Valerie Hawkins Review of The Man Who Stole Himself, original unedited version
I reviewed the 2016 University of Chicago Press book, The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan, by Gisli Palsson, for Booklist magazine back in 2016.
Because I never met a run-on sentence I didn’t like, my original review submitted to Booklist, shown below, was just confusing enough that the edited version that appeared in print in the magazine — and on the Booklist magazine website, and therefore on the Amazon.com website, and most visibly as a featured review in library catalogs the entire world over — included a massive error in regards to Jonathan’s life.
When the governor’s widow returned to Denmark, she took Jonathan’s enslaved mother, but not 4-year-old Jonathan. Jonathan was sent for a few years later, arriving in Denmark at age seven or so.
The edited version of my Booklist review that appears absolutely everywhere says Jonathan first arrived in Denmark as a young man — which completely derails the entire story of his existence, confounding his historical importance as an enslaved man who fought for his freedom in a court of law on European soil, and how and why he came to spend the bulk of his adult life as the first black man in Iceland.
It is a unique, important and even famous story in some European quarters, and it bothered me that my review got it so wrong.
So I’m hoping that by showing my absolute original review here, you’ll see why the error happened. And how much I greatly regret it. Because Palsson wrote a book that explained everything very clearly and that didn’t tiptoe around the fact that enslaved individuals can have complicated paternal histories, including, like Hans Jonathan with his distinctive appearance of strong African and European features, a paternity record of possibilities only, as his European father was never officially named — which doesn’t necessarily mean that his European father was actually unknown to him, it just wasn’t disclosed to the wider public.
(See what I mean about the sentences??)
So my original review…
The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan. Palsson, Gisli (author). October 2016. University of Chicago Press, cloth, $25 978–0–226–31328–3.
Revised and updated — and translated — from the original Icelandic edition, Palsson’s anthropologist approach to the story of Hans Jonathan in The Man Who Stole Himself arrives unapologetically with all of the questions — of paternity; of the 1802 case law that ruled a black body as property despite slavery’s illegality on European soil and thus that body’s free will as theft; of the escaped enslaved fugitive’s resurfacing in Iceland as a productive member of society with generations of descendants all over the globe — prompted by this extraordinary figure of the Danish slave trade. Born in St. Croix to an enslaved West African woman belonging to the sugar plantation of the governor, the move of first his mother and then a few years later himself to Denmark, for closer proximity to her — and possibly to the family of any one of the European white men suspected to be his father — set in motion a most different destiny for this enslaved mulatto boy of the Caribbean; his own.
