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Olaudah EquianoA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Equiano reiterates that there are so many instances of cruelty toward slaves that it would overwhelm his readers with both disgust and boredom if he included them all. He promises to recount only the cruelties he has experienced from this point on in the narrative and to share notable experiences and sights. He recounts, for example, visiting tourist site Brimstone Hill, a spot about which his readers are likely to be curious.
With the permission of Mr. King, Equiano began buying goods at a low price and selling them for more; he almost tripled his money at one point, so much so that he began to think that maybe he might buy his freedom one day. He constantly thought about gaining his freedom but decided (despite many opportunities to escape) that he would deal honestly with his master and wait for God’s intervention to set him free or leave him in slavery. The trust he earned from his owner and the captain to which his owner hired him out allowed Equiano to travel through the West Indies and back and forth between Georgia and South Carolina, usually working in the transport and sale of slaves.
He encountered many challenges because he was enslaved, despite his acceptance of his fate. He witnessed a free man enslaved by an unscrupulous slaver. He narrowly escaped being sold away from Mr. King after a mate on the ship where he worked falsely claimed Equiano planned to run away during a trip to Philadelphia, a place Equiano had always wanted to visit. Because of his good character and the discovery of the mate’s plot against him, Mr. King relented. The two came to a formal agreement that Equiano would be allowed to buy himself out of slavery, and Mr. King even advanced him some goods to help in his labors.
As he traveled and sold goods, Equiano encountered many trials. He fell sick with a fever due to overworking during a trip to Georgia, and he nearly died after George Perkins, a cruel slaver in Savannah, Georgia, had him severely beaten for socializing in Perkins’s yard. As usual, there was no legal recourse for Equiano because the testimony of enslaved people could not be used against white people. The captain of the ship brought Equiano on board ship and personally nursed him back to health. Equiano takes his survival of these events to be evidence of God’s providence.
Equiano continued his life of sailing and trading. He saw wonders during his travels, including the energetic preaching of George Whitfield, a minister famed for inspiring a religious revival in the United States, and exotic animals like whales and alligators. Due to his sharp investments and trading, Equiano eventually earned the price of his freedom. When he attempted to redeem himself, his owner at first tried to back out of his agreement to allow Equiano to buy his freedom. Equiano’s captain shamed the owner into sticking to his word, and Equiano describes the extraordinary happiness he felt as he went to secure his manumission papers from the local clerk. He includes the text of his manumission papers so the reader can see the peculiar and mundane bureaucracy of slavery.
Equiano seemed transformed both to himself and those around him. Women who formerly ignored him now paid him attention, and the new suit he bought in expectation of being free made him stand out. Some things remained the same, however. Equiano wanted to go to London, but his former owner and the captain insisted his labor was too valuable to give up. Out of a sense of obligation, Equiano sailed with the captain, intent on earning more money for a future voyage.
As a formerly enslaved person, he discovered that he was still vulnerable to fraud, abuse, and even losing his freedom again. When he beat an enslaved man for attacking him, Equiano was forced to hide from Mr. Read, the man’s owner, who applied to the constable to have Equiano flogged for damaging his “property.” Although Equiano was initially prepared to stand his ground rather than to be beaten like a slave, the captain and his friends convinced him to be discreet instead. The captain convinced Mr. Read to give up on punishing Equiano and hand over the warrant for Equiano’s arrest.
In 1776, Equiano proved his worth as a seaman when he steered the ship to safety after the captain died and the first mate was too ill to take charge. Equiano’s bravery led others to call him by yet another name, the “sable captain” (138).
Despite his desire to go back to England, Equiano once again set sail for Georgia to please Mr. King. On this voyage, Equiano was frustrated with the constant pumping required to keep water out of the ship, so much so that he cursed the ship. He had a prophetic dream in which the ship sank and the crew relied upon him to save them. The ship did sink. It ran aground due to the carelessness of his new captain. Equiano suspected the wreck was God’s punishment for swearing.
Equiano and his Black crewmates worked to save their white crewmates, many of whom spent their time drinking instead of working. The Black crew was able to get their shipmates to a very small island in the Bahamas. Ever on the lookout for wonders, Equiano observed that the island was populated with flamingoes that looked like men from a distance. Equiano, the captain, and a few others took the boat to secure help from New Providence, the main island of the Bahamas. After more wrecks and mischances, they managed to rescue every man. Equiano returned to Georgia.
Equiano found Savannah, Georgia, as dangerous to a formerly enslaved person as it was to an enslaved one. Two white men incarcerated him one night as he socialized with an enslaved acquaintance, and two more white men attempted to pass Equiano off as a long-lost slave they recaptured. Equiano escaped the first predicament by securing help from a respected white acquaintance and the second only because the men lost interest when Equiano threatened them with a stick and called them on their scam. He decided that he would travel to say goodbye to his old master and return to England.
In these chapters, Equiano presents the gaining of freedom as an important part of the arc of the slave narrative. Though he is ecstatic to be free, Equiano also carefully describes how being a formerly enslaved person leaves him vulnerable to extraordinary abuse.
Like many autobiographical and biographical forms, the slave narrative generally has three acts: early life, the events that make a life remarkable, and a period afterward. In The Interesting Narrative, we watch Equiano struggle with his status as an enslaved man, go to great lengths to achieve that freedom, and finally, reach it. The language Equiano uses to describe his manumission is laden with references to God and heaven, language that should signal to his readers that this man’s freedom is a part of a world ordered by God. Using this religious language directly counters the widespread idea that enslaved people were subordinated because that was the natural order of things.
In most autobiographies, the achievement of such a change in status would be followed with a happily-ever-after ending in which the narrator enjoyed the fruits of their hard work. However, Equiano describes many instances in which he still faced abuse, some of it life-threatening, because of his race. In fact, especially in his encounters with Mr. Reid and others, he was more exposed to harm because he did not have a master. The difficulties Equiano encounters serve as a somber warning that ending slavery would not be enough to improve the status of formerly enslaved people in Anglo-America and suggests a project of anti-racism in addition to abolition.
Equiano takes great effort to paint himself as an able seaman and traveler throughout the Atlantic. Compared to other enslaved and formerly enslaved people, he had an unusual degree of freedom. Like other free Black people, however, Equiano could not achieve full geographic mobility, economic stability, and legal standing despite being free. He was reliant on the goodwill of white people who knew him. Such a second-class form of citizenship prevailed wherever legal slavery ends, so Equiano’s portrait of his struggles after emancipation are realistic accounts of what freedom looked like in a world in which slavery has generational effects. Over the remaining chapters, Equiano’s life after emancipation focuses on his efforts to stretch as much as possible his ability to be geographically mobile in order to improve his economic prospects and his chances of achieving a life of success on his own terms.