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William Wells Brown took a rather unconventional first step in The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847-48), the first publication of his long and successful literary career. The text bears many of the marks of 19th-century slave narratives' depictions of slave society: the narration of brutalities to which slaves were subjected, the breaking up of familial bonds, the hypocrisies and cruelties of "Christian" plantation owners and overseers, and the heroic attempts to escape this subjection and degradation, culminating in the successful removal to freedom in the North. However, Brown notably omits from the Narrative any mention of his education in letters, a common element of the slave narrative genre that prominent 20th-century literary critics have touted as chief among the genre's concerns.1 Instead of depicting his literary education, and the links between that education and his desire for and success in flight from slavery, Brown reproduces the compulsory and fugitive travels of his youth and young adulthood.
By foregoing the narration of literary acquisition in his first publication, Brown demonstrates the possibilities for freedom and agency outside of, or by routes other than, literacy. In this essay, I examine the disparate forms of travel and mobility that Brown experiences and reconstructs throughout the Narrative. Much of the narrative content that exists between an early scene in which Brown solicits a young man's reading ability and his description, in the text's final chapter, of himself reading antislavery periodicals revolves around the different possibilities for agency lodged in his various travels-travel on the Mississippi River in the service of his owners, fugitive travel on foot, and autonomous travel across the Great Lakes that he achieves by the narrative's conclusion. Brown's narrative addresses what Mark Simpson refers to as a "crisis of movement under slavery, in which an unlicensed, unpredictable slave mobility actually constitutes material and social violence," and in which "movement as a social resource ... pre-supposes a degree of subjective integrity-a measure of motive force, of selfhood, of will" (8). Just as literacy stood as a liberating disobedience in many narratives, travel is, for Brown and for other narrators of the period, the essential transgression of and emancipation from the laws of bondage.2 In Brown's Narrative, a post-slavery subjectivity emerges from and with...