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CHAPTER 1
Ann Plato
Hartford’s Literary Enigma
Because so little is known about Ann Plato, literary history has offered her investigators no choice but to consign her to a status as a writer, poet, and teacher of minor importance in early nineteenth century Hartford, Connecticut. Her reputation, confined to African American literary history, rests solely on the prose and poems published in her single book of 1841, Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry; one of its poems, “Reflections, Written upon Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend,” had been published in the 5 September 1840, issue of The Colored American weekly newspaper with the word “Lines” in the title instead of “Reflections.” Her place and date of birth and her family particulars are unknown; documents relevant to black Hartford applaud her reticent presence as a teacher from 1842 to 1847 in one of the city’s two schools for colored children. Since 1988, Trinity College in Hartford has offered the Ann Plato Pre/Post-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship. After 1847, Plato vanishes, and she seems to appear nowhere else in the public record until the 1870 Iowa federal census.
Neither in documents nor in her writings has she provided posterity with more than the slightest circumstantial information about herself. And neither were her birth nor death officially recorded by the states of Connecticut or New York. Born in 1823 or 1824, she can only be reckoned implicitly in any federal census for New York or any of the southern New England states from 1830 to 1850. With the notable exception of her listing in Hartford’s Talcott Street [or Colored] Congregational Church catalogue of 1842,1 there are no other church records. There are no schooling records, their absence thus preventing verification of her education. Absence of both kinds of documentation coincides historically with officials in Connecticut only beginning to maintain such documentation consistently. Constructing a profile of Ann Plato means paying serious attention to her discursive strategies and her activities in Hartford’s colored community. She is probably related to other Plato families of color on Long Island (most likely Montauketts) and in Connecticut (Montaukett immigrants). With her writings expressing deeply felt pieties and for her commitment to teaching children, she can be included as a young woman of color among the black women writers of the early nineteenth century who, Frances Smith Foster observes in Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892, worked “within the Cult of True Womanhood, [creating] a literature dedicated to moral improvement and social welfare.” These women wrote to a general public, Foster asserts, on themes sometimes “blatantly political” but “routinely articulated in religious terms.” Their objectives were couched in moral didacticism, even as they addressed abolitionism and the kindred social issues that came to overlap with early nineteenth-century topics such as religious conversion and piety.2
Researching this nineteenth-century author, who left virtually no personal track record other than her teaching, resembles trying to garner the sparse information on a young early nineteenth-century British poet, Susan Evance, who published two poetry collections (1808 and 1818) and was a devout Christian, yet “remains relatively unknown.” Like Plato, her poems emphasized piety and were deemed appropriate for “impressionable young minds.” The comparison stops there, for Evance married and had children, but her fate remains a mystery.3
Scrutiny of some of Plato’s poems and prose should help demystify her identity and background and enlarge the distinct likelihood of her Native heritage as well as her unsteady allegiance to it. J. Saunders Redding took this at face value in 1967, and Vernon Loggins had proposed it in The Negro Author in America in 1931 by virtue of the father in Plato’s poem “The Natives of America,” but decades passed before Ann Shockley, in the Ann Plato entry for Afro-American Women Writers 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (1988) and Quandra Prettyman’s brief biography in Africana, compiled by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (1999), would echo them. Yet, none of these critics consider the complex dynamics experienced by a woman who may have come from a household where one or both parents may have been Natives but found social refuge and work in an urban black community. All of them bypass strategies that would allow them to view her in terms of being Native.
Subject-area bibliographies for American literature came about later in the nineteenth century. Volume 15 of the Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, published in 1885, lists Plato and Essays, followed by a curious comment: “The writer was also known as the colored Sappho,” probably due to Plato’s reputation as a lyric poet and teacher. No other bibliographies, including the Report of 1893–1894 compiled by the United States Bureau of Education and W. E. B. DuBois’s A Select Bibliography of the Negro American (1905), list her until A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry, by Arthur A. Schomburg, the renowned Puerto Rican–born bibliophile, who may have instigated early twentieth-century attention to her with this book, which was published in 1916. Having no political stance may have kept her off early compilations; whatever reservations Schomburg may have had, he put them aside to list her as a poet, and he deserves credit for her protracted revival. In 1945, Howard University librarian Dorothy B. Porter listed Plato and Essays in North American Negro Poets: A Bibliographical Checklist of Their Writings, 1760–1944, giving the pages where her poems appear and providing five sources where the book could be found.4
In a brief evaluation of her book in the 1924 An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes (which does not include any of her poems), James Hardy Dillard does not take up this issue, referring in the “Introduction” to her poems: “her Congregational minister … says that she should be encouraged on account of her youth and because such efforts dignify the Negro race, but her verses are so absolutely jejune and devoid of intellect and imaginative life that their service to her race is doubtful.” Dillard was the first in the twentieth century to critically evaluate her. In their closing “Bibliographical and Critical Notes” section, editors White and Jackson summarize the quality of her poems, citing examples by title as “earnest, illiterate, and vapid, with occasional errors in grammar and spelling, and strained rhymes”; they refer to her essays as “short and commonplace and on general subjects.” Loggins also thought little of her poetry; because of her detachment and “girlish restraint,” he stated unsympathetically, abolitionists would have found her “useless in the fight for emancipation.”5 The anthology editors and Loggins may have influenced two young African American scholars in the 1930s to omit her from their respective first books on African American literary history, or they may not have learned about her: Benjamin Mays, more a theologian than literary historian, in The Negro’s God, as Reflected in His Literature (1938), and Redding himself, in To Make A Poet Black (1939).6 Sterling Brown, close to echoing Loggins in Negro Poetry and Drama (1937), described Plato’s poems as “Connecticut Methodism” counterparts to Wheatley in Boston; “her work, sponsored as showing the Negro to be ‘educable,’ ” he affirmed, “is without literary value, and was overshadowed by the literary work of really educated Negroes.”7 Mays’s omission is curious because he briefly discussed Rev. James W. C. Pennington’s writings; he must have realized that Pennington wrote the introduction for Essays.
From the sparse nineteenth-century records, one senses that Plato shunned being documented by state and federal authorities; the countenance emerging from this and from the pious personality of her writing suggests that she was a young eccentric. Essays is the prominent record we have of her. That she may be the woman enumerated in a later federal census in the Midwest is highly plausible. The 1870 Iowa Federal census lists a forty-six-year-old “Miss Plato” residing in Decorah Township, Winneshiek County, in the household of a family of seven who were also boarding two Norwegian-born women servants in their twenties. This “Miss Plato” had been born in New York and was literate but had “No occupation.”8 That this woman is identified as white does not in itself derail the prospect that Miss Plato and Ann Plato are one.
Two men enumerated the town of Decorah. The principal enumerator for the F. B. Landers household where “Miss Plato” resided was O. N. Olson, of Norwegian heritage. The second, writing a bold and sharp “N” in New York for Miss Plato’s birthplace, was Cyrus Wellington. It was he who superimposed the “For” over the “k” ending New York, betraying that he perceived her as different from the white women he and Olson daily encountered. Harley Refsal, of Luther College’s Scandinavian Studies Program, never hesitated to suspect a Norwegian influence on Anglo-Iowan linguistic culture. Norwegian Fremmed signifies “stranger” or “foreigner”; “Fre” and “Fer” are interchangeable in Norwegian-Iowan vernacular, thus serving as the basis for how we interpret “For.”9 What the enumerators thought her to be is important. After this she disappears again, deepening the mystery about her.
Researchers of nineteenth-century free people of color occasionally succeed when documentary records yield details of vital statistics, land and probate circumstances, and church affiliations. But the absence of records for particular individuals amid records for those to whom they may be related or who are their neighbors or associates is frustrating. A simple fact is that researchers seeking free persons of color have difficulty finding them because they are not well documented in the record, and some are simply absent. The Barbour Collection, established in 1928 and renowned in Connecticut among genealogists, librarians, and historians as a major resource, remains incomplete and lacks many records for persons of color. In a few particular instances, what information it does contain does not corroborate Barbara W. Brown and James M. Rose in their invaluable Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut, 1650–1900.10 A researcher who cannot visit the Connecticut State Library will find the “Registry of Deaths,” for example, retrievable in the Barbour Collection, yet these resources complement one another for completeness. Outside Connecticut is a similar example involving another female writer of color, Julia C. Collins, a schoolteacher, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, whose unfinished novel, The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, was serialized in the Christian Reporter during 1864 and 1865, when she died of consumption, leaving a husband and children. As editors of the first-time book version explain, everything known about her dates strictly from twenty-one months of literary visibility.11
FIGURE 1.1. Enumeration for Miss Plato. Iowa Federal Census, Decorah, Winneshiek County, 1870.
Hypothesizing Plato’s life as a Native woman should help scholars appreciate some complexities in the nexus of Native and African American social relationships. Her literary and teaching activities occur during an eight-year period of the antebellum era, when northern blacks continued to organize politically and create social institutions, a period coinciding with state and national governments accomplishing the removal of Indians from the Southeast, with those Natives surviving in eastern North America skeptical about “Americanization.” Her life and identity raise questions of how race made an impact on her social choices, her education, her desire to teach, and her religious orientations.
Plato’s writings in fact neither assert nor celebrate any discernible African ancestral allusions or African American consciousness, but because Pennington introduces her book by identifying her as a “colored lady” of his Congregational Church, literary historians view her strictly in terms of African American writing and assign to her an identity that is strictly that of a black woman. For example, Katherine Clay Bassard, Shockley, and Prettyman, all of whom reflect the sympathetic turn in Ann Plato scholarship, contend that her specific audience was black schoolgirls. Bassard formulates her as part of a female black literary community in which the members were dialogically involved with each other’s work, with Phillis Wheatley being their influential and major intertextual inspiration. In my estimation, Plato’s legacy, if not her identity alone, is much more complex; her literary posture and some of the signs in her writings suggest rather persuasively that African American religious and teaching venues were but a social refuge for a young woman in Hartford’s 1830s and 1840s who possessed some perhaps vague ties to a Native community that survived by “hiding in plain sight,” which characterized many such communities in the Northeast and along the mid-Atlantic coast. Based on my personal knowledge of Native ancestry, I would say that she seems not fully committed to an African American identity. Her writing betrays a separation of public presence and private disposition. Writing during the height of the fervent debate in Connecticut and New York over abolition and civil rights, she left to literary posterity virtually nothing from which to glean the information that the excitement and tensions of a struggle for black freedom swirled around her; nothing in Essays alludes to specific persons such as William Lloyd Garrison, the Hartford-born Maria Stewart, or David Walker or events such as the public pressure levelled on Prudence Crandall and her school in Canterbury (1833) that led to Connecticut’s Black Law (1834), physical attacks against persons of color, and, more immediately, the cause célèbre of the Amistad Africans in New Haven during 1839–1841, whose defenders also were Congregationalists with missionary objectives. Hers is a remote, virtually disembodied voice: although her poem “To the First of August” acknowledges the end of slavery in the British Caribbean, the father she addresses in “The Natives of America” in turn narrates to her with great passion an intimately painful investment. In fact, although her “Natives” poem projects an Indian’s sadness and his will to survive, comments in her prose reveal her as unsteady and ambiguous by contrast. Meanwhile, she observes in her biography of Julia Ann Pell how school children of a “station inferior” to their mates “had their rights trampled upon” and were deliberately neglected. To emphasize that Native or black pupils in southeastern Connecticut would have experienced this schoolroom abuse overlooks how Plato covertly embeds her disdain for their condition in carefully chosen rhetoric (see chapter 10).
Plato is far more reticent about identifying herself racially or biracially than Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1869–1944), who wrote prose, poetry, and skits. Bush-Banks, born in Sag Harbor in eastern Long Island, claimed parents of Montaukett descent and attended the Poosepatuck [Unkechaug] Indian Reservation school in Mastic, where some of her father’s relations lived. Taking on a biracial identity, Bush-Banks described herself as a “colored person,” and while she participated in Indian affairs, writing a poem titled “Morning on Shinnecock” and a drama titled Indian Trails; or Trail of the Montauk, she “concurrently retained a Montauk Indian and Afro-American ethos” according to her great-grandniece and Montaukett member Bernice Forrest (Guillaume), editor of The Collected Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks. Guillaume asserts that Bush-Banks’s “protest poetry and essays mirror her acceptance of an official, if inaccurate, social categorization as an African American.”12 In the manner of intellectual and social activist sisterhood, for Bush-Banks, it was the Harlem Renaissance that attracted her vigorous participation; three-quarters of a century earlier, Plato had responded by teaching in one of Hartford’s African schools after publishing her book. Plato’s writings demonstrate how piety encourages acquiescence to the status quo.
Very brief notices distinguish critical scholarship on Ann Plato, and scholarship may be too generous a term. Justifying why an unknown writer of ...
