He makes this point effectively when he proposes a new category or genre of autobiographical writing, the "enslaved narrative," written from within the immediacies of slave experience rather than, as with slave narratives, from the perspective afforded by time, distance, and freedom. While Hager thus suggests the potential value of close reading to historians, he also encourages scholars in my discipline, literary studies, to expand what we typically take to constitute the body of nineteenth-century African American literature. By attending to the letter with such care, Hager approaches something we might otherwise miss in the historical record: Maria Perkins's private life and rich interiority, indexed here by spelling, handwriting, and self-corrections. Moreover, this change in the nature of composition matches a change in the letter's content, which transitions from "an epistolary mode of outreach to her husband and toward a diaristic mode of private reflection" (67). By the letter's end, however, she seems to speed up, misspelling words she's already spelled correctly, running out of room as she comes to the end of a line. He notes, for instance, that Perkins begins the letter fastidiously, editing her own writing in a way that indicates self-conscious composition over a period of time. Where previous editors and writers ignore, apologize for, or rectify the letter's imperfections and idiosyncrasies, Hager applies close reading methods, interpreting them instead "as reflections of Perkins's experience" (63). In the letter, Perkins describes her master's decision to sell her and her children: "I write you a letter to let you know of my distress my master has sold albert to a trader onmonday court day and myself and other child is for sale also. A frequently cited and published letter written by Maria Perkins to her husband provides an ideal case study. He aims "to broaden literary studies (to manuscripts in addition to printed works, marginally literate writers in addition to the well-educated) and inspire new modes of interpreting historical sources" (4-5). Hager's interventions are methodological and recuperative as much as historical and critical. For him, to treat the letters as distinctly authored documents-as vital instances of composition, expression, and literacy-is to transform them from artifacts into narratives and to, in turn, expand the range of modes through which the documents might speak across time.
In his remarkable Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, Christopher Hager advances the latter option. The latter marks the documents as exceptional, fragments of singular lives and singular moments of composition. After celebrating the gift, what do you do? Where do they go? Do you file the letters in existing subject-specific boxes: those labeled "Slave Religious Practices," for instance, or "Slaves in Kentucky"? Or do you sort them by author, cataloged into categories marked off by names previously unknown? The former, of course, highlights the letters as part of a larger collective history, instances gesturing toward experiences repeated across multiple lives. Say you're an archivist, and you've been given a box of letters written, you soon come to realize, by enslaved men and women in the antebellum South.
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