Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem

African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919

Barbara McCaskill, Caroline Gebhard

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814759776
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

The years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem” era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance.

Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem offers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebration of African American cultural production during these influential decades. Alongside discussions of political and artistic icons such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James Weldon Johnson are essays revaluing figures such as the writers Paul and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Georgia-based activists Lucy Craft Laney and Emmanuel King Love.

Contributors explore an array of forms from fine art to anti-lynching drama, from sermons to ragtime and blues, and from dialect pieces and early black musical theater to serious fiction.

Contributors include: Frances Smith Foster, Carla L. Peterson, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Barbara Ryan, Robert M. Dowling, Barbara A. Baker, Paula Bernat Bennett, Philip J. Kowalski, Nikki L. Brown, Koritha A. Mitchell, Margaret Crumpton Winter, Rhonda Reymond, and Andrew J. Scheiber.

Part I

Reimagining the Past

Chapter 1

Creative Collaboration

As African American as Sweet Potato Pie

Frances Smith Foster

The stories of African American collaboration—particularly the coalitions of artists and activists who worked in formal organizations and in informal communities to articulate goals and to promote progress towards racial equality, spiritual maturity, social competence, and self-esteem—are less well known in our culture than those of the rugged individualists who succeeded against the odds.¹ Particularly in narratives of African American cultural history before Emancipation, the lone fugitive, the fiery rebel, the singular sojourner, or the inspired visionary dominates our attention. Our narratives of racial progress generally feature a heroic Moses while making it seem that half of his challenge was convincing those he would rescue that if they stopped acting like crabs in a barrel, they could become a people with a purpose.

The essays of this volume counter or complement dominant narratives by emphasizing collaborative efforts of African American writers, artists, and thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century: that is, between 1880 and that era most often referred to as the “Harlem Renaissance.” This essay introduces or contextualizes those discussions by describing eighteenth-and nineteenth-century creative intellectual precursors. It focuses upon a few particular examples while suggesting that they represent a tradition of collaborative creative industry that is as African American as sweet potato pie. In our communities, as in our culinary inventions, people of African descent living in the North American colonies and in the first century or so of the United States combined the materials at hand with memories in head to feed their bodies, minds, and souls. They formed families, neighborhoods, organizations, and larger, sometimes international, networks to provide for themselves the strength of numbers and the solace of like minds and similar aesthetics. Whether in creating spirituals and work songs, newspapers and novels, churches, schools, or lodges, collaboration was a necessary and nurturing part of these enterprises.

The centers of U.S. economic and artistic dominance were generally in the urban Northeast and above the Mason-Dixon line. England and its traditions, while not the sole source from which U.S. America developed its philosophical and artistic concepts, had an unusually significant impact. Thus, it makes sense to assume, as most people do, that much of African American cultural development, including its concepts of family, friendship, and fraternity, integrates Anglophone and European elements and that its spokespersons articulate their hybridity in English. Certainly the scholarship on our organizations and cooperative enterprises focuses primarily on the events and individuals in and around the bustling corridor from New England to New York and Philadelphia. However, just as the so-called Harlem Renaissance was in fact infused, influenced, and supported by writers, artists, and intellectuals from California to Oklahoma and Florida, from Jamaica and Cuba to Mexico, Senegal, France, Germany, and beyond, so, too, one very important achievement of earlier artist/activist coalitions was the diversity and pervasiveness of their influence and effect. Perhaps, therefore, the instances of collaboration among artists and intellectuals whose energies were employed in lesser discussed areas such as the pre–Civil War South and in community building among African American Muslims or Louisiana Creoles are all the more important to recall. Thus, as a way of reminding us why discussions of the achievements of African American writers, artists, and thinkers should recognize the minority as well as the majority confederations within our common heritage, this essay begins with instances of two minority communities that must not be overlooked when the achievements of African American writers, intellectuals, and artists are tallied. The second part of this essay concentrates upon organized efforts to theorize and practice progressive racial politics using combinations of education, art, and reason. Mutual aid and literary societies and the emerging African American press provide such examples.

Among the earliest African American communities were those of African Muslim slaves. From all accounts, they were a numerical minority in this country and in the local African American populations within which they resided. However, as scholars such as Sylviane A. Diouf point out, “they preserved a distinctive lifestyle built on religious cohesiveness, cultural self-confidence, and discipline,” and their memoirs form “a disproportionate number” of extant African-in-America narratives.² Some scholars use data, such as the places in which certain texts have been found and the kinds of paper and ink with which they were produced, to hypothesize that African American Muslims, along with African Americans of other religious and cultural traditions, participated in an international network among African Americans and people of African descent in Brazil, Italy, and other parts of the world. Their work suggests collaboration and cooperation melding art and aesthetics, artifice, and activism in ways that parallel or presage certain twentieth-century Pan-African, Caribbean, and Continental integrations and interventions by Harlem Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey, Jean Toomer, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Speculations about established antebellum international and interreligious networks are intriguing and merit more concentrated research. Still, the evidence that we already have makes it clear that African American Muslims were an important part of early African American culture, and that their writers, artists, and thinkers expressed ideas and conserved traditions essential to group survival and prosperity.

Most of the extant writings from African Muslim slave communities are in Arabic.³ Many of them can be considered as slave narratives, for they are personal accounts of lives in slavery and attempts to free themselves from bondage. However, most narratives by Muslim slaves, in emphasis and perhaps intent, are different from the more commonly discussed antebellum fugitive narratives. For example, Muslim slave narratives tend to be much briefer and to give little attention to antislavery or abolitionist rhetoric. In this, they are more similar to those by Olaudah Equiano or Venture Smith, whose memoirs tend to be more communal, more descriptive of religious, artistic, social, and familial practices and observances. Their treatments of literacy, both in their communities and in their own lives, suggest greater sophistication than that of marveling over how they learned the English alphabet or to write their names. In fact, because they are written in Arabic and they assume literacy as a given and not something snatched by stealth, such narratives imply that some intellectual traditions survived the Middle Passage and continued despite enslavement and laws designed to eradicate them. They remind us that it was not unheard of for at least some African Americans to be literate and multilingual. In narratives by African Muslim slaves, as in narratives by many other slaves who did not choose to write in the tradition of the fugitive slave narrative genre, learning to read and to write in English were less important than other endeavors, such as acquiring a greater degree of economic or physical independence or preserving metaphysical concepts and religious practices. Texts such as those written by African American Muslims may be considered early examples of African American collaboration within African America. They seem more intended to build and to preserve community, to protect themselves and others from at least some of the disintegrative aspects of U.S. American enslavement, than to argue or plead with Euro-Americans for surcease or succor.

Among the African American Muslims who wrote and provided intellectual or spiritual guidance for their communities is Umar (Omar) ibn Said. Said spent most of his life as a slave in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The legends, myths, and controversies around him, his writings, and his relationships are myriad and difficult to resolve. Some things, however, are clear. He was a leader in his community and esteemed for his intellectual acuity. A contemporary newspaper article about him deemed him “An African Scholar.” Allan D. Austin writes that African Americans generally considered him “a ‘pray-god to the king,’ a marabout, or a kind of religious counselor, to non-Muslim rulers.”⁴ Among his fourteen extant manuscripts are excerpts from the Koran and from traditional commentaries on the Koran, lists of family members, the Lord’s Prayer, and an autobiography. These topics imply concern with conservation of religious traditions, preservation of family history, and possible revisions of identity as people of African descent now living in the intersections of Christianity, Islam, and racial oppression.

Another example comes from Bilali (aka Bilali Mohamed and Ben-Ali), who lived on Sapelo Island in Georgia. An imam or admaamy of the local African Muslim community, Bilali wrote a highly unusual and controversial text generally referred to as Ben Ali’s Diary or Meditations. ⁵ According to translators, a portion of the extant Bilali manuscript excerpts a tenth-century Islamic legal work that was common in the curriculum of many Muslim schools in West Africa. Excerpts of cultural history, such as this, were essential to claiming and preserving the diversity and integrity of an important aspect of African American culture. In (Dis)Forming the American Canon, Ronald A. T. Judy argues that Bilali’s manuscript “prompts a study of the conditions of knowledge determining the field of modernity, and within that field a special order of cultural studies.”⁶ Judy’s suggestion that Bilali’s achievements in the nineteenth century can be a key influence for thinkers and scholars of the twenty-first can be applied generally to his Muslim American colleagues also.

Bilali and Umar ibn Said are but two of several early African Americans who preserved in Arabic ideals and ideas of African Americans. Their extant texts evidence a strong, if small, community of African Muslims who produced letters, autobiographies, histories, and texts that range from excerpts of the Koran and theological commentaries to strategies for political rebellion and social integrity. As Diouf summarizes, these Arabic-writing intellectuals “used their knowledge not only to remain intellectually alert but also to defend and protect themselves, to maintain their sense of self, to reach out to their brethren, to organize uprisings, and, for some, to gain their freedom.”⁷ In sum, they were pre-Emancipation forerunners to those in the post-bellum–pre-Harlem era and later years. Like their African American sisters and brothers of other religious persuasions, like those who wrote in English, and like those whose achievements occurred decades later, they worked to preserve cultural values and to offer alternate modes of transcendence by, for, and of people of African descent in America.

French, too, was a lingua franca for some African Americans, and the collaborative achievements of French-speaking intellectuals form part of our legacy from African American writers, artists, and thinkers before 1880. They demonstrate a way in which some people of African descent rejected external definitions that tried to conflate and to dictate the cultural ingredients they should use. Instead of following the North Star, they sometimes sought freedom by sailing to France. However, these communities did not so much deny their African ancestry as they affirmed the African American Francophonic or Creole culture they constructed. Consideration of their art and shared endeavors provides a different starting point for narratives of the development of the African American press as well as our understanding of African American literary production. For example, the life and early writings of Alice Dunbar-Nelson become more nuanced and less odd and the chronicle of the development of African American fiction changes.

To begin with the last point, if one accepts, as did the editors of the first edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), Victor Séjour’s short story, “The Mulatto,” as African American fiction, the earliest extant short story can be dated from 1837 rather than 1852.⁸ Accepting Victor Séjour as an African American seems appropriate since he was born in New Orleans, his father was a free mulatto from Santo Domingo, and his mother was a Louisiana native of African ancestry. Moreover, Séjour grew up within a larger African American community than many African Americans of the eighteenth-century colonies did. He was educated at Sainte-Barbe Academy, a school run by an African American writer, Michel Séligny. As a young man, Séjour went to France, where he found recognition as an artist and intellectual. In important ways, Séjour’s journey parallels or prefigures those by other African Americans such as sculptor Edmonia Lewis in Italy, painter Henry Ossawa Tanner in France, violinist Portia Washington in Germany, and singer/actor Paul Robeson and writer Dorothy West in Russia.

Before leaving the United States, Victor Séjour had belonged to a dynamic literary community in New Orleans that produced in 1843 what some call the “first Negro literary magazine.”⁹ The Literary Album, Journal of Young People/L’Album Littéraire, Journal des Jeunes Gens began as a bimonthly, bilingual (French/English) compilation of “poems, editorials, sketches and short stories,” but proved so popular, write Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson II, that “it soon became a semi-monthly.”¹⁰ Slaveholding New Orleans, Louisiana, was not only the birthplace of what is considered the “first” literary magazine by African Americans, but it was also home to what has been identified as “the first Black newspaper in the South,” The Union/L’Union (1862), and in 1864, the “first Negro daily newspaper,” The New Orleans Tribune/La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orleans.¹¹ While they did not represent the majority of African Americans in the South, the French and/or multilingual newspapers and literary s...