Octavia Rogers Albert

Octavia Rogers Albert (December 24, 1853 – August 19, 1889) was an African-American author and biographer. She documented slavery in the United States through a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people in her book The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, which was posthumously published in 1890.

Early life
Albert was born Octavia Victoria Rogers in Oglethorpe, Georgia, where she was enslaved until the abolition of slavery in the United States. She attended Atlanta University, where she studied to be a teacher. Octavia Rogers saw teaching as a form of worship and Christian service. She received her first teaching job in Montezuma, Georgia.

Marriage and family
In 1874, at around 21 years old, she married another teacher and physician, Aristide Elphonso Peter Albert, with whom she had one daughter together, Laura Thalula Albert Smith. In 1875, Octavia converted to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a church under the ministry of Henry McNeal Turner, a Congressman and prominent political activist. After her conversion, she then taught because she saw teaching as a form of worship and as a part of her Christian service like her fellow contemporaries. While teaching in Montezuma, Georgia, she and her husband became strong advocates for education and "American religion" as they used their home to teach reading and writing lessons.

Her husband, Aristide E. P. Albert, became an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1877. Shortly after the couple married, they moved to Houma, Louisiana.

The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves
This book was published in December 1890. Octavia Albert began conducting interviews with men and women in Houma, Louisiana, who were once enslaved. She met Charlotte Brooks for the first time in 1879 and decided to interview her later, along with other formerly enslaved people from Louisiana. These interviews were the raw material for her collection of narratives. Excerpts of this work were published in the Southwestern Christian Advocate.

Although most of the book focuses on the narrative of Charlotte Brooks, Albert also included interviews with formerly enslaved people: John Goodwin, Lorendo Goodwin, Lizzie Beaufort, Colonel Douglass Wilson, and a woman known as Hattie. Their interviews and experiences shaped her book The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves as a mix of slave stories that would expose the inhumanity of slavery and its effects on individuals. Albert's writing goal was to tell the stories of enslaved people, their freedom, and their adjustment into a changing society to "correct and create history." The stories of Charlotte Brooks and the others would eventually be compiled into a book after Octavia's death, published in New York by Hunt and Eaton in 1890. Octavia Rogers Albert died on August 19, 1889, aged 35, before The House of Bondage became widely known.