Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 119 / Number 4
Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery: The Freedom Narrative of Henry Goings
- Calvin Schermerhorn, pp. 314–49
Partly an ex-slave autobiography and partly a collection of essays, Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery by Henry Goings is a transnational meditation on the struggle for freedom among African-descended people in North America. Published in Ontario in 1869, Rambles is a freedom narrative as well as a slave narrative. Goings narrates his trials as an enslaved man taken from his home in Virginia. Owned by a peripatetic planter, he saw the rise of the cotton South at key moments, and as a domestic servant he witnessed many facets of that process. After his owner died, Goings ran away from slavery in Alabama and embarked on an odyssey in the North. He sought temporary employments along the way and eventually escaped to Canada, from where he sought to rescue his wife from slavery. In addition to a narrative of his life, Goings composed essays during the Civil War and Reconstruction that argued for an end to slavery and for African American civil rights while emphasizing self-reliance. His reflections on the progress of freedom and civil rights are expressions of a writer and observer unconnected to organizational abolitionism.