Americana Holiday 2022 - 52 - “The Constant Experience Of ‘Normal Violence’”: Exceedingly Rare First Edition Of Aunt Sally, 1858, One Of The Few Surviving Slave Narratives By A Woman, In Original Cloth 48. WILLIAMS, Sally. Aunt Sally: The Cross the Way of Freedom. A Narrative of the Slave-Life and Purchase of the Mother of Rev. Isaac Williams, of Detroit, Michigan. Cincinnati, 1858. Small octavo (4-1/4 by 6 inches), original brown cloth rebacked with original spine laid down. $9000. First edition of this rare work documenting the “violence and abuse” women and children particularly “suffered at the hands of slaveholders,” published with the nation on the brink of war, with four wood-engraved illustrations, including two of Sally Williams, very elusive in original cloth. Born enslaved in North Carolina, circa 1796, Sally Williams was early put to work and separated from her mother, who was hired out to other plantations. Sally’s Narrative notably speaks, in its opening pages, to yet another loss devastating loss when her own son, Isaac, as a child, saw his mother “torn by brute force from her home” to be imprisoned in a slave pen and sent away on a “slave-train.” Isaac, throughout his enslavement, struggled to find her until, after he achieved freedom and became a minster in Michigan, he received a letter in which his mother’s slaveholder said he would sell her for $400. After tense negotiations Isaac and his mother were finally united, to have Sally’s life recorded in this exceedingly rare first edition. Like similar aspects of Sojourner Truth’s Narrative, Aunt Sally documents the “violence and abuse” bothmother and child “suffered at the hands of slaveholders” (Schermerhorn, 1031). As noted in the preface by Mrs. Brookner, the book’s white facilitator, “this story of Aunt Sally is… strictly true in all its incidents. It has not been embellished… but is given as nearly as possible in the words in which it was related to the author. Aunt Sally is a veritable person, and is now living in Detroit.” With engraved full-page portraits of “Aunt Sally,” “Isaac Williams” and “Aunt Sally and Her Children”; in-text engraved illustration of a whipping. Early leaves mispaginated as issued without loss of text. Blockson 9194. Early gift inscription; owner signature. Text generally fresh with faint occasional soiling, small closed tear to one leaf minimally affecting text, expert restoration to original cloth boards.
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