We mentioned earlier some of the many encyclopedias of various aspects of African and African American life that have been published in the past. The publication of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience as a one-volume print edition aspires to belong in the grand tradition of encyclopedia editing by scholars interested in the black world on both sides of the Atlantic. It also relies upon the work of thousands of scholars who have sought to gather and to analyze, according to the highest scholarly standards, the lives and the worlds of black people everywhere. We acknowledge our indebtedness to these traditions of scholarly endeavor—more than a century old—to which we are heirs, by dedicating our encyclopedia to the monumental contribution of W. E. B. Du Bois.
SOURCE: Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
PREFATORY NOTES ON THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE
From In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
THIS BOOK IS in large measure about slavery and its aftermath, and the impact of that horrendous institution on generations of African American families and some of their more notable descendants, leading figures in the African American community today. Because the stories of these individuals and their ancestors are rooted in genealogical research, they are necessarily based on historical analysis and a few salient statistics about the origins of our ancestors forced into the slave ships and shipped to the United States between 1619 and the 1800s. Understanding this historical background will, I think, help you more fully to appreciate the stories in this book.
First and foremost, you need to understand who our slave ancestors were—that is, where they originated on the African continent. They were Africans of many different ethnic groups from many different regions, taken captive—often by other Africans—and sold to Europeans. They were then put on ships and transported to the New World. Many did not survive the dreadful journey: Historians estimate that 15 percent of those who boarded the slave ships along the African coast perished in the dreadful Middle Passage. Those who managed to survive endured a lifetime of unimaginable hardship, bound by people who carefully and willfully did all they could do in every possible way to strip away every aspect of their slaves’ humanity.
All African Americans whose ancestors were born in the New World before the twentieth century are descended from these slaves, and every African American today—unless she or he is descended from a very recent African immigrant—can trace his or her lineage deep into the slave past. While some of our ancestors were fortunate enough to be freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—about 600,000 according to historian David Blight—before the end of the Civil War (three of the individuals whose family lines are discussed in this book descend from slaves who were freed before 1800), about 87 percent of the 3,953,760 slaves in 1860 were freed from slavery only in 1865. But because of the way the slave system worked, few of us know much, if anything, about any of our ancestors from this period, even if they had been freed. We know even less about our African ancestors, of course. While it’s not so likely, some may even have been members of royal families in Africa; many more would have been captured in battle, then sold to Europeans as the booty of war. Others were imprisoned because of debt; some were kidnapped. Regardless, however, of how they were enslaved in Africa, still they spoke their languages and knew their names. But here, on this side of the Atlantic, they soon lost those names.
Slavery poses enormous challenges to any scholar seeking to reconstruct its features. Though the practices of slave owners varied, sometimes significantly, in different eras and in different states and in different times, slavery was, almost everywhere, a systemic effort to rob black human beings of their very humanity itself—that is, of all the aspects of civilization that make a human being “human”: names, birth dates, family ties, the freedom to be educated and to worship, and the most basic sense of self-knowledge and continuity of generations within one’s direct family lines. With very few exceptions—and there were some, oddly enough—each slave had one name only, a first name, that the law and custom acknowledged. No matter what slaves called themselves within the confines of their own communities, within their sheltered and hidden lives as a veritable subcontinent of the plantation, and no matter what their family and friends knew them by, the American legal system did not generally acknowledge those names. (Slaves would usually be listed by first names in legal documents such as wills, estate papers of the deceased, and some tax records, for example. And, remarkably, in the schedules of the 1850 and 1860 federal censuses, eight counties—including Hampshire County, then in Virginia, now in West Virginia, where some of my own slave ancestors lived—listed the slaves owned there by a first name and a surname; but these were the exceptions, only eight counties among all the counties in all the states in America.) And sometimes, though very rarely, notices of slave auctions would list slaves to be sold by a first and a last name. (I own one of these advertisements.) How in the world can you reconstruct a family tree consisting of generations of people who had only one name, when even that name was not often listed in official, legal documents maintained by the state?
In my efforts to trace present-day African Americans back to their family roots in Africa, I frequently consult what I consider to be one of the most valuable and impressive historical research tools ever created: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. This database is a compilation of the records kept by shipping companies involved in the slave trade. It offers detailed information on 34,941 transatlantic slave-trading voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866. Compiled under the direction of David Eltis, with the collaboration of Stephen D. Behrendt, Manolo Florentino, and David Richardson, it is the largest uniform, consolidated database of its kind in the world. The authors estimate that the assembled data cover at least two-thirds of the slaving voyages that crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. Of especial interest to us are the voyages to the United States, either directly from Africa or via the Caribbean.
According to the database, before the slave trade ended in the United States, approximately 455,000 Africans were brought here against their will, 389,000 directly from Africa, and another 66,000 from the Caribbean, according to Greg O’Malley. Meaning that of the 12.5 million Africans taken from Africa and shipped across the Atlantic in slavery, only a tiny portion—less than 4 percent—were brought to this country (the remainder, of course, went to the Caribbean and Latin America). Of the 12.5 million Africans who left Africa, 10.7 million arrived in the Americas between 1501 and 1867. For most black Americans—about 90 percent of those of us living in the United States today—these 455,000 Africans are the basis of our ancestral gene pool. They are the core source of what are now more than 35 million African American citizens.
The vast majority of our African ancestors came to the United States as slaves between 1700 and 1820. Most, in fact, arrived in the final decades of the eighteenth century. David Eltis estimates that in 1700 only 4 percent of the original 455,000 had arrived here. By 1750 the figure is 41 percent; by 1800 it is 80 percent; and by 1820 it is 99.7 percent. This means that virtually all African American families had an ancestor here by 1820, if not much earlier. In fact, more than half of us had ancestors living in the United States by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The black presence is as old as America itself.
In other words, if a room were full of black people and we gave each one a DNA test, we would learn that 23.0 percent of us are descended from people who were shipped from Congo or Angola, 17.5 percent of us from eastern Nigeria and the Cameroon Republic, 2.2 percent from Mozambique, 14.1 percent from Ghana, 2.4 percent from Benin and western Nigeria, and 40.8 percent from the countries that range from Senegal and Gambia to Liberia (known as Upper Guinea).
Within these regions there were scores of tribes or ethnic groups who were poured into the slave s
hips bound for America. Africa was, and remains, one of the most diverse continents, genetically and linguistically, on the face of the earth. Fifteen hundred languages are spoken on the African continent today. But the ancestors of the African American people are surprisingly localized. Linda Heywood and John Thornton have recently estimated that about fifty ethnic groups in Africa primarily made up the body of slaves who became the ancestors of the African American people. These ethnic groups have names today such as Mende, Igbo, Yoruba, and Fon, and these names refer to shared languages and cultural practices. Some of these names would have been used by Africans to describe themselves; others are of more recent vintage. As David Eltis explained to me, “There were some large ethnolinguistic groups such as Mende and Congo, but these were not necessarily part of people’s self-identification. Identities would have been developed for much smaller units of people. From Upper Guinea, Mende, Koronko, Susu, Fula, and Mandingo would have been well represented. From the Bight of Biafra (in today’s eastern Nigeria), more than half would likely have been Igbo.” The slaves who commandeered the slave ship called the Amistad, for example, under the leadership of Cinque, identified themselves as members of the Mende people in a Bible they presented to their attorney, former president John Quincy Adams, in 1841. In other words, the names that Africans use to describe themselves today were not necessarily in use during slavery times as a form of self-identification, but many were. What this means is that if we could go back in time and meet our earliest enslaved ancestor, depending on the point in time, he or she may or may not think of him- or herself as “Mende,” say, despite speaking a language that we call “Mende” and living in a “Mende” land. Such ancestors might think of themselves instead as belonging to a specific local group—a group whose name has been long ago lost. For the purposes of this book, and indeed for most work on slavery, we will not attempt to parse the local groups within the larger ethnic identities. If your ancestors shared genetic characteristics with a person who describes him- or herself as Mende today, I will call them Mende here. After all, just because Frederick Douglass thought of himself as “colored” doesn’t mean that it would be incorrect to describe him today as an “African American.”
Now, of course, once our ancestors came to this country, their ethnic identities were stripped from them, along with their names, religions, and family ties. They ceased to be Mende or Igbo or Kpelle and became Negro slaves, thrown together with people of other ethnicities without any consideration. Over the years the blending of their different ethnicities created the rich mixture—the pan-African identity—that is African American culture today. But it took time. And you can bet that there were some painful intra-African conflicts along the way. After all, what united these many different people of African descent was their color, the continent of their origin, and most especially their condition as the enslaved. There were also, of course, interracial mixtures with whites and with Native Americans—over half the African American people today have at least one European great-grandfather, while that figure for a Native American great-grandparent is much, much less, amounting to only about 5 percent—and all this intermixture contributes to who we are today when we describe ourselves as “African Americans.”
I’ll have more to say about our “admixture” throughout this book since this is one of the crucial tests that I administered to each of the individuals who participated in this project. In the broad picture, the geneticist Dr. Mark Shriver has advised me that African American DNA today breaks down something like this:
•5 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5 percent Native American ancestry (equivalent of one great-grandparent).
•58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry (equivalent of one great-grandparent).
•19.6 percent of African Americans have at least 25 percent European ancestry (equivalent of one grandparent).
•1 percent of African Americans have at least 50 percent European ancestry (equivalent of one parent).
By contrast, Americans of predominantly white or European ancestry have the following mixtures:
•2.7 percent of European Americans have at least 12.5 percent Native American ancestry (equivalent of one great-grandparent).
•Less than 1 percent of European Americans have at least 12.5 percent West African ancestry (equivalent of one great-grandparent).
These fascinating statistics should, I hope, give us all a better understanding of the genetic and geographical origins of the victims of the African slave trade to America.
Statistics are by their nature very broad and maddeningly vague and anonymous. It will always be so. We will never know even a tiny fraction of the names of our ancestors who were taken from Africa. We will never see their faces, never read their words. They are lost to us forever, because of the devastatingly effective way the slave trade worked in its attempt to erase the past from the present of a slave. Nevertheless, we can now, after all of these centuries, begin to get a sense of who our ancestors were, by analyzing the DNA of their descendants—and by re-creating the lines of the families they started in slavery, the families that against all odds now thrive in such great numbers today. After Nigeria and Brazil, the African Americans living in the United States constitute the third-largest group of black people in the world. Telling the story of their origins and their evolution from the seventeenth century to the present, from slavery to freedom, is precisely what this book attempts to do, through what I hope is a careful history of nineteen extraordinary individuals, individuals whose past—while unique, of course—is also most certainly representative of the world that our ancestors—your ancestors and mine, black and white—created out of the crucible of slavery and the centuries-long battle to become free and equal citizens in the great republic that America is still striving to be.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (New York: Crown Publishers, 2009).
PART III
CANONS
LITERARY CANONS DON’T just appear. The 1970s and 1980s saw numerous battles over the idea and content of the literary canon, not only in African American Studies, but also in fields like Women’s Studies, Latino Studies, Jewish Studies, and other Ethnic Studies. Scholars working in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and in the heat of feminism and academic post-structuralism deeply wanted to break canons, to reject the received wisdom that some works were inherently worth reading and some were irredeemably not. At the same time, many scholars—including Gates—saw a pressing need to reshape the literary canon to reflect the wide body of writing that actually existed, rather than the narrow stock of writing that made its way onto syllabi and into anthologies.
Eventually, through the labor of Gates and his colleagues, women writers like Edith Wharton and black writers like Ralph Ellison—and black women writers like Toni Morrison—found a place at the canonical table and became vocal and admired presences there. As canon-breakers, Gates and his fellow critics exposed the stale notions of fixity and objective value that had determined and defined earlier bodies of knowledge as culturally determined. At the same time, as canon-makers, they established new models of inclusion and valuation.
The pieces in this section address this fractious moment in literary and cultural studies in which Gates was a key player in the 1980s. The contradictions in the simultaneous work of canon-busting and canon-building are evident, especially as we look back on them from the more expansive vantage point engendered by these debates.
Abby Wolf
THE MASTER’S PIECES
On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition
WILLIAM BENNETT AND Allan Bloom, the dynamic duo of the new cultural right, have become the easy targets of the cultural left—which I am defining here loosely and generously, as that uneasy, shifting set of alliances formed by feminist critics, critics of so-called minority discourse, and Marxist and poststructuralist critics generally, the Ra
inbow Coalition of contemporary critical theory. These two men symbolize for us the nostalgic return to what I think of as the “antebellum aesthetic position,” when men were men, and men were white, when scholar-critics were white men, and when women and persons of color were voiceless, faceless servants and laborers, pouring tea and filling brandy snifters in the boardrooms of old boys’ clubs. Inevitably, these two men have come to play the roles for us that George Wallace and Orville Faubus played for the civil rights movement, or that Nixon and Kissinger played for us during Vietnam—the “feel good” targets, who, despite our internal differences and contradictions, we all love to hate.
And how tempting it is to juxtapose their “civilizing mission” to the racial violence that has swept through our campuses since 1986—at traditionally liberal northern institutions such as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, the University of Chicago, Columbia, and at southern institutions such as the University of Alabama, the University of Texas, and at The Citadel. Add to this the fact that affirmative action programs on campus have meanwhile become window-dressing operations, necessary “evils” maintained to preserve the fiction of racial fairness and openness, but deprived of the power to enforce their stated principles. When unemployment among black youth is 40 percent, when 44 percent of black Americans can’t read the front page of a newspaper, when less than 4 percent of the faculty on campuses is black, well, you look for targets close at hand.
And yet there’s a real danger of localizing our grievances, of the easy personification, assigning a celebrated face to the forces of reaction and so giving too much credit to a few men who are really symptomatic of a larger political current. Maybe our eagerness to do so reflects a certain vanity that academic cultural critics are prone to. We make dire predictions, and when they come true, we think we’ve changed the world.
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