Since the late 1960s, antebellum slave narratives have enjoyed a renaissance as tens of thousands of surviving narratives have been reprinted and that scholars have published major works on the sources, art, and development of these stories; the people who produced them; and their continuing influence on subsequent work. Also drawing on slave narratives, among 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 milieu that gave rise to the narratives and their development, and providing insight into what the narratives can say about slavery as well as what they leave out, Frances Smith Foster's Witnessing Slavery (1979) offered readers a book-length analysis of genre. Robert B. Stepto's From Behind the Veil (1979) places slave narratives at the center of the African American written narrative. John Sekora and Darwin Turner's collection of essays, The Art of the Slave Narrative (1982), focused attention on how narratives achieved their rhetorical effects. In The Slave's Narrative (1985), Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. collected excerpts from some of the best-known stories and essays on narratives such as history and autobiographical literature. William L. Andrews's ToTell a Free Story (1987) examines the stories as public autobiographies, both exploring and demanding freedom. Today, there is hardly a book on American autobiography without a chapter on slave narratives. It is not only scholars who write on African-American literature who often refer to the slave. ÎAnd...... middle of paper ......ased; Unlike stories written by men, women's stories do not emphasize this factor. While the male narrators emphasize the role of literacy, the women emphasize the importance of relationships. Given the importance of relationships in most women's lives, this is hardly surprising. Through their stories, fugitives and ex-slaves, men and women, strove to counter the racial stereotypes that bound them even in “free” societies. However, black men and women face different stereotypes. Black men fought the stereotype that they were “boys,” while black women challenged the idea that they were either helpless victims or whores. For a fugitive, public discourse served to claim his place among men; for a woman, her relationships – as daughter, sister, wife, mother and friend – demonstrated her femininity and shared roles with readers.