Since the late 1960s, antebellum slave narratives have experienced a resurgence as tens of the thousands still in existence have been reprinted and scholars have published major works on the sources, art, and the development of narratives; the people who produced them; and their continuing influence on subsequent work. Drawing on slave narratives and other sources, John Blassingame's The Slave Community (1972), for example, drew attention to the complex social interactions developed in antebellum slave culture. By examining the environment that generated the narratives and their development, and providing insights into what the narratives can say about slavery and what they leave out, Frances Smith Foster's Witnessing Slavery (1979) has provided readers with such an analysis in a book. Robert B. Stepto's From Behind the Veil (1979) places slave narratives at the center of African-American written fiction. John Sekora and Darwin Turner's collection of essays, The Art of the Slave Narrative (1982), focused more attention on how narratives achieved their rhetorical effects. In The Slave's Narrative (1985), Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. brought together excerpts from some of the best-known short stories and essays on narratives as history and autobiographical literature. William L. Andrews's ToTell a Free Story (1987) examined narratives as public autobiographies, simultaneously exploring and calling for freedom. Today, hardly a book on American autobiography is published without a chapter on slave narratives. Not only do scholars who write about African-American literature often refer to the slave0026-3079/93/3502-073$1.50/0 7oSv'ni her children, so dear, so young, And, these too, were torn away ÎE. .. in the center of the sheet......ased; unlike stories written by men, women's stories do not emphasize this factor. While male narrators accentuate the role of literacy, female narrators emphasize the importance of relationships. Given the importance of relationships in most women's lives, this is not surprising. Through their narratives, both runaways and former slaves sought to counter the racial stereotypes that bound them even in "free" societies. Black men and women, however, faced different stereotypes. Black men fought the stereotype that they were “boys,” while Black women challenged the idea that they were helpless victims or prostitutes. For a male fugitive, public discourse served to reclaim his place among men; for a woman, her relationships - as daughter, sister, wife, mother and friend - demonstrated her femininity and her shared roles with readers.