Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months, By His Teacher - Softcover

Paul, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674002377 ISBN 13: 9780674002371

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

“The design of this Memoir is, to present the incidents in the life of a little colored boy.” So begins the life story of James Jackson, as set down by his African American teacher, Susan Paul, in 1835, as an example to other children and adults who might learn from the boy’s goodness. This remarkable document―the first African American biography and a work that predates Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by almost thirty years―is a lost treasure from the annals of African American history. With its combination of eyewitness accounts, personal testimony, and excerpts from traditional Sunday school texts, the memoir is an extraordinary social history rooted in both nineteenth-century evangelicalism and the experiences of free African Americans. Susan Paul’s portrayal of James Jackson’s Christian sensibility, his idealism, and his racial awareness emphasizes his humanity and exemplary American character over his racial identity, even as it embeds him in his African American community.

About this title

About the Author

Lois Brown is Assistant Professor of English, Mount Holyoke College.

From the Back Cover

"The design of this Memoir is, to present the incidents in the life of a little colored boy". So begins the life story of James Jackson, as set down by his African American teacher, Susan Paul, in 1835, as an example to other children and adults who might learn from the boy's goodness. This remarkable document -- the first African American biography and a work which predates Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by almost thirty years -- is a lost treasure from the annals of African American history. With its combination of eyewitness accounts, personal testimony, and excerpts from traditional Sunday school texts, the Memoir is an extraordinary social history rooted in both nineteenth-century evangelicalism and the experiences of free African Americans. Susan Paul's portrayal of James Jackson's Christian sensibility, his idealism, and his racial awareness emphasizes his humanity and exemplary American character over his racial identity, even as it embeds him in his African American community.

Reviews

This fascinating little book is a two-for-one: it offers a remarkably instructive, 63-page introductory essay by Brown (English, Mount Holyoke Coll.) and a 66-page biography written in 1835 as a didactic spiritual narrative--a work of evangelical juvenilia--by Paul (1809-1841), then the 26-year-old daughter of a leading black New England family. Paul was a family friend who taught James Jackson (1827-33) in Boston's segregated Primary School Number 6 and in Sunday school at the Belknap Street Church, the first black Baptist church in the North. Paul's extended eulogy unveils a black child's socialization at home, church, and school in the 1830s--a process too rarely glimpsed in any documented detail. Brown's adept annotations combine with her introduction and Paul's text to produce an explication and exposition that command attention from a wide range of scholars and general readers interested in African Americans, women's studies, children's literature, social history, regional history, the antebellum era, and more. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.
-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674002377
• ISBN 13: 9780674002371
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Brown Lois