Scholarly treatments of Venture Smith, an African man who gained freedom and went on to own land and slaves in the late eighteenth-century United States, almost exclusively consider the 1798 edition of his narrative, ignoring the later 1835 and 1897 editions. I analyze each published narrative, and argue that Smith, as represented in the narratives and other printed materials, functions as an emblematic bourgeois. His economic actions conducted within Franco Moretti’s “grey area,” when paired with his performance of ascetic labor and virtue, provide the social legitimation necessary for a bourgeois owner class. However, Smith’s status as a black man has important implications. Even though he attains nominal freedom, the construction of the narrative and its representation throughout the nineteenth century suggest a cultural imperative to envision the black body as a source of labor and production—I argue that this legacy shapes how we understand Smith, even now.