining moment in the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the british Empire more broadly, and Equiano was a major catalyst in making it public. briefly recounted, on 29 november 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong threw overboard 132 ailing slaves en route from sao Tomé, africa to black river, Jamaica, with the intention of claiming insurance funds for the “lost cargo.” The case went through a series of lawsuits, from guildhall to the Court of King’s bench, with the ship’s owners eventu-ally receiving a £4000 insurance settlement for what was referred to in maritime insurance law as the jettison. ian baucom has argued that for eighteenth-century history the Zong Massacre is as significant as the storming of the bastille, for it announces the arrival of a distinctly modern mode of brutal capitalism.23 The event (and subsequent trials) provided the abolition movement with undeniable evidence of the slave

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trade’s horrors: reports and visual recreations effectively formed the gothic obverse of Josiah Wedgwood’s famous cameo. it was Equiano, we must remember, who worked to bring all of this to light when he called on granville sharp to report the case.24 and it was this event’s notoriety that established the climate of sympathetic outrage that welcomed Equiano’s own emergence, in the mid-1780s, as a leader in the abolition campaign. yet this atrocious episode in imperial history and Equiano’s success in bringing it to national attention go without a single mention in The Interesting Narrative. We cannot know why Equiano did not treat the Zong Massacre in his text, but we must face the interpretive pressures that such absences exert on the traditional autobiographical calculus of emphasis and elision. To say this another way, taking the reading map from the final page of The Interesting Narrative, we must weigh those textual clusters Equiano calls trifles not as epiphenomenal bursts but as integral to the life story he wishes to tell.

occupying moments of narrative suspension, Equiano’s trifles tend to be signaled by the conjunction “while”: trifles happen while the main plot idles nearby. Take this early passage, in which Equiano describes his reaction to hearing of the death of his first white friend, richard baker:

While we lay here the Preston came in from the levant. as soon as she arrived, my master told me i should now see my old companion Dick, who was gone in her when she sailed for Turkey. i was much rejoiced at this information, and expected every minute to embrace him; and when the captain came on board of our ship, which he did immediately after, i ran to enquire about my friend; but, with inexpressible sorrow, i learned from the boat’s crew that the dear youth was dead! and that they had brought his chest, and all his other things to my master: these he afterwards gave to me, and i regarded them as a memorial of my friend, whom i loved and grieved for as a brother. While we were at gibraltar i saw a soldier hanging by the heels at one of the moles. i thought this a strange sight, as i had seen a man hanged in london by his neck. at another time i saw the master of a frigate towed to shore on a grating, by several of the men of war’s boats, and discharged [from] the fleet, which i understood was a mark of disgrace for cowardice. on board the same ship a sailor was also hung up at the main-yard-arm. (80)

over and again throughout The Interesting Narrative Equiano offers dense textual clusters without elaboration or commentary. in this

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instance, readers are left to puzzle out the connection between the two paragraphs: How are we to understand the abrupt transition from the report of baker’s death to the bleak survey of maritime justice? The loss of baker was clearly a devastating moment for the young Equiano, and his montage here indicates how his experience of spectacular punishment shaped his understanding of the concept of death. by moving from the news of baker’s death to various descriptions of capital punishment in the atlantic world, Equiano shows how his younger self knew death primarily as a grisly effect of maritime justice, as the specter of baker’s body summons other corpses that had impressed themselves on his young mind. but the textual collation of baker’s death with the catalog of executed sailors also suggests that the young Equiano wondered how his friend had died: Was he, too, executed for bad behavior? is there another way to be dead in this world?

it is through this subtle process of suggestion and implication that what i have called Equiano’s trifling counterplot functions. its substratal nature is an effect of the pressures on Equiano’s own freedom of utterance, pressures that he demonstrates throughout The Interesting Narrative, perhaps most explicitly in his repeated complaint that people of african descent cannot testify in Caribbean courts.25 Equiano’s refrain of enforced silence runs not only through registers of denial, however, but also of active punishment, as in his description of a female slave in Virginia who wears an “iron muzzle” that “locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak” (63), and in his report of the threats he received because of his own fluid speech:

Captain Doran said i talked too much English; and if i did not behave myself well, and be quiet, he had a method on board to make me. i was too well convinced of his power over me to doubt what he said: and my former sufferings in the slave ship presenting themselves to my mind, the recollection of them made me shudder. (94)

With the hopeful, even vivacious spirit in which Equiano tells his franklin-esque story of success through hard work, we might over-look just how often he reminds us that his language is under constant pressure. it is crucial that we read his rhetorical strategies with this shaping force in mind.

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ii. THE blaCK boy TriflE: in WHiCH THE DiasPora EMbraCEs oUr narraTor

one of the most politically suggestive of Equiano’s trifles appears in the fourth chapter of The Interesting Narrative. it involves a doppel-gänger he meets on the isle of Wight in 1760, when he is about fifteen years old. The episode is prefaced by a painful story of misrecognition. after telling some people at gibraltar that he had been violently sepa-rated from his sister by slave traders, Equiano soon finds a sympathetic listener who assures him that his sister is in fact there, at gibraltar. Equiano reports that, even as he registered the improbability of this claim, he rushed to see the girl as his “heart leaped for joy” (79). He soon met “a black young woman, who was so like my sister that at first sight, i really thought it was she; but i was quickly undeceived; and, on talking to her, i found her to be of another nation” (79–80). Equiano’s sister haunts the margins of The Interesting Narrative, and here her near-image rises up in a burst of expectation before giving way to disappointment. The black boy trifle answers this disappoint-ment with a story of tentative suture.

Equiano recalls that, upon the death of george ii, his ship remained moored at Cowes, a town on the northern tip of the isle of Wight. While his ship was docked, Equiano “was much on shore all about this delightful island” (85). The black boy trifle arises from one of these littoral rambles:

While i was here, i met with a trifling incident which surprised me agreeably. i was one day in a field belonging to a gentleman who had a black boy about my own size; this boy having observed me from his master’s house, was transported at the sight of one of his own countrymen, and ran to meet me with the utmost haste. i not knowing what he was about, turned a little out of his way at first, but to no purpose; he soon came close to me, and caught hold of me in his arms as if i had been his brother, though we had never seen each other before. after we had talked together for some time, he took me to his master’s house, where i was treated very kindly. This benevolent boy and i were very happy in frequently seeing each other, till about the month of March 1761, when our ship had orders to fit out again for another expedition. . . . [W]e sailed once more in quest of fame. (85)

This narrative of encounter is layered with drama and irony, as Equiano sets the excitement of the “black boy” against his own startled response. His description of the boy’s reaction—that he was “trans-ported”—evokes the lexicon of the triangular slave trade and situates

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this encounter within the larger story of the formation of the african diaspora in the atlantic world. The young Equiano is at first perplexed by the boy’s actions and portrays himself in a moment of flight. but the boy brooks no diffidence, and Equiano carefully narrates the move-ment from contact zone to community: first visual recognition, then a physical embrace that seems familial, and finally a shared language, though Equiano does not reveal what the two boys talked about. but lest his English readers fear that the isle of Wight is now becoming an isle of black, Equiano soon enough evacuates the trifle in order to rejoin the imperial masterplot.26

The black boy trifle reveals Equiano wondering whether the african diaspora has the potential to create new families to compensate for the relationships torn apart by the slave trade. This question may seem natural enough, but at the time Equiano was writing, conventional abolitionist thought accommodated only two modes of existence for people of african descent within britain: either individual figures laboring for a white community (everything from household servants to boxers), or potential settlers of a new free state in africa. Equiano himself was deeply involved in the latter project, serving, as we learn in the final chapter of The Interesting Narrative, as “Commissary of Provisions and stores for the black Poor to sierra leone” (227).27 initiated by Henry smeathman and managed by the london-based Committee for the relief of the black Poor, the sierra leone project, both abolitionists and their pro-slavery opponents seemed to agree, was the only suitable way to think about the black british population. but what about other forms of community, especially for those who were torn from their homes as children, and who had grown, as Equiano says immediately after his manumission, to have “hearts . . . fixed on london” (138)? given the processes of both deracination and encul-turation that many ex-slaves lived through, might not such a community be possible in britain after all? Equiano writes that the boy “caught hold of me in his arms as if i had been his brother,” as though to wonder if a new kind of family might be formed on british soil. The black boy trifle suggests the possibility, and through Equiano’s prefacing story of his lost sister documents the historical cause, of an african diasporic community in britain. This is not an idea that Equiano could freely and directly discuss in 1789, and given his work for the sierra leone project, it is perhaps an idea about which he was ambivalent. of the boy’s friendly entreaties, Equiano writes that he at first did not know “what he was about, [and] turned a little out of his way,” but what this doppelgänger is “about” is an idea that Equiano wished to consider,

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that a surrogate family community might be established in britain to help heal the violent ruptures of the slave trade.

iii. THE nEsT of TrUnKs TriflE: in WHiCH oUr narraTor’s lEgaCy VanisHEs bEforE His EyEs

if the black boy trifle airs the dream of a black british community, in the nest of trunks trifle Equiano reexamines the possibilities for his free participation in the eighteenth-century atlantic world. The nest of trunks trifle in fact dramatizes the manifold disappointments that Equiano experiences throughout The Interesting Narrative, in which promises are broken, exchange is interrupted, the famed mari-time brotherhood fails to protect him, and so on. This trifle comes halfway through his autobiography, as Equiano reports that he has been promised a legacy of £10 for helping Captain farmer nurse a dying silversmith who was thought to be “very rich” (133). The episode takes place at savannah and, as usual, opens with the conjunction of abeyance: “While we were here, an odd circumstance happened to the captain and me” (132). When Equiano’s would-be benefactor dies, Captain farmer rushes to the man’s room and brings Equiano along. a mise-en-abyme of dashed hopes, the nest of trunks trifle compresses the metonymic logic of the plot and the metaphoric logic of the trifle:

The captain said he would give him a grand burial, in gratitude for the promised treasure; and desired that all the things belonging to the deceased might be brought forth. among others, there was a nest of trunks of which he had kept the keys whilst the man was ill, and when they were produced we opened them with no small eagerness and expectation; and as there were a great number within one another, with much impatience we took them one out of the other. at last, when we came to the smallest, and had opened it, we saw it was full of papers, which we supposed to be notes; at the sight of which our hearts leapt for joy; and that instant the captain, clapping his hands, cried out, “Thank god, here it is.” but when we took up the trunk, and began to examine the supposed treasure and long-looked-for bounty (alas! alas! how uncertain and deceitful are all human affairs!) what had we found? While we thought we were embracing a substance, we grasped an empty nothing. (134)

This “empty nothing” is so disappointing to Equiano because he meant to use the promised legacy of £10 to top off his manumission fund, and in anticipation of celebrating his freedom, he had even purchased “a suit of superfine clothes” (134).

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Equiano’s narrative pauses here to examine something that is undiscoverable no matter how many times one turns the “papers” in one’s hands: no wonder the metanarrative potential of this passage has begun to attract critical attention. for Pudaloff, this moment of disappointment holds importance for Equiano’s gradual assumption of subjectivity, for Equiano learns that it is only through exchange, and not reliance on the kindness of silversmiths, that he will win his freedom.28 We might, however, sense a less victorious possibility lingering within this trifle. Equiano does not receive the money that would have allowed him to buy his freedom, and so he leaves the silver-smith’s room “greatly mortified,” or at least not yet fully alive (135). but how much less mortified, or more free, would Equiano’s life be if the £10 inheritance were there for him to collect? as he later makes clear, the life of an ex-slave is everywhere at risk, so much so that he laments that, once free, the manumitted still “live in constant alarm for their liberty” (122). and so we are left with a harrowing query: What is the difference, to someone in Equiano’s position, between a manumission paper and “an empty nothing”?

This is an unutterable question for Equiano in 1789, both personally and politically. Personally, as The Interesting Narrative makes painfully clear, he spent years overcoming obstacle after obstacle to achieve his manumission, a moment that he recalls as “the happiest day i had ever experienced” (137). How then to ask his readers, and himself, what the point of it all was? in the world of the eighteenth-century atlantic, the idea that his manumission paper might be “an empty nothing” could not be voiced directly. Perhaps even more dangerous was the effect that troubling the value of “freedom” would have had for the larger abolition movement, to which Equiano had dedicated much of his life and for which he was quickly becoming a national leader. Positioned as an open letter to Parliament, The Interesting Narrative is replete with juridical reference and evidentiary documents, not least the actual manumission paper that Equiano reprints in his text. How, then, amidst this legal assortment and with the arrectis auribus of the contemporary abolition movement, to question whether a manumis-sion paper were, after all, an empty nothing? How to express a forlorn realization that personal liberation is not only politically inconsequential but legally deniable? Equiano could not directly sound this thought in The Interesting Narrative, and so he metaphorically stages the journey through a series of disappointments that at last led him to query the value of his desiderata. it is as though Equiano has pulled a tarot card that images the consanguinity of slavery and freedom in 1789 and he is not certain how to tell what he has seen.

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iV. THE TUrKEy TriflE: in WHiCH THE PriCE of rEfUsal is DEMonsTraTED

although the trifles in The Interesting Narrative follow the same structural pattern, they do not all register the same matter or mood: some are protests, some are yearning, some mourning. The trifles do, however, often cluster around scenes of death. The Interesting Narrative is an autobiography, but the thanatographical impulse is always felt, as death seems to face Equiano wherever he goes. in his introduction Equiano claims that he is no “hero,” but throughout the work he is careful to accrue to himself one of the folk hero’s chief characteristics: unkillability (31). Equiano shows himself elect, if not in the eyes of a Christian god, then at least in the world of the revolutionary atlantic. His unkillability is a keynote of the book, and he’s been this way for a while. “some of our snakes,” he recalls of his african childhood, “were poisonous: one of them crossed the road one day when i was standing on it, and passed between my feet, without offering to touch me, to the great surprise of many who saw it” (43). We too witness Equiano’s performances of unkillability, including one that comes in the turkey trifle, an episode that immediately follows his manumission. in advance of a trip from georgia to Montserrat, the now free Equiano is promised “the privilege of carrying two bullocks” of his own for resale in the Caribbean (141). initially thrilled by this allowance, he is crestfallen when the captain abruptly declares that the ship cannot accommodate the animals after all. for a brief moment Equiano had felt hopeful at the apparently benevolent treatment he was to receive after his manumission, but once again he loses a life: “i was a good deal mortified at this usage” (141).29

but in The Interesting Narrative, when Equiano is mortified, it is the agent of mortification whose life is at risk. “as the bullocks were coming on board,” Equiano reports of the ship’s preparations to leave georgia, “one of them ran at the captain, and butted him so furiously in the breast, that he never recovered of the blow” (141). Equiano, meanwhile, had been permitted to carry turkeys on board, though he worried that “they were such tender birds that they were not fit to cross the seas” (142). Turkeys are a risky, second-rate cargo, but Equiano decides to try his hand at the trade. En route from georgia to Montserrat the gorged captain passes away, and all of the bullocks on board grow sick and die. but, Equiano tells us,

the turkeys i had, though on the deck, and exposed to so much wet and bad weather, did well, and i afterwards gained near three hundred per cent. on the sale of them; so that in the event it proved a happy

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circumstance for me that i had not brought the bullocks i intended, for they must have perished with the rest; i could not help looking upon this, otherwise trifling circumstance, as a particular providence of god. (143)

if not every sparrow’s flight, then every turkey’s crossing. amidst this scene of absolute and grotesque carnage, Equiano emerges with both the profit and the promise. although his commentary is restricted to a proclamation of divine agency, his structuring of this episode registers other implications.

There are a few moments in The Interesting Narrative in which Equiano allows anger to surface, such as his apostrophe to the “nominal Christians” who work as slave traders (61), and his turn to Milton to describe the hell of Caribbean plantations (98). but these glimpses of anger are rare and carefully directed at the behavior of slave traders and Caribbean overseers. Despite the physical and psychological violence he suffers, Equiano never expresses a bold desire for revenge. The reasons for this are clear enough: Equiano needs to portray himself as much more than a “nominal” Christian, and, for his readers, he is careful to avoid the suggestions of slave retribution that were a staple of anti-abolition propaganda.30 The turkey trifle, however, allows Equiano to sketch a scene of revenge, one encoded within the larger frame of divine retribution but couched in terms fraught with contemporary relays.

Equiano was mortified at the “usage” he received from the captain, and it is fast upon this sentiment that a bull stabs the captain in the chest. as we know from his efforts to bring the Zong Massacre to light, Equiano was all too aware of the episodes of maritime slaughter that marked the slave trade. The turkey trifle shows us a scene of mass carnage transposed from people to livestock, a change that, if figura-tively stark, was legally apt: one of the shocking findings of the Zong trials was that the slaves thrown overboard were referred to as “prop-erty” no different from livestock. Here is solicitor-general John lee: “What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder. . . . The case is the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.”31 Equiano portrays a death-ship in terms of livestock, but the legal and discursive resonances of this passage refer it to the human massacres that were taking place under the british flag. following the mapping of this allegory, the captain is the victim of a revolt: “[o]ne of them ran at the captain, and butted him so furiously in the breast, that he

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never recovered of the blow” (141). There is a level of rage here that approaches the visceral, as the white captain is violently ripped apart by one of his own “cargo.” The turkey trifle allows Equiano to depict what any victim of the slave trade who learned of the story of the Zong Massacre must have felt: an urgent demand for retribution. Equiano’s own anger is registered in the conspicuous absence of lament for the captain’s brutal death, which he reports matter-of-factly and without a word of condolence. Writing for a predominantly white, british audi-ence, Equiano could never express such anger directly, and instead chose to foreground his capitalist successes, but the turkey trifle reveals a side of him we may not recognize: angry, violent, and unremorseful.

V. THE ExPloDing JoUrnal TriflE: sHall oUr narraTor obliTEraTE an iMPErial DrEaM?

The fiery energies that pulse through the turkey trifle return, with a metanarrative wit, in the exploding journal trifle, in which Equiano is at his most self-reflexive as a writer. This trifle appears in chapter 9, and like the black boy trifle, it follows a brief preface. Describing an atlantic crossing from the grenadas to England, Equiano mentions “a piece of negligence of mine” (171). The ship had just departed, Equiano tells us, when “i went down under the cabin to do some business, and had a lighted candle in my hand, which, in my hurry, without thinking, i held in a barrel of gunpowder” (171). The upshot is anti-climactic: “it remained in the powder until it was near catching fire, when fortunately i observed it, and snatched it out in time and providentially no harm happened; but i was so overcome with terror, that i immediately fainted at the deliverance” (171). one might assume that this experience, including a terror that causes Equiano to lose consciousness, would render him wary of the spaces he chooses “to do some business,” but just two pages later we find him returning to the very same practice, this time aboard Constantine John Phipps’s famous polar voyage of 1772–73. Equiano signed on to this venture at the invitation of Charles irving, “the purifier of waters,” to desalinate sea water, or as Equiano puts it in a flourish, he was “employed in reducing old neptune’s dominions” (172). The goal of Phipps’s voyage, to find a northern passage to asia, would of course have reduced old neptune’s dominions too, by halving the length of the maritime trade route. Equiano describes his attempt to keep a record of this “interesting voyage,” the only time in The Interesting Narrative that he portrays himself as a memoirist:

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i had resolved to keep a journal of this singular and interesting voyage; and i had no other place for this purpose but a little cabin, or the doctor’s store-room, where i slept. This little place was stuffed with all manner of combustibles, particularly with tow and aquafortis, and many other dangerous things. it happened in the evening, as i was writing my journal, that i had occasion to take the candle out of the lanthorn, and a spark unfortunately having touched a single thread of the tow, all the rest caught the flame, and immediately the whole was in a blaze. i saw nothing but present death before me, and expected to be the first to perish in the flames. in a moment the alarm was spread, and many people who were near ran to assist in putting out the fire. all this time i was in the very midst of the flames; my shirt, and the handkerchief on my neck, were burnt, and i was almost smothered with the smoke. However, through god’s mercy, as i was nearly giving up all hopes, some people brought blankets and mattresses, and threw them on the flames, by which means, in a short time, the fire was put out. i was severely reprimanded and menaced by such of the officers who knew it, and strictly charged never more to go there with a light; and, indeed, even my own fears made me give heed to this command for a little time; but at last, not being able to write my journal in any other part of the ship, i was tempted again to venture by stealth with a light in the same cabin, though not without considerable fear and dread on my mind. (173)

in the first instance this episode communicates the danger of Equiano’s writing project for his own safety. “Equiano’s willingness to risk self-immolation,” susan Marren has pointed out, “indicates how urgently he feels the need to construct a self.”32 but Equiano is not the only one endangered by his determination to keep a record of his “interesting voyage.” The exploding journal trifle captures Equiano’s fraught status: an educated ex-slave seemingly assimilated into the imperial dream (here, the great dream of the West, to find a northern passage to the East), he also implies that his literacy is a potential threat to the entire mission, for “the only part of the ship” in which he can engage his “stealth” campaign is the space laden with explosives. The crew once doused the fires with blankets and mattresses, but the exploding scene of writing repeats, though the crew has gone back to using their mattresses for sleep. but while they sleep, Equiano writes.

if the talking book passage showed us Equiano’s realization of a cultural tradition from which he has been excluded, the exploding journal trifle suggests something much more threatening. no lament for alienation, this is a portrayal of writing as an incendiary act, one with the potential to destroy the imperial venture from which it issues. That Equiano’s actions might cause the ship to catch fire evokes

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contemporary narratives of slave revolt, in which fire is the tool of the oppressed and annihilation the aim.33 but Equiano’s metaphor has broader resonances. He is talking not about the inflammation of one ship but about the fact that the only space in which he can write is the one filled with explosives: his writing project must happen at the site of demolition. in the opening chapter of The Interesting Narrative Equiano presented himself as “a private and obscure individual” offering “the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant” (31), but in the exploding journal trifle he sketches a stealth self-portrait of a new kind of hero, a black guy fawkes for the age of empire.

* * * * * *

The Interesting Narrative is usually read as a prototypical slave narrative, one that follows the emerging conventions of the genre. it does of course follow these conventions, but it is important to recognize that it contains other rhetorics as well. in his trifles, Equiano initiates conversations that could not yet be accommodated by contemporary abolitionist discourse and thinks about problems that would preoc-cupy successive generations of writers. i have argued that we need to learn to read The Interesting Narrative in a new way: not just as a triumphalist account of one person’s attainment of freedom from slavery, and not only as an abolitionist tract dedicated to exposing the horrors of the institution, but as a visionary text embedded with reflections on the complexities of integration, intersectionality, and post-abolition existence. a discourse under pressure, The Interesting Narrative thematizes restrictions on speech, but at the same time, through the strategy of the trifle, Equiano does more than merely embody the language of the contemporary abolitionist movement: he creates space for the contemplation of issues for which there was less consensus or even awareness in the transatlantic world in which he lived and wrote.

Fordham University

noTEs1 ross Pudaloff, “no Change Without Purchase: olaudah Equiano and the Economies

of self and Market,” Early American Literature 40 (2005): 519.2 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. and intro.

Vincent Carretta (new york: Penguin, 2003), 136. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.

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3 This group was most commonly referred to as the “royal african Company.” The guinea coin was made from gold mined on the west coast of africa, and was, as the Oxford English Dictionary reports, “intended for use in the guinea trade” (s.v., “guinea”).

4 James olney has even wondered if ex-slave narratives must avoid poiesis in order to warrant the accuracy of their testimony: “if it were creative it would be eo ipso faulty for ‘creative’ would be understood by skeptical readers as a synonym for ‘lying’” (“‘i was born’: slave narratives, Their status as autobiography and as literature,” Callaloo 20 [1994]: 48).

5 Carretta, introduction to The Interesting Narrative, xx. The passage Carretta quotes occurs on page 204 of his edition of The Interesting Narrative.

6 see gérard genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. lewin (ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), 190.

7 Cathy Davidson, “olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40 (2006): 22.

8 Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (athens: Univ. of georgia Press, 2005), xiv.

9 Mary Wollstonecraft, review of The Interesting Narrative, Analytical Review 4 (May 1789): 28.

10 Unsigned review of The Interesting Narrative, Monthly Review 80 (June 1789): 551.11 adam Potkay, “olaudah Equiano and the art of spiritual autobiography,”

Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1994): 680. samantha Manchester Earley suggests that Equiano turns to spiritual autobiography strategically, to move “from the dominant European cultural ‘margins’ to a culturally ‘central’ position and to speak and write against slavery with an authoritative voice” (“Writing from the Center or the Margins? olaudah Equiano’s Writing life reassessed,” African Studies Review 46.3 [2003]: 3). on Equiano and genre, see geraldine Murphy, who reads The Interesting Narrative within the context of contemporary travel writing (“olaudah Equiano: accidental Tourist,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 [1994]: 551–68). see also Wilfred D. samuels, who argues that Equiano engages the tradition of military writing (and francophobia) in order to attract british readers (“Disguised Voice in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African,” Black American Literature Forum 19.2 [1995]: 64–69). readings of the structural patterning of The Interesting Narrative have also attended to its thematic and phrasal relays with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). see, for instance, s. E. ogude, “olaudah Equiano and the Tradition of Defoe,” African American Literature Today 14 (1984): 77–92; and Tanya Caldwell, “‘Talking too much English’: languages of Economy and Politics in Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative,” Early American Literature 34 (1999): 263–82.

12 Henry louis gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (new york: oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 20; Davidson, 22.

13 gates, 155. Equiano would “answer” this painting with his own penetrating gaze in the frontispiece portrait he included in The Interesting Narrative (68). lynn a. Casmier-Paz studies this portrait of Equiano within the larger tradition of the slave narrative in “slave narratives and the rhetoric of author Portraiture,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 91–116.

14 gates, xxv.15 gates, 156. several critics have commented on the talking book episode; see, for

instance, susan M. Marren, “between slavery and freedom: The Transgressive self in olaudah Equiano’s autobiography,” PMLA 108 (1993): 94–105.

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16 roland barthes referred to the post-hoc fallacy as the “mainspring of narrative” (“introduction to the structural analysis of narratives,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. susan sontag [1966; repr. new york: Hill and Wang, 1982], 266).

17 olney, 46.18 olney, 49.19 OED, s.v. “trifle.”20 in this passage Crusoe is explaining to “Merchants and Planters” at st. salvadore

just how easy it is to acquire slaves for transportation from the west coast of africa.21 see Peter brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 3.22 for this debate, see Carretta, “olaudah Equiano or gustavus Vassa? new light

on an Eighteenth-Century question of identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20 (1999): 96–105; Davidson; george E. boulukos, “olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on africa,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 (2007): 241–55; and Paul E. lovejoy, “autobiography and Memory: gustavus Vassa, alias olaudah Equiano, the african,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006): 317–47. i address the issue of Equiano’s birthplace in “The other interesting narrative: olaudah Equiano’s Public book Tour,” PMLA 121 (2006): 1422–42.

23 see ian baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2005). on the Zong Massacre’s significance to british political and cultural history, see James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery (new Haven: yale Univ. Press, 2011). Public outrage was further sparked when it was reported that no murder charges were pressed as a result of the massacre—the Zong trials involved only the issue of maritime insurance.

24 granville sharp recorded Equiano’s visit in his diary on 19 March 1783: “gustavus Vassa, a negro, called on me, with an account of one hundred and thirty negroes being thrown alive into the sea, from on board an English slave ship” (Prince Hoare, The Memoirs of Granville Sharp [london: Henry Colburn, 1820], 236). sharp wrote to both the admiralty office and the Duke of Portland about the Zong, but when neither took action, he turned to the press to publicize the tragedy. for a report on sharp’s involvement in the Zong case, see Jane Webster, “The Zong in the Context of the Eighteenth-Century slave Trade,” Journal of Legal History 28 (2007): 285–98.

25 for more on this complaint, see bugg, 1428.26 gretchen gerzina argues that the growing black population in london at the end

of the eighteenth century “challenged the English sensibilities about race and fairness and xenophobia” (Black London: Life Before Emancipation [new brunswick: rutgers Univ. Press, 1997], 6). Tanya Caldwell offers a differently calibrated reading of what she refers to as Equiano’s wariness of “establishing himself and black africans against britain as a potential ‘new force’” (265).

27 Equiano was eventually dismissed from this position after a controversy over the mismanagement of funds; see stephen braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786–1791 (liverpool: liverpool Univ. Press, 1994). Carretta’s annotations to the Penguin edition of The Interesting Narrative provide an excellent summary of Equiano’s involvement in the sierra leone endeavor; see esp. 297–302.

28 see Pudaloff, 514–15.29 on Equiano’s perilous legal status post-manumission, see Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds,

“The spirit of Trade: olaudah Equiano’s Conversion, legalism, and the Merchant’s life,” African American Review 32 (1998): 635–47.

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30 on eighteenth-century slave revolts in the british Caribbean, see Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982).

31 for sharp’s letters on the Zong case, and Prince Hoare’s summary of the event and its legal aftermath, see The Memoirs of Granville Sharp, 236–49.

32 Marren, 104.33 see Craton, esp. 125–79.