Narrative of Sibell from Narratives of Ashy and Sibell (1799): A Scholarly Introduction

By: Josephine Sloman

The narratives of Ashy and Sibell are first-person oral accounts given by Ashy and Sibell, two African-born enslaved women in Barbados. They were originally transcribed in 1799 for a manuscript produced by John Ford. Little is known about John Ford, save that he was a white man who was likely born in the West Indies and lived there all of his life. Each woman’s narrative provides details of her previous life in her respective African homeland, and how she came to be enslaved in Barbados. Neither comment directly on their current day-to-day lives on the island, perhaps for fear of the consequences of doing so.

In 1998, Jerome S. Handler published their oral histories as part of an article, “Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barbados,” in Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies. The original late eighteenth-century transcription can be found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, but there is no confirmed record of how or when the transcript first arrived. According to the footnotes supplied in Handler’s 1998 article, T. D. Rogers, Deputy Keeper of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian, believes the narratives to be part of a group of texts found in the rooms of the Bodleian during the 1890s.

There is limited scholarship that engages directly with these narratives, but they do have the potential for further scholarship (Handler; John R. Rickford; Nicole N. Aljoe). Handler and John R. Rickford used these narratives in work focused on the Afro-Barbadian dialect, as represented through Ford’s seemingly minimal editorial mediation of the two women’s oral accounts. Additionally, Nicole Aljoe’s analysis addresses “the inherent narrative hybridity and fragmentariness associated with slave narratives” on the same subject (“Caribbean Slave Narratives” 367). These narratives are of potential interest to scholars in a variety of ways, including as evidence for research on the linguistic analysis of the women’s speech, analysis of the content of these narratives (with particular attention to their subversion of their circumstances), and with respect to Sibell’s narrative, one might investigate how she portrays female-male relationships in eighteenth-century Africa.

Works Cited

Aljoe, Nicole N. "Caribbean Slave Narratives." In The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, edited by John Ernest, 362-70. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Handler, Jerome S. "Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barbados." Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 19, no. 1 (1998): 129-40.

Supplementary Bibliography

Aljoe, Nicole N. Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Handler, Jerome S. "Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America." Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 25-56.

Rickford, John R., and Jerome S. Handler. "Textual Evidence on the Nature of Early Barbadian Speech, 1676-1835." Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 9, no. 2 (1994): 221-55.

How to cite this scholarly introduction:

Sloman, Josephine. “The Narratives of Ashy and Sibell (1799): A Scholarly Introduction." The Early Caribbean Digital Archive. Boston: Northeastern University Digital Repository Service. 2015.