Historical Silence Theme Analysis

The reader may be surprised to find that, despite its being an otherwise rigorous, nonfictional, and historical account of the experiences of a slave, Celia, A Slave contains a great deal of speculation about the events it depicts. On nearly every page, McLaurin encounters gaps in the historical record and attempts to fill them with educated guesswork. Guesswork is of course important in the study of history, but in this case it may seem exaggerated. Examples of these speculations abound in the book, but to give a few notable ones: McLaurin hypothesizes that Newsom likely raped Celia immediately upon purchasing her. He also suggests that Celia’s defense team broke her out of jail after her sentencing, despite there being no definitive proof of this, only a few scraps of evidence. McLaurin also tries to imagine the private emotional landscapes of the historical characters he is tracking, which are irrevocably lost to history.

To be sure, McLaurin is not a lazy historian. He does not speculate for lack of research. Rather, McLaurin is confronting one of the greatest problems in the telling of American history: the deafening “silence” of slavery. In the antebellum (pre-Civil-War) American South, where slavery was widespread, there was no reason for slave owners to keep anything but the most rudimentary records of their slaves. What we now know of the incalculable human cost of slavery comes from those few slaves who managed to escape, or lived through emancipation. These constitute a tiny percentage of the total victims of slavery, the vast majority of whose stories are forever lost.

Celia presents an interesting case. Because she was tried and executed for murdering her master, a substantial amount of information about her life has been preserved in legal and historical records. However, the information is not enough to paint a full portrait of Celia; notably, there is no account of her life written in her own words, nor, for that matter, is there any information about the first fourteen years of her life. McLaurin thus faces a problem. Celia’s story is of great interest, for one because it opens a window into the lives of people, women especially, who suffered under the institution of slavery, and also because it aligns with some of the larger historical events of the period. At the same time, her story seems almost impossible to tell in full. In a situation such as this, does a historian try anyway, guessing when he can’t know for sure? Or does he simply give up? McLaurin bravely chooses the former option. That McLaurin lacks the details to complete his history of Celia is a testament to the fact that the institution of slavery, while arguably the most painful, ugly, and indelible mark on American history, is also perhaps the most invisible and silent, in that the lives of slaves are fundamentally unknowable. That McLaurin chooses to speculate highlights his conviction that it is of crucial importance to try to know them.