Homework Questions:
Equiano (c. 1745-1797) :
The Interesting Narrative of the Life (1789)
211:

• What is a picaresque adventure?
• What is a religious conversion narrative?

• Why is he "obliged to submit" to the rape of female slaves?
• Why does it appear "as if it were no crime in the whites to rob an innocent African girl of her virtue, but most heinous in a black man only to gratify a passion of nature, where the temptation was offered by one of a different color, though the most abandoned woman of her species" (216)?
• Why would "the state of a free negro" be worse than that of a slave?

• In the introduction to the Schomburg Library edition of this work, editor William Andrews explains the significance of Prince's closing remarks, asserting that her declaration "constitutes the first claim in the Afro-American autobiographical tradition for the black woman's authority as a spokesperson for all black people, regardless of gender, on the subject of 'what slaves feel' about the morality of slavery" (xxxiv).
• In describing the fact that the text was ghostwritten, Andrews remarks, "The power to write their own stories as they saw fit did not come to female slaves as early as it did to male slaves" (xxxiv).

• The excerpt opens after Prince, aged about 12, has been sold with her two sisters to three different owners, as her "owner's" father, Mr. Williams, needs money for his second marriage after the death of the kindly first Mrs. Williams.  Prince's discussion of this experience includes a description of her mother, who accompanies her children to say good bye to them, bidding them to be obedient (4).

• Explain:  "I was mercifully preserved for better things" (222).
• What is the significance of the earthquake?

• Why isn't Prince allowed to say goodbye to her family?
• What is the difference, according to Prince, between Mr. D— and Capt. I — ?

• Explain Prince's final statement.

• What is the significance of the doubts regarding the place of Equiano's birth?
• Why does Equiano believe the Europeans are "bad spirits" (211)?

• What does he think they are going to do to him? Why?
• Explain:  "The white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner" (212).  How does the treatment of the white man on this page support this belief?

• Explain the astonishment Equiano experiences in response to the white people in England.

• What is the significance of Equiano's discovery in the Bible of the laws and rules of his own country?
• Explain:  "He forced me into the barge, saying, I was going to leave him, but he would take care that I would not" (214).
• Why doesn't Equiano think his master has the right to sell him?

• Explain:  "A negro cannot earn his master the first cost" (215).

Explain:  "I have known many slaves whose masters would not take a thousand pounds current for them" (216).

What is a guinea?  What is a shilling?

What does Equiano mean when he says, "I was frequently to have different cargoes of new negroes in my care for sale" (216)?

What does it mean to be "cut most shockingly" (216)?

• Does the maxim "honesty is the best policy" really apply to the situation Equiano describes? Explain.

• Why does Equiano struggle between "inclination and duty" (219)?
• Why does Equiano still love Captain Pascal?

• What is privateering?