3.Although Hildreth published his novel anonymously, it was copyrighted under the name of the printer and publisher, John Eastburn. Hildreth’s name, however, appears on the copyright page of the second edition (Boston, 1840), and on the title page as editor in the expanded 1852 edition, titled The White Slave: or, Memoirs of a Fugitive (London: Ingram, Cooke and Company, 1852). The review in The Liberator (March 31, 1837) defends the novel against those who doubted its authenticity, arguing that “it purports to have been written by a slave, and it is no more difficult to imagine this to be the case, than to imagine who could write it, if a slave did not.” But reviews such as that published in The Christian Examiner in 1839 were far more typical: “We read, in what professes to be the language of a slave, that which we feel a slave could not have written” (quoted in Yellin, The Intricate Knot, p. 102).
4.Lockard, pp. 405, 408–09, 411.
5.Letter from Jean Fagan Yellin to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., November 21, 2001.
6.Letter from Werner Sollors to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., September 12, 2001.
7.See also The North Star, June 15, 1849; The National Era, November 7 and November 28, 1850; Frederick Douglass’s Paper, January 1 and January 15, 1852.
8.William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872), pp. 60–61 and 177–89.
9.Letter from Augusta Rohrbach to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., July 23, 2001.
10.Ibid.
11.Letter from Ann Fabian to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., July 31, 2001.
12.Ibid.
13.Ibid.
14.Letter from Leslie A. Morris to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., April 5, 2001.
15.Letter from Craigen W. Bowen to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., April 5, 2001.
16.Letter from Wyatt Houston Day to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., April 6, 2001.
17.Letter from Kenneth Rendell to Laurence Kirshbaum, April 26, 2001.
18.Nickell’s report, pp. 13–14.
19.Ibid., pp. 12–13.
20.Ibid., p. 27.
21.Letter to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., December 13, 2001. See also Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 96–98 and 107.
22.On Wheeler, see S. Austin Allibone, editor, Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1897), p. 1511; “Sally’s Family Place” website (www2.txcyber.com/smkoestl/; John E. Findling, editor, Dictionary of American Diplomatic History, 2d ed., rev. and expanded (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 543–44; Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, ed. by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York: Appleton, 1888), p. 453; Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928–58), vol. 22, p. 50; see also p. 139 of vol. 23 of the 1999 edition of the ANB.
23.Letter from Tom Parramore to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., November 16, 2001.
24.Bryan Sinche pointed this out to me.
25.See The Case of Passmore Williamson (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 1855), and Still, pp. 86–97. Two versions of Jane Johnson’s testimony appear in Appendix B. See Still, pp. 94–95.
26.David Brion Davis, “The Enduring Legacy of the South’s Civil War Victory,” New York Times, August 26, 2001, section 4, p. 6.
27.Conversation with Tim Bingaman, Mormon Family History Library, May 15, 2001.
28.Giles R. Wright, Afro-Americans in New Jersey (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1988), p. 39.
29.This book is reprinted in The Black Biographical Dictionary Index, ed. by Randall and Nancy Burkett and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck Healy, 1985).
30.Elizabeth M. Perinchiet, History of the Cemeteries in Burlington County, New Jersey, 1687–1975 (n.p. 1978), p. 30.
31.Letter from Nina Baym to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., May 9, 2001.
32.Letter to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., October 26, 2001.
33.Letter to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., November 2, 2001.
SOURCE: Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 2002).
IN HER OWN WRITE
Series Introduction, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman, . . .
The “other side” has not been represented by one who “lives there.” And not many can more sensibly realize and more accurately tell the weight and the fret of the “long dull pain” than the open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America.
As our Caucasian barristers are not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark man’s place, neither should the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce the exact Voice of the Black Woman.
—ANNA JULIA COOPER, A VOICE FROM THE SOUTH (1892)
THE BIRTH OF the Afro-American literary tradition occurred in 1773, when Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry. Despite the fact that her book garnered for her a remarkable amount of attention, Wheatley’s journey to the printer had been a most arduous one. Sometime in 1772, a young African girl walked demurely into a room at Boston to undergo an oral examination, the results of which would determine the direction of her life and work. Perhaps she was shocked upon entering the appointed room. For there, perhaps gathered in a semicircle, sat eighteen of Boston’s most notable citizens. Among them were John Erving, a prominent Boston merchant; the Reverend Charles Chauncey, pastor of the Tenth Congregational Church; and John Hancock, who would later gain fame for his signature on the Declaration of Independence. At the center of this group was His Excellency, Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, with Andrew Oliver, his lieutenant governor, close by his side.
Why had this august group been assembled? Why had it seen fit to summon this young African girl, scarcely eighteen years old, before it? This group of “the most respectable Characters in Boston,” as it would later define itself, had assembled to question closely the African adolescent on the slender sheaf of poems that she claimed to have written by herself. We can only speculate on the nature of the questions posed to the fledgling poet. Perhaps they asked her to identify and explain—for all to hear—exactly who were the Greek and Latin gods and poets alluded to so frequently in her work. Perhaps they asked her to conjugate a verb in Latin or even to translate randomly selected passages from the Latin, which she and her master, John Wheatley, claimed that she “had made some Progress in.” Or perhaps they asked her to recite from memory key passages from the texts of John Milton and Alexander Pope, the two poets by whom the African claimed to be most directly influenced. We do not know.
We do know, however, that the African poet’s responses were more than sufficient to prompt the eighteen august gentlemen to compose, sign, and publish a two-paragraph “Attestation,” an open letter “To the Publick” that prefaces Phillis Wheatley’s book and that reads in part:
We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.
So important was this document in securing a publisher for Wheatley’s poems that it forms the signal element in the prefatory matter preceding her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London in 1773.
Without the published “Attestation,” Wheatley’s publisher claimed, few would believe that an African could possibly have written poetry all by herself. As the eighteen put the matter clearly in their letter, “Numbers would be ready to suspect they were not really the Writings of Phillis.�
� Wheatley and her master, John Wheatley, had attempted to publish a similar volume in 1772 at Boston, but Boston publishers had been incredulous. Three years later, “Attestation” in hand, Phillis Wheatley and her master’s son, Nathaniel Wheatley, sailed for England, where they completed arrangements for the publication of a volume of her poems with the aid of the Countess of Huntington and the Earl of Dartmouth.
This curious anecdote, surely one of the oddest oral examinations on record, is only a tiny part of a larger, and even more curious, episode in the Enlightenment. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, Europeans had wondered aloud whether or not the African “species of men,” as they were most commonly called, could ever create formal literature, could ever master “the arts and sciences.” If they could, the argument ran, then the African variety of humanity was fundamentally related to the European variety. If not, then it seemed clear that the African was destined by nature to be a slave. This was the burden shouldered by Phillis Wheatley when she successfully defended herself and the authorship of her book against counterclaims and doubts.
Indeed, with her successful defense, Wheatley launched two traditions at once—the black American literary tradition and the black woman’s literary tradition. If it is extraordinary that not just one but both of these traditions were founded simultaneously by a black woman—certainly an event unique in the history of literature—it is also ironic that this important fact of common, coterminous literary origins seems to have escaped most scholars.
That the progenitor of the black literary tradition was a woman means, in the most strictly literal sense, that all subsequent black writers have evolved in a matrilinear line of descent, and that each, consciously or unconsciously, has extended and revised a canon whose foundation was the poetry of a black woman. Early black writers seem to have been keenly aware of Wheatley’s founding role, even if most of her white reviewers were more concerned with the implications of her race than her gender. Jupiter Hammon, for example, whose 1760 broadside “An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ, With Penetential Cries” was the first individual poem published by a black American, acknowledged Wheatley’s influence by selecting her as the subject of his second broadside, “An Address to Phillis Wheatley, Ethiopian Poetess, in Boston,” which was published at Hanford in 1778. And George Moses Horton, the second Afro-American to publish a book of poetry in English (1829), brought out in 1838 an edition of his Poems By A Slave bound together with Wheatley’s work. Indeed, for fifty-six years, between 1773 and 1829, when Horton published The Hope of Liberty, Wheatley was the only black person to have published a book of imaginative literature in English. So central was this black woman’s role in the shaping of the Afro-American literary tradition that, as one historian has maintained, the history of the reception of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry is the history of Afro-American literary criticism. Well into the nineteenth century, Wheatley and the black literary tradition were the same entity.
But Wheatley is not the only black woman writer who stands as a pioneering figure in Afro-American literature. Just as Wheatley gave birth to the genre of black poetry, Ann Plato was the first Afro-American to publish a book of essays (1841) and Harriet E. Wilson was the first black person to publish a novel in the United States (1859).
Despite this pioneering role of black women in the tradition, however, many of their contributions before this century have been all but lost or unrecognized. Wheatley, while certainly the most reprinted and discussed poet in the tradition, is also one of the least understood. Ann Plato’s seminal work, Essays (which includes biographies and poems), has not been reprinted since it was published a century and a half ago. And Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, her compelling novel of a black woman’s expanding consciousness in a racist northern antebellum environment, never received even one review or comment at a time when virtually all works written by black people were heralded by abolitionists as salient arguments against the existence of human slavery. We can only wonder how many other texts in the black woman’s tradition have been lost to this generation of readers or remain unclassified or uncatalogued and, hence, unread.
This was not always so, however. Black women writers dominated the final decade of the nineteenth century, perhaps spurred to publish by an 1886 essay entitled “The Coming American Novelist,” which was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and written by “A Lady From Philadelphia.” This anonymous essay argued that the “Great American Novel” would be written by a black person. Her argument is so curious that it deserves to be repeated:
When we come to formulate our demands of the Coming American Novelist, we will agree that he must be native-born. His ancestors may come from where they will, but we must give him a birthplace and have the raising of him. Still, the longer his family has been here the better he will represent us. Suppose he should have no country but ours, no traditions but those he has learned here, no longings apart from us, no future except in our future—the orphan of the world, he finds with us his home. And with all this, suppose he refuses to be fused into that grand conglomerate we call the “American type.” With us, he is not of us. He is original, he has humor, he is tender, he is passive and fiery, he has been taught what we call justice, and he has his own opinion about it. He has suffered everything a poet, a dramatist, a novelist need suffer before he comes to have his lips anointed. And with it all he is in one sense a spectator, a little out of the race. How would these conditions go towards forming an original development? In a word, suppose the coming novelist is of African origin? When one comes to consider the subject, there is no improbability in it. One thing is certain,—our great novel will not be written by the typical American.
An atypical American, indeed. Not only would the great American novel be written by an African-American, it would be written by an African-American woman:
Yet farther: I have used the generic masculine pronoun because it is convenient; but Fate keeps revenge in store. It was a woman who, taking the wrongs of the African as her theme, wrote the novel that awakened the world to their reality, and why should not the coming novelist be a woman as well as an African? She—the woman of that race—has some claims on Fate which are not yet paid up.
This theme would be repeated by several black woman authors, most notably by Anna Julia Cooper, a prototypical black feminist whose 1892 A Voice From the South can be considered to be one of the original texts of the black feminist movement. It was Cooper who first analyzed the fallacy of referring to “the Black man” when speaking of black people and who argued that just as white men cannot speak through the consciousness of black men, neither can black men “fully and adequately reproduce the exact Voice of the Black Woman.” Gender and race, she argues, cannot be conflated, except in the instance of a black woman’s voice, and it is this voice which must be uttered and to which we must listen. As Cooper puts the matter so compellingly:
It is not the intelligent woman vs. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman vs. the black, the brown, and the red,—it is not even the cause of woman vs. man. Nay, ’tis woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice. It would be subversive of every human interest that the cry of one-half the human family be stifled. Woman in stepping from the pedestal of statue-like inactivity in the domestic shrine, and daring to think and move and speak,—to undertake to help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, is merely completing the circle of the world’s vision. Hers is every interest that has lacked an interpreter and a defender. Her cause is linked with that of every agony that has been dumb—every wrong that needs a voice.
It is no fault of man’s that he has not been able to see truth from her standpoint. It does credit both to his head and heart that no greater mistakes have been committed or even wrongs perpetrated while she sat making tatting and snipping paper flowers. Man’s own innate chivalry and the mutual interdependence of their interests have insured his treating her cause, in the main at least, as his own. And he is pardonably s
urprised and even a little chagrined, perhaps, to find his legislation not considered “perfectly lovely” in every respect. But in any case his work is only impoverished by her remaining dumb. The world has had to limp along with the wobbling gait and one-sided hesitancy of a man with one eye. Suddenly the bandage is removed from the other eye and the whole body is filled with light. It sees a circle where before it saw a segment. The darkened eye restored, every member rejoices with it.
The myopic sight of the darkened eye can only be restored when the full range of the black woman’s voice, with its own special timbres and shadings, remains mute no longer.
SOURCE: This article is drawn from the series introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
INTRODUCTION, AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES
WITH EVELYN BROOKS HIGGINBOTHAM
AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES tells many stories and yet one. Its six hundred and eleven biographies span more than four centuries, presenting the lives of men and women whose backgrounds and achievements are as varied as their talents, skills, and knowledge. Taken together these lives of distinction attest to the integral character of African Americans to the life of this nation—to their abiding influence on American culture and institutions. African American Lives presents this history through a mosaic of individuals, some known throughout the world and others all but forgotten. We chose to include both familiar and unfamiliar names in the belief that history is more than the coherent account of important national events and social movements and that it is more than great ideas and works of art. The contours and content of history are shaped by people’s lives, their personal choices and circumstances, individual uniqueness and creativity. Large events and small ones are brought about by ordinary people, for even the greatest of us is but an individual, while the least of us—as can be seen frequently in African American Lives—may have a profound effect on the course of world events.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 17