Olaudah Equiano 2.1

. . . I thought I could plainly trace the hand of God, without whose permission a sparrow cannot fall. I began to raise my fear from man to him alone.
~     Olaudah Equiano, Norton edition, pg. 64

Equiano's account of his own childhood is marked by fear. His several accounts from Africa include the regular fear of kidnapping, punishment, war, and abandonment (he could not leave his mother, even during her time of separation), and especially his fear of the cemetary and his mother's ancestor rituals. This beginning opens a major thread of the narrative, which is Equiano's spiritual journey from fearful childhood through zealous proscelyte. The frightening things don't stop happening to him after his coming of spiritual age - at several points in the text the reader fears for his enslavement or financial ruin - but the text shows him reacting with faith, prayer, and courage, though surely this change has as much to do with the development of physical stature and confidence in his profession as it does with his spiritual growth. But these are other threads which Equiano does not emphasize at all.

The child in Equiano's story is the remembered child, emphasis on the author, and is pushed through filters of memory and storytelling. We know Equiano enjoys a good story because we don't know if his African childhood is his own, and we're pretty sure seahorses don't whinny. Although he rhetorically creates an image of himself to intentionally react to and respond inside the racial discourse of the late eighteenth century, the infant Equiano is not flattened into a pathetic figure as would be the way in the later sentimental novels and slave narratives, and the first-person perspective keeps the child immediate to the author without giving him the author's adult agency.

The nearest reader-oriented wing that might house Equiano, because so much of his spiritual maturing could be read didactically, would be the classroom wing where the interactions of the adult world are laid out for the edification of the child or pupil (DuBois sufficiently complicated that conflation), but in comparison, the classroom wing seems to maintain some kind of ideal within those rules and interractions (this is the world you must enter, vs. these are the problems we should fix), where Equiano's experiences with American slavery defy that kind of idealism while immitating the styles of the wing's other occupants (Defoe, most clearly).

Also, I love a good sea story!