But we have never seen anything like this. Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption (and, yes, that is the word) of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii—and even Alaska—from “the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire . . . [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia,” as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made.
My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried. My father waited 95 years to see this day happen, and when he called as results came in, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can’t quite believe it!
How many of our ancestors have given their lives—how many millions of slaves toiled in the fields in endlessly thankless and mindless labor—before this generation could live to see a black person become president? “How long, Lord?” the spiritual goes; “not long!” is the resounding response. What would Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? What would Dr. King himself say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor leading to spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all those Jim Crow laws and protest marches, those snarling dogs and bone-breaking water hoses, all of those beatings and all of those killings, all of those black collective dreams deferred—that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama’s election? This certainly doesn’t wipe that bloody slate clean. His victory is not redemption for all of this suffering; rather, it is the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream. Would they say that surviving these horrors, hope against hope, was the price we had to pay to become truly free, to live to see—exactly 389 years after the first African slaves landed on these shores—that “great gettin’ up morning” in 2008 when a black man—Barack Hussein Obama—was elected the first African-American president of the United States?
I think they would, resoundingly and with one voice proclaim, “Yes! Yes! And yes, again!” I believe they would tell us that it had been worth the price that we, collectively, have had to pay—the price of President-elect Obama’s ticket.
On that first transformative day, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Frederick Douglass, the greatest black orator in our history before Martin Luther King Jr., said that the day was not a day for speeches and “scarcely a day for prose.” Rather, he noted, “it is a day for poetry and song, a new song.” Over 3,000 people, black and white abolitionists together, waited for the news all day in Tremont Temple, a Baptist church a block from Boston Common. When a messenger burst in, after 11 p.m., and shouted, “It is coming! It is on the wires,” the church went mad; Douglass recalled that “I never saw enthusiasm before. I never saw joy.” And then he spontaneously led the crowd in singing “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow,” John Brown’s favorite hymn:
Blow ye the trumpet, blow!
The gladly solemn sound
Let all the nations know,
To earth’s remotest bound:
The year of jubilee is come!
The year of jubilee is come!
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.
At that moment, an entire race, one that in 1863 in the United States comprised 4.4 million souls, became a unified people, breathing with one heart, speaking with one voice, united in mind and spirit, all their aspirations concentrated into a laser beam of almost blind hope and desperate anticipation.
It is astounding to think that many of us today—myself included—can remember when it was a huge deal for a black man or woman to enter the White House through the front door, and not through the servants’ entrance. Paul Cuffe, the wealthy sea captain, shipping merchant, and the earliest “Back to Africa” black colonist, will forever have the distinction of being the first black person to be invited to the White House for an audience with the president. Cuffe saw President James Madison at the White House on May 2, 1812, at precisely 11 a.m. and asked the president’s intervention in recovering his famous brig Traveller, which had been impounded because officials said he had violated the embargo with Britain. Cuffe, after the Quaker fashion, called Madison “James”; “James,” in turn, got Paul’s brig back for him, probably because Cuffe and Madison both favored the emigration of freed slaves back to Africa. (Three years later, on Dec. 10, 1815, Cuffe used this ship to carry 38 black people from the United States to Sierra Leone.)
From Frederick Douglass, who visited Lincoln three times during his presidency (and every president thereafter until his death in 1895), to Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington, each prominent black visitor to the White House caused people to celebrate another “victory for the race.” Blacks became frequent visitors to Franklin Roosevelt’s White House; FDR even had a “Kitchen Cabinet” through which blacks could communicate the needs of their people. Because of the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson had a slew of black visitors, as well. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, I attended a White House reception with so many black political, academic and community leaders that it occurred to me that there hadn’t been as many black people in the Executive Mansion perhaps since slavery. Everyone laughed at the joke, because they knew, painfully, that it was true.
Visiting the White House is one thing; occupying the White House is quite another. And yet, African-American aspirations to the White House date back generations. The first black man put forward on a ticket as a political party’s nominee for U.S. president was George Edwin Taylor, on the National Liberty Party ticket in 1904. Portions of his campaign document could have been written by Barack Obama:
. . . in the light of the history of the past four years, with a Republican president in the executive chair, and both branches of Congress and a majority of the Supreme Court of the same political faith, we are confronted with the amazing fact that more than one-fifth of the race are actually disfranchised, robbed of all the rights, powers and benefits of true citizenship, we are forced to lay aside our prejudices, indeed, our personal wishes, and consult the higher demands of our manhood, the true interests of the country and our posterity, and act while we yet live, ’ere the time when it shall be too late. No other race of our strength would have quietly submitted to what we have during the past four years without a rebellion, a revolution, or an uprising.
The revolution that Taylor goes on to propose, he says, is one “not by physical force, but by the ballot,” with the ultimate sign of the success being the election of the nation’s first black president.
But given all of the racism to which black people were subjected following Reconstruction and throughout the first half of the 20th century, no one could actually envision a Negro becoming president—“not in our lifetimes,” as our ancestors used to say. When James Earl Jones became America’s first black fictional president in the 1972 film, The Man, I remember thinking, “Imagine that!” His character, Douglass Dilman, the president pro tempore of the Senate, ascends to the presidency after the president and the speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse, and after the vice president declines the office due to advanced age and ill health. A fantasy if ever there was one, we thought. But that year, life would imitate art: Congress-woman Shirley Chisholm attempted to transform “The Man” into “The Woman,” becoming the first black woman to run for president in the Democratic Party. She received 152 first-ballot votes at the Democratic National Convention. Then, in 1988, Jesse Jackson got 1,219 delegate votes at the Democratic convention, 29 percent of the total
, coming in second only to the nominee, Michael Dukakis.
The award for prescience, however, goes to Jacob K. Javits, the liberal Republican senator from New York who, incredibly, just a year after the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, predicted that the first black president would be elected in the year 2000. In an essay titled “Integration from the Top Down” printed in Esquire magazine in 1958, he wrote:
What manner of man will this be, this possible Negro Presidential candidate of 2000? Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be well-traveled and have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade. . . . Assuredly, though, despite his other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought to the top in government and politics . . . those in the vanguard may expect to be the targets for scurrilous attacks, as the hate mongers, in the last ditch efforts, spew their verbal and written poison.
In the same essay, Javits predicted both the election of a black senator and the appointment of the first black Supreme Court justice by 1968. Edward Brooke was elected to the Senate by Massachusetts voters in 1966. Thurgood Marshall was confirmed in 1967. Javits also predicted that the House of Representatives would have “between thirty and forty qualified Negroes” in the 106th Congress in 2000. In fact, there were 37 black U.S. representatives, among them 12 women.
Sen. Javits was one very keen prognosticator. When we consider the characteristics that he insisted the first black president must possess—he must be well-educated, well-traveled, have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world, be a dedicated internationalist and have a very thick skin—it is astonishing how accurately he is describing the background and character of Barack Obama.
I wish we could say that Barack Obama’s election will magically reduce the numbers of teenage pregnancies or the level of drug addiction in the black community. I wish we could say that what happened last night will suddenly make black children learn to read and write as if their lives depended on it, and that their high school completion rates will become the best in the country. I wish we could say that these things are about to happen, but I doubt that they will.
But there is one thing we can proclaim today, without question: that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States of America means that “The Ultimate Color Line,” as the subtitle of Javits’ Esquire essay put it, has, at long last, been crossed. It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him.
How does that make me feel? Like I’ve always imagined my father and his friends felt back in 1938, on the day that Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling. But ten thousand times better than that. All I can say is “Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound.”
SOURCE: “In Our Lifetime,” The Root, November 5, 2008, URL: http://www.theroot.com/views/our-lifetime.
PART II
EXCAVATION
ZORA NEALE HURSTON has been something of a touchstone for Gates throughout his career, and with good reason. She was a brilliant writer and a keen observer of black culture whose vivid tableaux and spicy vernacular jump off the page to create a living landscape of African American life. But it was Alice Walker’s discovery of her unmarked grave and her subsequent recovery of a brilliant life and career that renders Hurston so potent a symbol for African American literature.
Hurston had hardly been obscure throughout much of her lifetime: her novels and stories were lauded for both their literary and anthropological contributions when they were published in the 1930s and 1940s. But she made no money, her fame faded, and her unmarked grave in Florida told a different story—or no story at all—until Walker found it and put a name to it.
Walker’s discovery and Hurston’s story are emblematic of the African American literary tradition. African American writing—by both men and women—has existed for centuries, but it has taken concerted acts of excavation and recovery to restore it to simple visibility and, in a great many cases, to prominence. Gates has been a participant in and a champion of this type of literary detective work for three decades. The works in this section present some of the fruits of those investigations.
Abby Wolf
INTRODUCTION, OUR NIG; OR, SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE OF A FREE BLACK, BY HARRIET E. WILSON
Though I’ve no home to call my own,
My heart shall not repine;
The saint may live on earth unknown,
And yet in glory shine.
When my Redeemer dwelt below,
He chose a lowly lot;
He came unto his own, but lo!
His own received him not.
—HARRIET E. WILSON, CIRCA 1852
I sincerely appeal to my colored brethren
universally for patronage, hoping that they
will not condemn this attempt of their sister
to be erudite, but rally around me a faithful
band of supporters and defenders.
—HARRIET E. WILSON, 1859
ON THE EIGHTEENTH day of August 1859, at the Clerk’s office of the District Court of Massachusetts, Mrs. Harriet E. Wilson entered the copyright of her novel, a fictional third-person autobiography entitled Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. Printed for the author by the George C. Rand and Avery company, the novel first appeared on September 5, 1859. In a disarmingly open preface Mrs. Wilson states her purpose for publishing Our Nig:
In offering to the public the following pages, the writer confesses her inability to minister to the refined and cultivated, the pleasure supplied by abler pens. It is not for such these crude narrations appear. Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.
The experiment undertaken for financial reasons was a book whose central theme is white racism in the North as experienced by a free black indentured servant in antebellum days: a subject that might have been highly controversial among white abolitionists and free blacks who did not wish to antagonize their white benefactors. Nonetheless, Harriet E. Adams Wilson asked her “colored brethren” to “rally around me a faithful band of supporters and defenders,” and to purchase her book so that she might support herself and her child.
Just five months and twenty-four days after the publication of Our Nig, the Amherst, New Hampshire, Farmer’s Cabinet dated February 29, 1860, included among its obituaries the following item:
In Milford, 13th inst[ant], George Mason, only son of H. E. Wilson, aged 7 yrs. and 8 mos.
According to his death certificate, George Mason Wilson succumbed to “Fever” on February 15, 1860. Described as the child of Thomas and Harriet E. Wilson, he was probably named in honor of George Mason, the prominent Revolutionary-era Virginia planter and statesman who opposed slavery. The “color” of the child is listed as “Black.” The death certificate of George Mason Wilson establishes that “Mrs. H. E. Wilson”—the name that appears on the copyright page of the first edition of Our Nig and in the Farmer’s Cabinet death notice—was a black woman, apparently the first to publish a novel in English. Ironically, George’s death certificate helped to rescue his mother from literary oblivion. His mother wrote a sentimental novel, of all things, so that she might become self-sufficient and regain the right to care for her only son; six months later, her son died of that standard disease, “fever”; the record of his death, alone, proved sufficient to demonstrate his mother’s racial identity and authorship of Our Nig. These curious historical events could easily have formed part of the plot of a sentimental novel. That Harriet Wilson, moreover, dared
to entitle her text with the most feared and hated epithet by which the very humanity of black people had been demeaned adds to the list of ironies in her endeavor.
With this audacious act of entitlement, Harriet Wilson became most probably the first Afro-American to publish a novel in the United States, the fifth Afro-American to publish fiction in English (after Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, and Martin R. Delany), and along with Maria F. dos Reis, who published a novel called Ursula in Brazil in 1859, one of the first two black women to publish a novel in any language. Despite their importance to the Afro-American literary tradition, however, Mrs. Wilson and her text seem to have been ignored or overlooked both by her “colored brethren universally” and by even the most scrupulous scholars during the next one hundred and twenty-three years, for reasons as curious and as puzzling as they are elusive, reasons about which we can venture rather little more than informed speculation.
Reconstructing the life and times of Harriet E. Wilson is as challenging as it is frustrating. While there remains no questions as to her race or her authorship of Our Nig, we have been able to account for her existence only from 1850 to 1860. Even her birthdate and date of death are unknown.
The first record of the woman who through marriage would become “Mrs. H. E. Wilson” is the 1850 federal census of the state of New Hampshire. This document lists one “Harriet Adams” (H. E. Wilson’s maiden name) as living in Milford, New Hampshire. Her age is said to be “22” and her race is described as “Black” (the choices were “White,” “Black,” and “Mulatto”). Harriet Adams’s birthplace is listed simply as “New Hampshire.” If these statements are correct, then Miss Adams was born a free black in 1827 or 1828.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 6