In identifying accounts of those who had been born in Africa as 'freedom narratives', I am calling into question the major differences in accounts thus identified here from the narratives composed by or otherwise received from individuals who had been born into slavery, who were thereby distanced from the physical act of enslavement and, instead, exposed to slavery through birth, growing up in perpetual trauma. The Middle Passage reflected the life experiences of those who crossed the Atlantic. Doubts have been unnecessarily raised about Vassa's assertion that he was born in Africa and, therefore, about whether he ever experienced the Middle Passage. If the centrality of the shipboard experience is denied, then we are not really talking about Vassa as a 'founder' of a narrative tradition but rather as a fraud who lied. It is hard to imagine that falsification  
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[^0]:    3 https://www.freedomnarratives.org/  
of a personal story can be seen as a contribution to the slave narrative tradition, as Vincent Carretta (2005) suggests through his characterization of Vassa as a 'self-made man' who was more interested in selling his book, and thereby making money, than in advancing the fight against slavery (see Lovejoy, 2012). Vassa was a politically vocal hero of the Enlightenment, one of the leading proponents of abolition, not an opportunistic, self-serving villain of a crass, materialistic world more representative of twenty-first century academia than the religiously-inspired dedication of fighting the crime of slavery.