This Very Short Introduction brings together a wide range of narratives of slavery across a broad historical period to understand how Black people—enslaved and not-enslaved—have experienced and imagined slavery. It also investigates how slavery's long reach and afterlife has continued to shape Black life in the twenty-first century. By giving attention to the narratives produced during the last two hundred plus years, this volume examines American chattel slavery as a specific historical period that legally ended in 1865, and yet recognizes its impacts, effects, and significance as extending into the twenty-first century. Slave narratives tie the life of slavery its abolition with its afterlife and the reconfigurations that followed—Black Codes, Jim Crow segregation, and many other forms of disenfranchisement.

Robert J. Patterson examines so-called "traditional" slave narratives alongside writings from non-enslaved Black people in the nineteenth century, the imaginative works of twentieth century fiction, and twenty-first century cinema to create a compelling and informative introduction to the long historical arc of slavery woven into the cultural and political fabric of America.