The Many-Headed Hydra
Page 40
After dinner the master [Jefferson] and I went to see the slaves plant peas. Their bodies dirty brown rather than black, their dirty rags, their miserable hideous half-nakedness, these haggard figures, this secretive anxious air, the hateful timorous looks, altogether seized me with an initial sentiment of terror and sadness that I ought to hide my face from. Their indolence in turning up the ground with the hoe was extreme. The master took a whip to frighten them, and soon ensued a comic scene. Placed in the middle of the gang, he agitated, he grumbled, he menaced, and turned far and wide (on all sides) turning around. Now, as he turned his face, one by one, the blacks changed attitude: those whom he looked at directly worked the best, those whom he half saw worked least, and those he didn’t see at all, ceased working altogether; and if he made an about-face, the hoe was raised to view, but otherwise slept behind his back.41
William Cobbett denounced Volney as an infidel and a cannibal, while Joseph Priestley accused him of Hottentotism. John Adams probably had him in mind when he complained that the United States was becoming a “receptacle of malevolence and turbulence, for the outcasts of the universe.” Jefferson himself believed that Volney was the principal object of the Act Concerning Aliens of 1798, which was designed to promote “purity of national character” and forced the Frenchman to sail back to Europe.42
BLAKE’S AFRICAN ORC
William Blake wrote his prophecy America in 1793. Its preludium was illuminated, like the initial letter of a medieval manuscript, by the image of an outstretched figure—Orc, the symbol of revolution—pinioned spread-eagled to the ground, straining to be free. Blake derived the image from Captain John Gabriel Stedman, a mercenary soldier who had fought four years in Suriname against the maroons—escaped slaves who shared the tropical rain forest with Indians and other state-of-the-art forest dwellers—and lived to tell the tale. Stedman wrote a “narrative” and painted a hundred watercolors that he submitted in 1790 to Joseph Johnson, a publisher, who in turn hired Blake to help engrave the plates.43 From 1791 to 1794 Blake bore down, elbow grease mixing with the burin and copperplate, on these images of an American slave revolt. His poetry of this period—Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Experience, America a Prophecy, The Four Zoas—and his politics (he paraded in a red liberty cap, the symbol of the emancipated slave) were deeply colored by Stedman’s text, pictures, and friendship. One of the plates, entitled The Execution of Breaking on the Rack, provided the basis of his depiction of red Orc.
Orc, by William Blake. William Blake, America, a Prophecy (1793).
The Execution of Breaking on the Rack, c. 1776, by William Blake. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition.
In the summer of 1776, Stedman had followed a crowd to the savannah to watch the execution of three African Americans. One of them, Neptune, had killed an overseer. He was pinioned to a rack on the ground. The executioner, a fellow African, chopped off his left hand, then used an iron rod to break and shatter his bones. Neptune lived. He fell from the rack “and Damn’d them all for a Pack of Barbarous Rascals, at the Same time Removing his right hand by the help of his Teeth, he Rested his Head on Part of the timber and ask’d the by Standers for a Pipe of Tobacco Which was infamously Answered by kicking & Spitting on him”—a final insult that Stedman and some American sailors intervened out of sympathy to stop. Neptune begged for the coup de grace, but it was denied him. He sang a song to take leave of his friends, and a second to tell his deceased relations that he would soon join them. He asked the sentinel on guard “how it came that he a White Man should have no meat.” The soldier answered, “Because I am not so rich.” Neptune responded, “Then I will make you a Present first pick my Hand that was Chopt off Clean to the Bones Sir—Next begin to [eat] myself till you be Glutted & you’ll have both Bread and Meat which best becomes you.” He laughed. When Stedman returned to the site of execution later in the day, he observed Neptune’s skull on the end of a stick, nodding at him. Frightened out of his wits, Stedman recovered only when he saw that a pecking vulture had set the skull in motion.
Reflecting fourteen years later on the experience, Stedman quoted the prophet Daniel in passages that referred to the island slave trade and prophesied deliverance by a prince. Blake conjoined the redeeming warrior of Daniel with the rebellious African American Neptune to create a revolutionary symbol of energy, desire, and freedom: Orc. In contrast to Neptune’s fate, in Blake’s America, a dark virgin brings food and drink to Orc and inspires him to break free. They make love. She exclaims,
I know thee, I have found thee, & I will not let thee go;
Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa.
And with that ecstatic shout, Blake began his praise-song of the American Revolution, in which the meaning of “America” was no more restricted to the thirteen states of the U.S.A. than the meaning of “revolution” was restricted to the mutilating Constitution, which treated each African American as three fifths of a human being. Blake’s America was an African America, and his revolution included the emancipation of the whole person:
Aftermath of the Demarara slave revolt, 1823. Joshua Bryant, Account of an Insurrection of the Negro Slaves in the Colony of Demarara (1824).
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness & in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise & look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open,
And let his wife and children return from the oppressors scourge.
Blake’s vision was further compressed into a single, powerful symbol: the tiger. Stedman had written about the tigers and other wild cats of Suriname, where he and his fellow soldiers had once captured a jaguar in a chicken coop and drowned it. He described the cougar and the “Tiger-Cat Which is Extremely Beautiful . . . a Very Lively Animal With its Eyes emitting flashes of Lightning;—But ferocious, Mischievious, and not Tameable like the rest.” Of the “Red Tiger” he wrote, “the head is small the Body thin the Limbs Long with tremendous whitish Claws The Teeth are Also Very Large, the Eyes prominent, and Sparkling like Stars.” These observations inspired Blake’s “The Tyger,” part of Songs of Experience, published in 1793.44
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
It lived in the forest, ferocious and untamable, a creature of the commons. In the poem’s trochaic rhythm we hear hammer blows or the march of soldiers, or perhaps the blows upon Neptune’s body:
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
Stedman respected the creature, but only with the hunter’s wish to kill it. Blake also wondered about the relation between hunter and hunted, but he widened it to include the larger social forces of oppressor and oppressed.
Stedman’s Narrative concluded with Europe supported by Africa & America, a plate depicting three idealized nude women—white, black, and brown—standing arm in arm upon a green, with mountains in the distance. Stedman called it an emblematical picture “accompanied by an ardent wish that in the friendly manner as they are represented they may henceforth & to all eternity be the prop of each other; and I might have included Asia but this I omitted as having no Connection with the Present Narrative—we all only differ in the Colour but we are Certainly Created by the same hand & after the Same Mould”—lines that echoed Blake’s own belief about the “everlasting gospel” and that helped him to compose his first draft of “The
Tyger,” which asked,
In what clay & in what mould
Were thy eyes of fury roll’d?
Stedman himself had fought against freedom, but he nonetheless brought the revolution of the Americas to Blake in a way that was consistent with what Blake would have learned during the same period from Ottobah Cugoano and other abolitionists. Blake discovered in the revolts of the slaves of the Americas a revolutionary energy, politics, and vision.
Europe supported by Africa & America, by William Blake. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition.
After 1795, Blake would continue to write poetry that drew on American struggles, but he would not publish another line for ten years. In 1797 he wrote Vala, or the Four Zoas, describing child labor at grinding wheels and workers in brick kilns:
Then All the Slaves from every Earth in the wide Universe
Sing a New Song drowning confusion in its happy notes.
The New Song would be sung by an African, wrote Blake. The phrase referred either to Revelation 4, in which the scroll is opened by the harp players and the Lion of Judah, or to Isaiah 42, where justice will shine on every race, “a beacon for the nations, to open eyes that are blind, to bring captives out of prison.” Blake continued, “The good of all the Land is before you, for Mystery is no more.” He meant that ideological manacles were to be cast away.45 Isaiah 42 was the most well-thumbed part of the Hebrew Bible for the Atlantic proletariat; these passages would have been instantly recognizable to the Afro-Baptists of Savannah, the Iroquois followers of Joseph Brant, the worshipers of the Free African Society in Philadelphia, George Liele’s congregation in Kingston, or the “Tom Paine Methodists” of Sheffield. They would have known about jubilee, universalism, and Isaiah’s appeal to “you that sail the sea, and all the sea-creatures, and you that inhabit the coasts and islands.” These people had affected Blake himself, who in 1793 had expressed his hopes of freedom through an African torture victim in a South American colony. Yet ten years later he could ask in the song “Jerusalem,” an unofficial anthem in the English-speaking world,
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
The world had been different ten years earlier, when freedom was not merely English.
“SEIZE THE FIRE”
The years 1790–1792 were a revolutionary moment. Egalitarian, multiethnic conceptions of humanity had not evolved in isolation, but rather through solidarity and connection, within and among social movements and individuals. Blake had certainly crossed paths with Equiano (perhaps their mutual acquaintance Cugoano introduced them). The L.C.S. published a cheap edition of the Ruins, which Hardy carried in his pocket. Blake studied Volney. The friendship of Olaudah Equiano and Thomas and Lydia Hardy proved that Atlantic combinations—African and Scot, Englishwoman and African American man—were powerful and of historic significance. Volney demonstrated the power of laughter and the centrality of Africa, to civilization in general and to the struggle between Privileged Class and People in particular. Blake embodied the anamnesis of seventeenth-century radicalism and insisted that the liberation of the imprisoned and the enslaved was necessary to all freedom struggles. All showed that the early 1790s were an expansive time for redefining what it meant to be a human being. But that time would not last.
When casualties began to mount after the British expeditions against Haiti in 1795–96, panic—and racism—spread through society. This was, as we have seen, the very moment when the biological category of race was being formed and disseminated in Britain and America, and no less the moment of the formation of the political and economic category of class. Organizations such as the L.C.S. would eventually make their peace with the nation, as the working class became national, English. With the rise of pan-Africanism, the people in diaspora became a noble race in exile. The three friends became unthinkable within ethnic and nationalist historiography. Volney disappeared from radical scholarship, except among the pan-Africanists and “Ethiopianists” who kept him in print.46 What began as repression thus evolved into mutually exclusive narratives that have hidden our history.
English sailors and commoners wanted to stay in Bermuda rather than sail on to Virginia, and some, after they got there, deserted to Algonquian villages. Diggers built communes upon the “earthly treasury” on George’s Hill as the light shone in Buckinghamshire. Resistance to slavery extended from Putney Common to the estuarial waters of the river Gambia. Renegades who fought with Bacon against slavery in Virginia escaped to the swampy commons of Roanoke. Pirate rovers of the deep hindered the advance of West African slaving and offered occasional refuge. The outcasts gathered at John Hughson’s tavern in New York for laughter and hospitality. Black preachers searched the Atlantic for a place to build a new Jerusalem. Sheffield cutlers pocketed the “wasters.” Colonel Edward Marcus Despard redistributed land in Belize. Elizabeth Campbell staged a little jubilee in Jamaica. The mutineers escaped the regimen of the Bounty for the beautiful ecology and people of Tahiti. One of them, Peter Heywood, his legs covered with tattoos, composed a poem, “Dream,” in praise of the “beauteous morals,” simplicity, and generosity of the friendships he formed in Tahiti, contrasting them with the expropriation, exploitation, and possessive individualism of his own civilization. He would have gazed at the sky to see the southern constellation of stars known as the Hydra, the ancient sign of navigators, preceding even the agrarian signals of the Nile for the wanderers of the planet. To do this he would have sat not quite on the ground, but upon the root of the breadfruit tree, the nourishing commons of the Pacific. He would have meditated, in that hopeful moment of 1791, like Thomas and Lydia Hardy, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Wolfe Tone, Constantin François Volney, Edward and Catherine Despard, and William Blake—but only Heywood sat in the Pacific. Captain William Bligh used Pacific breadfruit to support Atlantic slavery, and he had Heywood captured and tried for his life. The globalizing powers have a long reach and endless patience. Yet the planetary wanderers do not forget, and they are ever ready from Africa to the Caribbean to Seattle to resist slavery and restore the commons.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
Detail from “A New Map of the World According to Mercators projection, Shewing the Course of Capt Cowleys Voyage Round it.” Captain William Hacke, ed., A Collection of Original Voyages (1699). Named after the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, who designed it in 1569, the projection is formed as if a cylinder of paper were slid over the globe, touching it only at the equator, with area and direction projected accordingly upon the paper. The projection enlarges the sizes of European countries relative to those closer to the equator, such as African or Caribbean nations. This distortion flattered the imperialist imagination of European globalizers while it permitted navigators to plot their bearings with straight lines. The many-headed hydra thrived against such a mapping.
Notes
Introduction
1. Stephen B. Baxter, “William III as Hercules: The Political Implications of Court Culture,” in Lois G. Schwoerer ed., The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
2. Frank H. Sommer, “Emblem and Device: The Origin of the Great Seal of the U.S.,” Art Quarterly 24 (1961): 57–76, esp. 65–67. Also Gaillard Hunt, The History of the Seal of the United States (Washington D. C., 1909), 9.
3. Mauricius quoted in Richard Price, ed., To Slay the Hydra: Dutch Colonial Perspectives on the Saramaka Wars (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma, 1983), 15.
4. Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures: Or, an Exposition of the Scientific
, Moral; and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London, 1835), 367.
5. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702), book 7.
Chapter One
1. William Strachey, A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas (London, 1625), and Silvester Jourdain, A Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise Called the Isle of Devils (London, 1610), both republished in Louis B. Wright, ed., A Voyage to Virginia in 1609 (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1964), 4–14, 105–7; A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (London, 1610), republished in Peter Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776 (1836; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), 3:14, 20.
2. Jourdain, Discovery of the Bermudas, 106.
3. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others (Glasgow: MacLehose and Sons, 1906), 16:111–12. The cahow (or cohow or cohoo), which flourished on Bermuda in the early seventeenth century, is now almost extinct.
4. Jourdain, A Discovery of the Bermudas, 109; Strachey, A True Reportory, 40; John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624), in Edward Arber, ed., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia, and Admiral of New England, 1580–1631 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1910), 2:633, 637.