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However, this genre only flourished in the English-speaking Atlantic world no French “slave narratives”-save the captivity narratives of Frenchmen held as slaves in the Maghreb-were published in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. 6 The plot of liberation is so central to these stories that Paul Lovejoy has recently proposed that the term “slave narrative” be replaced with the phrase “freedom narrative” (Lovejoy, 2011, 91-107). Abolitionists, beginning with Equiano and Cugoano in the eighteenth century, and continuing through the nineteenth century, appropriated the Calvinist-inspired genre of the captivity narrative to tell the story of enslavement and liberation of particular slaves, and circulated to Atlantic audiences hundreds of these stories in thousands of copies. The authors and editors of nineteenth-century slave narratives knew this. That is, a biography of Jefferson, however told, implicitly foregrounds the experiences of this elite individual, as opposed to biographies of Sally or James Hemings, even when discussing the same episodes and using the same evidentiary sources. 6 I propose the Calvinist salvation myth as the fundamental plotline of abolitionist slave narrative (.)ĤThe politics of narration, however, make the telling of a life story different, according to the position of the subject of that study.Rebecca Scott, Jean Hébrard and Martha Jones, are working collectively and individually on several biographical projects concerning generations of families in slavery and freedom, with connections to Saint Domingue and Haiti. Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais’s Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus is a thoughtful and nuanced biographical study of a black woman-who may or may not have been a slave-displayed as an icon of exoticism in England and France in the early nineteenth century. Perhaps the most successful of these is Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello, which recovers the hidden story, over multiple generations, of the family enslaved to Thomas Jefferson, including new insights into the residence of Sally and James Hemings in Paris. 2 Several recent and forthcoming biographical projects narrate the lives of slaves and freed people who, at some point, transited or lived within the French empire.