The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  Still threatening to devour me opens wide,

  To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.

  The abyss through which he fell from heaven has reappeared within him, and is bottomless.17

  The illustration by Gustave Doré cannot literally show Satan in his despair, since it is tied to lines in the poem which describe the ‘Paradise of Fools’, a dark wilderness on the outer edge of Creation which, when Satan visits it in Book III, is still deserted (illus. 56). Later it will be filled by all those who build their hopes on vain, transitory, material things – among whom Milton includes religious ‘enthusiasts’, hermits, pilgrims, monks and friars. Burton had characterized severe and deluded religious belief as ‘religious melancholy’, and Doré’s plate does seem to hold the darkness of self-inflicted terror, pain and mania. The figure in the centre may then not be Satan, but some other misguided leader in Milton’s list (which includes Nimrod, who according to some built Babel, and the philosopher Empedocles). But in his armour, martial pose and royal diadem he is indistinguishable from Satan in the depth and fury of his anguish, and probably is taken by many scanning this magnificent edition to be Satan at the heart of a teeming mental hell where sinners, demons and lunatic believers tumble pell-mell forever in a flying-falling darkness. Often in Doré’s plates Satan is seen more or less in silhouette, as though a shadow fell wherever he flew, however bright the firmament. For Satan could also be called melancholic in the sense in which Pseudo-Aristotle used the term, when he called the destructive and self-destructive heroes of tragedy – Hercules, for example – melancholics.

  56 Gustave Doré, illustration to John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book III, ll. 473–4 (edition of 1882).

  Though melancholy, however, Satan is not literally black – except when, on his arrival in Paradise, he abandons his heroic form in order to advance ‘like a black mist low creeping’, as he seeks, through the ‘thicket dank’, the body of the Serpent. It is his incestuous child Death, by his daughter Sin, who is the ominous jet-black form in Paradise Lost, reviving – one might say – black’s oldest value. Almost invariably, Milton’s illustrators make Death a skeleton, because Death is Bones, but Milton’s words are clear – and apt – for the towering, coal-black shadow-shape of Death:

  . . . The other shape,

  If shape it might be called that shape had none

  Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb

  . . . black it stood as night,

  Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,

  And shook a dreadful dart.18

  Steadily through the poem, the light who was the prince of angels draws towards the blackness that already stands beside hell’s gate his cherished son and shadow-self, and gift to man, black Death.

  THESE THREE FIGURES – Prince Hamlet, the melancholy poet of ‘Il Penseroso’ and Milton’s Satan – were to characterize the new vein of poetic melancholy, the melancholy consciously sought by English poets, which was to run through the following, eighteenth century and on into the Romantic age. Those poets, and their blacks, are for later mention, but in closing the present thumbnail biography of melan choly I shall note that melancholy was to change its hue – or rather, to add another colour to its spectrum. From the mid-eighteenth century the phrase ‘the blue devils’ gained increasing currency, meaning delirium tremens and the hallucinations of alcoholism. The sense of it broadened to feeling ‘blue’ – depressed – and in time it became ‘the blues’, a depressed mood, until that in turn was translated into wonderful, sombre music. But just as sin did not necessarily cease to be red when it became also black, so depression did not cease to be black when it became also blue, and the phrase ‘black depression’ has currency still. Famously, Winston Churchill called depression his ‘black dog’. On the road ahead, then, are the black paintings of Mark Rothko, but I should turn first to the different black of the community which in time, with good reason, made ‘the blues’. I should turn, belatedly, to Africa.

  57 Lucas Cranach workshop, St Maurice, 1529, oil on wood, left wing of altarpiece.

  SEVEN

  Servitude and Négritude

  ALTHOUGH THE SOUTHERN European nations had a long acquaintance with Africa, there had, before the time of Shakespeare, been few representations of Africans in England. But for Shakespeare, and for his time, Africa had become important. Africa was to provide Shakespeare with the hero, and then the heroine, of two of his best-known plays; and in his work we see the picture of Africa that prevailed before the English entered the slave trade – which in time they came to dominate.

  In general Shakespeare was alert to blackness. In his tragedies there is the sense – much more so than in ancient tragedy – of an impenetrable darkness which surrounds us closely. ‘Come, thick Night,’ cries Lady Macbeth, ‘And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell.’ ‘Arise black vengeance from thy hollow cell’, says Othello. There is the extraordinary line, said by Edgar, in King Lear, ‘Croak not, black angel; I have no food for thee.’ In All’s Well That Ends Well there is a reference to ‘the black gown of a big heart’ (the image is of a cassock).

  Shakespeare had moreover a marked interest in people – not Africans at all – who could be called black. In his early comedy Love’s Labours Lost, Biron is teased about the looks of the girl he likes, Rosaline, ‘By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.’ He replies, ‘Is ebony like her? O wood divine! . . . No face is fair that is not full so black.’ Another friend ribs him, ‘To look like her are chimney sweepers black.’ Rosaline is however far from dark-skinned, since Biron also calls her ‘a whitely wanton’: but her hair, her eyebrows and her eyes are so black that he can see nothing else. Simultaneously he castigates, and celebrates, his helplessness before black beauty:

  And among three to love the worst of all,

  A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,

  With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes.

  What is most notable is the divided feeling Biron has about Rosaline’s black eyes, as if their charm were so powerful that only explosive words would do. For pitch-balls were incendiary weapons. They were catapulted blazing into enemy strongholds, to incapacitate troops and ignite ammunition stores.1

  With the same violence of divided feeling the poet, in Shakespeare’s sonnets, writes of his beloved:

  For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

  Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

  He is referring at once to her sexual conduct and to her colouring. For Shakespeare does not call his ‘dark lady’ dark, he calls her black. In sonnet 131 he says:

  . . . thinking on thy face . . .

  Thy black is fairest in my judgement’s place.

  And the following sonnet ends,

  Then will I swear beauty herself is black,

  And all they foul that thy complexion lack.

  Unlike Rosaline, the Lady is dark-skinned – ‘If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun.’ Her hair is black – ‘If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head’ – as are her eyes (‘my mistress’ eyes are raven black’).2

  We do not know if the Lady is of mixed race. What is clear is that both the sonnet-poet, and Biron in Love’s Labours Lost, speak of their obsessive love with excited self-reproach, as though to love ‘black’ women were perverse and dangerous. Their own desire is suspect to them, though also irresistible, as if it drew them towards a forbidden zone, like the sheer cliff in Hamlet whose precipitous drop incites one to fall. These elements are again present when Shakespeare imagines his supreme, and North African, ‘dark lady’ in Antony and Cleopatra. In the opening lines of the play, Cleopatra is called ‘tawny’, and she herself says of her skin colour:

  . . . Think on me,

  That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black

  That is, her skin is not merely burned black by the sun, but is bruise-black from the passionate lust of the sun-god (Phoebus). Like the Lady, she is irresistibly desirable and sexually promiscuous. She is called a ‘strum
pet’, a ‘triple-turned whore’, the ex-mistress of Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompey who in ‘hotter hours’ had other lovers ‘luxuriously [lecherously] picked out’. When he accuses her, Antony is perhaps unfair, since she does not cheat on him in the course of the play, and it is he who, when one wife dies (in Act I, Scene 3), immediately marries another one (in Act II, Scene 2). But dangerous Cleopatra is, destroying Antony absolutely, and herself in the process: her antics on battlefields make him lose his war with Caesar, and her pretence that she has died from grief causes him to kill himself. At the play’s end she is many things: tender and grieving, mercenary, playful and courageous. She dies ‘a lass unparallelled’, pretending that the cobra whose bite will kill her is ‘my baby at my breast’.3

  One might say that Cleopatra dramatizes those particular prejudices that Shakespeare (and his time) had about women: but she also dramatizes the derogatory prejudices that Shakespeare (and his time) had about Africans. Again we might say Cleopatra was hardly ‘African’, since she was Greek and at most north Egyptian. But Shakespeare has little to say of her Greekness, and when she describes herself as black, she sounds like one of those ancient black pharaohs whom Martin Bernal imagines in Black Athena.

  Shakespeare’s sense of geography has been called loose, and if we turn to his other play about a North African, we find that Othello, a ‘Moor’, is imagined as a black African man. Actually, in Shakespeare’s time, the word ‘moor’, like ‘blackamore’, was applied broadly to Africans; it derives, via the Roman province of Mauretania, from the Greek mauros, meaning black (and mavros means black still in modern Greek). Othello is called a ‘thick-lips’ and ‘an old black ram’ (perhaps with an implication of tightly curled hair), though he is also thought of as a handsome man. The love between him and Desdemona is, like that between Antony and Cleopatra, clearly based on mutual strong desire and admiration.4

  If we put Cleopatra beside Othello, we can see the larger side of Shakespeare’s idea of the African. They are both fit heroes for tragedy because they have a largeness, a grandeur of heart as well as libido; they have a natural authority, even a magnificence, and easily speak with a grand public eloquence. It is also true that they have no reflectiveness. They are not introverts at all, as Shakespeare’s European protagonists are. And they can slip, without great difficulty, into violent savagery. Othello says of Desdemona, ‘I’ll chop her into messes’, while Cleopatra tells her tortures as a recipe:

  Thou shalt be whipped with wire and stewed in brine,

  Smarting in ling’ring pickle.5

  In the final account, both are victims of the unscrupulous European brain. Cleopatra is in part destroyed by the ruthless operation of Roman militarism, coldly controlled by the future Augustus Caesar; Othello is destroyed by a clever, manipulative European, who is twisted at the centre, neurotically jealous and eaten with grudges, and virulently colour prejudiced. The play Othello gives a sense of the difficulties of mixed marriages, even as it creates, at the start, a uniquely radiant picture of martial honour and heroism, in a black general, marrying for love a beautiful, good, white woman.

  The narrow and nasty form of colour prejudice is voiced in Shakespeare’s work. When the prince of Morocco fails to win Portia’s hand in The Merchant of Venice, she says, as he leaves, ‘Let all of his complexion choose me so.’ And in the earlier play Titus Andronicus, the ‘Moor’ Aaron, who is again African, is both coal-black and evil in the most conventional way (though sympathetic when he snatches his child from an abusive midwife: ‘Zounds, ye whore! is black so base a hue?’).6

  Shakespeare’s attitude to Africa is mixed because he stands at just that point in history when attitudes were tipping towards greater degradation. For though the skin colour of Africans was widely associated with sin and even devilry, the perception of Africans in the later Middle Ages had not been solely negative. The Christian tradition itself privileged certain individuals. There was not only the Bride, black but comely, of the Song of Songs. From the thirteenth century, in European illuminated manuscripts, the Queen of Sheba was sometimes depicted as coal-black, and in the second half of the fourteenth century the custom had begun, in altarpieces, of letting one of the Three Kings – Balthazar – be an African. He is usually younger than or subordinate to the other, white Kings, and may be the last to reach the manger, but also he may be both handsome and majestic. Also, from the thirteenth century, St Maurice – the Egyptian commander of a Roman legion who was martyred for his Christian faith in 287 CE – began to be represented as African. In Cranach’s painting of 1529 he wears the glittering full armour of the Late Middle Ages, and has something of the dandy in his crimson cap decorated with ostrich feathers (illus. 57). At the same time his sword is a spotless golden cross, while his cloth-of-gold banner shows the wingtips and claw-tips of the eagle silhouette, which in this context will call to mind both the actual Roman Empire in whose army Maurice served, and the later Holy Roman Empire whose soldier-saint he had become.

  In Shakespeare’s lifetime no English colonist owned slaves. An English sea captain, John Hawkins, had attempted to trade slaves in the 1560s, and been beaten off by the Spanish. The first slaves arrived in an English colony in 1619 (three years after Shakespeare’s death), and the first permanent slave-trading English outpost was established on the West African coast in 1631 (at Kormantin in present-day Ghana). But the slave trade itself had existed since the beginning of the sixteenth century, practised by the Portuguese and the Spanish, and some characters in Shakespeare’s plays do voice the racial prejudices which would facilitate slave-trading in Africans. Shakespeare himself, however, and a good part of his public, one would guess, shared in a more moderate outlook which dated back to the ancient world. One piece of evidence for this is the attitude to love between Africans and northerners. Even Aaron in Titus Andronicus is the loved consort of Tamara, queen of the Goths. The loves of Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello and Desdemona, stand in a grand continuity with Solomon’s liaison with the Queen of Sheba, and his love for the Bride in the Song of Songs, and with the marriage of the Roman emperor Septimus Severus to the Syrian or Berber lady Julia Domna – as well as with Cleopatra’s actual amours with Julius Caesar, Pompey and Mark Antony. Such matches were still great, and luminous, but their thrill could be touched by fear, as we see in the intermittent demonizing of the Lady of the sonnets.

  There is a comparable doubleness in ‘The Masque of Blacknesse’, which Shakespeare’s great competitor, Ben Jonson, wrote for performance at court in 1605, ‘because it was her Majesty’s will’. In the masque, Niger (‘in forme and colour of an Aethiope’) welcomes twelve ‘negro’ nymphs, his daughters, saying, ‘in their black, the perfect’st beauty grows . . . their beauties conquer in great beauty’s war’. Niger is joined in his welcome, however, by a white Æthiopia (‘her garments white and silver’), who personifies the moon, said to have been worshipped in Ethiopia. She commends the English sun (and king):

  Whose beams shine day, and night, and are of force

  To blanch an Æthiope.

  The black nymphs, it appears, may grow white after all. On the subject of Africa, Shakespeare, Jonson and their world hover precariously on the edge of a change for the worse.7

  FOR UNDOUBTEDLY THERE is a correlation between the expansion of the slave trade and the increasingly degraded perception of Africans. It is not that the ancient world had no colour prejudice. In Talmudic thought, ‘the curse of Ham’ was blackness, passed on to all Africans through Ham’s black son, Canaan. And in the Bible, in the Book of Numbers, we are told, ‘And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.’ But the element of colour-prejudice was fluctuating, and was not, in the Roman world, identified with slavery. The Romans had black slaves, and in the Satyricon of Petronius the principals consider escaping their troubles by covering themselves with ink, so as to be mistaken for Ethiopian slaves. But slaves in Rome were not necessarily Ethiopian, and mi
ght equally be Slavs, Celts, Germans, Gauls or Britons.8

  As slavery developed in the English colonies, decade by decade through the seventeenth century, the standing of Africans was increasingly debased. In a sense the colonists also had white slaves, in the form of bonded labourers whose bonds could be inherited. But as the number of black slaves grew, and economic dependence on them increased, the conditions under which they survived deteriorated. At an early point the right to carry arms in an emergency was removed, though not from white bonded labour, and ‘negro’ women, unlike bonded white women, were required to do fieldwork. Miscegenation was viewed – and punished – with increasing severity, except in those colonies (like the Carolinas) where it was too frequent, and popular, to oppose. Africans were from the start identified by their colour, mainly using the Spanish word for black, negro (hence also ‘negers’, ‘negars’, ‘negors’), though the English terms ‘moore’ and ‘blackmore’ continued. The colour coding of race-based slavery became more explicit after 1670, when the word ‘negros’ in administrative documents began to be replaced by ‘blacks’, and the words ‘Christians’ and ‘English’ by ‘whites’.9

  It is perhaps not surprising that the characterization of Africans became more derogatory as it became more completely the case that the slaves of the world were black Africans. For the whole process had happened before – centuries earlier – when, in the seventh century, Islam began its career of conquest. Slavery had existed in Arabia before Muhammad, but the vast colonial expansion which he inaugurated meant that many more slaves were drawn from deeper in Africa. Not all Arab slaves were African – Muhammad’s slaves included Persians and Greeks – but as Islamic slaves became preponderantly African, so references to Africans became more derogatory. The Arabic word abd, which derived from the verb ‘to serve’, meant first a ‘slave’ regardless of race, then a slave who was black, and then, in colloquial Arabic especially, anyone whose skin was black.