Part One
Slavery and Abolitionism, Freedom and Jim Crow America
The works of the six writers discussed here contain a microscopic history of slavery, abolitionism, and black emancipation and then the rise of Jim Crow strictures, which sought to limit the newly acquired freedom of African Americans. Their genres are easily recognizable: Wheatleyâs religious poetry; Jacobsâs slave narrative; Forten GrimkĂ©âs Civil War journals; and Fausetâs, Larsenâs, and Hurstonâs early twentieth-century novels. Across their selection of literary genres, these authors provided the visible conditions of their times, which they experienced and/or confronted and described in their work. Based on the variety of their art forms, a set of critical and theoretical assessments is used to elucidate the uniqueness of their style, content, and meaning.
1 | Phillis Wheatleyâs Seminaked Body as Symbol and Metaphor |
As Roman imperialism laid the foundations of modern civilization, and led the wild barbarians of these islands along the path of progress, so in Africa today we are repaying the debt, and bringing to the dark places of the earth, the abode of barbarism and cruelty, the torch of culture and progress, while ministering to the material needs of our own civilizationâŠ. We hold these countries because it is the genius of our race to colonize, to trade, and to govern.1
As the opening quotation on empire and racial arrogance reveals, the image of Africa as the dark and vast unknown has a long and tortured history from the advent of the African slave trade in the fifteenth century to these postmodern times. In examining the iconography of Phillis Wheatleyâs seminaked body, marketed on Bostonâs slave auction block in 1761, we see her enslaved physical body as a pejorative symbol of the Dark Continent of Africa, pronounced in the rationalization of slavery and the construction of racial grids. Yet, Wheatleyâs body can also be interpreted as a metaphor of womenâs transformational power, for in coming to write, she gave new birth to herself and founded African American literature. As an artist, Wheatley represents the feminine-maternal capacity to regenerate life, although women as mothers have identities that go beyond that which are gendered and biologically determined. In her study Philosophy and the Maternal Body, Michelle Boulous Walker, like Helene Cixous before her, relates womenâs bodily power to their creative potential in opposition to the (in)stability of the fatherâs universe.2 Samples of Wheatleyâs poetry reveal from this perspective her appropriation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in that she often demonstrates a gender-specific, nurturing, and transformational impulse in selected works, whether her autobiographical poem, political and religious poems, or elegies. Rebirth and regeneration are major motifs in her poetry, of which, as slave-turnedpoet, she is the archetypal model.
Critics such as Robert Reid-Pharr who argue for the disestablishment of Wheatley as the harbinger of African American literature misread her significance as the first African American writer who established the precedence of black authors rewriting the body and human suffering via tropes of healing and recovery. Reid-Pharr posits, incorrectly, that because Wheatley was purchased and reared by the white Boston merchant John Wheatley and his wife, Susannah, she manifested âtraits of an âunfinishedâ literary trainingâ and âan âunfinishedâ racial identity.â In an attempt to buttress his argument for a new assessment of Wheatley, he states that she lacked a âblack subjectivityâ and âblack singularity.â Wheatley, according to his reading, was âno Frederick Douglass,â who distinguished masters from slaves in the Hegelian sense of the individual striving with the wisdom of historical consciousness and progress. âThis is why I have pointed to Wheatleyâs interracial domestication in my efforts to disestablish her status as the original author of a noble Black American literary tradition,â Reid-Pharr writes. Wheatleyâs seminal autobiographical poem âOn Being Brought from Africa to America, 1768â demonstrates, he continues, that her âwork does little to establish black specificityâ because âshe celebrates her enslavement.â3
Yet this autobiographical poem serves as an example of how several Wheatley scholars, including Reid-Pharr, have misinterpreted her double-voiced poem on Christian hypocrisy, which she parodies. In coming to write, Wheatley not only was the first significantly published and celebrated black intellectual artist to re-create herself from a degraded slave to a famous author, but she also was the most cherished who reinvigorated the abolitionist movement. By the time of Frederick Douglassâs emergence from slavery in 1838 to the publication of his first slave narrative in 1845, the abolitionist movement in America and London was well under way, having been advanced by Wheatley as early as 1773. From her autobiographical poem to her later poems and letters, Wheatley emerges as a moral and social reformer of her rigid colonial world. In her poetry she constructs the sociopolitics of civic mothering, caring and nurturing others and fostering a sense of community, beyond the circumscribed boundaries of race, gender, religion, science, and politics.
While drawing upon maternal metaphors of regeneration, Wheatley anticipated the principal tenets of maternal and feminist ethics that contemporary feminists from Carol Gilligan to Patricia Hill Collins attribute to women in their overarching maternal roles.4 White and black feminists such as Gilligan and Hill have defined concepts of a feminist morality in terms of the self in relation to others in the community that the precocious Wheatley, as poet, clearly embraces. In her pathbreaking book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Womenâs Development, Gilligan interprets white, middle-class womenâs definitions of themselves in terms of their relationship and connection with others, unlike their male peers who view autonomy and individualism as important self-defining values. Feminists such as Collins agree that womenâs maternal ethics of fostering care and building relationships symbolize a distinctly feminine characteristic and code of behavior. However, Collins posits that given the unique history of black men and women as enslaved individuals, black maternal and feminist ethics encompass a broader political and social agenda in reforming society in reference to the lives of black Americans. Their survival of slavery was a blow to the established order where their bodies had been given the marginal status of only an economic interest in the marketplace, as Ralph Ellison suggests in the introduction to this work.
On the threshold of a defining moment in history, Wheatley is one of the major precursors of the questing artist in society, advocating freedom and social and political justice on a much larger scale than Gilligan suggests about white women in particular. Wheatley is the first, African American female writer to combine the domestic politics of maternal and feminist ethics on a prominent level, for she wrote poetry that addresses the needs of individuals as well as the redressing of the entire national and global order vis-Ă -vis religion, science, peace, war, and later, slavery. For example, in her University of Cambridge (now Harvard University) poem, written before 1773, she refers to herself as an âEthiop,â synonymous with the whole of Africa. She uses her ethnic identity to admonish white college students to make the most of their privileges and opportunities, the luxuries of which are missing in Africa. Wheatley cites her hybrid status (as an African pariah and American Evangelical Christian) to contrast the indigenous but limited world of Africa to the unlimited realm of science in the West, thereby crossing and yet building a bridge across continents and disciplines. While the African scholar Adeleke Adeeko classifies this and other poems (in which Wheatley refers to her ethnic identity) as the poetâs âAfrican poemsâ of a âNew World, Christian, subaltern voice,â imitating her âmasters and mentorsâ and denigrating Africa,5 Vincent Carretta posits that her âexposure to Christianity, and to literacy, soon made her known to fellow believers,â6 nationally and internationally.
Wheatley appropriates her religion âas a primary subject,â giving her the âauthority and powerâ7 to speak to others, democratizing the hierarchy of race and class for the African outsider. In the Cambridge poem science and religion are morally juxtaposed as two determining forces of history. But the logic of science should not supplant, she implies, the importance of faith and religion. She explains, âStudents, to you âtis givân to scan the heights / Above, to traverse the ethereal space, / And mark the systems of revolving worlds / Still more, ye sons of science you receive / The blissful news by messengers from heavân, / How Jesusâ blood for your redemption flows.â8 Although the Cambridge poem does not specifically address the issue of race, Wheatley, the Ethiop, uses race and religion as yardsticks to check the inevitable proliferation of science against the studentsâ cultivation of an inner spirituality. With her antithetical positioning of race, religion, and science, Wheatley, the self-deprecating and âuntutoredâ African, appears to analyze subtly the inequality of race and opportunity while lauding the triumph of faith, a socially leveling force for her in an enslaving society.
Another illustration of her offering an olive branch of peace in this time after conflict and war is seen in one of her last poems, where she examines political power but applies feminine metaphors of positive social change to human advancement. Wheatleyâs poem âLiberty and Peace,â published in 1784, the year of her death, celebrates the achievement of the American Revolution. In this poem she uses gender-specific language to describe the human virtues of peace and freedom, which she characteristically feminizes. She writes,
Lo! Freedom comes âŠ
âShe moves divinely fair,
âOlive and Laurel bind her golden Hair.â
She, the bright Progeny of Heaven, descends,
And every Grace her sovereign Step attends;
For now kind Heaven, indulgent to our Prayer,
In smiling Peace resolves the Din of War.9
Justice and freedom, peace and nonaggression are intricately connected to a feminine psyche, but war and aggression (âNavies,â âfraternal Arms,â and âsavage Troopsâ) are firmly linked to a masculine imaginary. She feminizes the word âColumbiaâ and is believed to be the first to describe America as âColumbia, âthe goddess of freedomââ: âThe Sword resignâd, resume the friendly Part! / For Gailiaâs power espousâd Columbiaâs Cause.â The goddess of freedom functions as a metaphor of tranquillity after the chaos of war. Considering her violent abduction from Africa, her transition from a state of innate freedom to one of colonial enslavement, done at the will of an avaricious African and European patriarchy, Wheatleyâs poetic inscription of feminine powers appears to register her distrust of dominating, imperial authorities. Historically the black female body, as with the example of Wheatleyâs youthful appearance at auction, has been a site of the configuration of black womenâs identity as indistinguishable from commodified objects, made visible in black womenâs socially ascribed roles as slaves, servants, and sexed bodies. Appreciably, Wheatley is the first to rewrite the history of race and gender subordination to international acclaim and social change, transcending her inauspicious beginnings.
The Origin of Phillis Wheatley: The Quintessential Slave Heroine
According to Julian Masonâs introduction to Phillis Wheatleyâs poetry, on July 11, 1761, an enslaved and frail African female arrived at Bostonâs Feather Wharf10 perhaps wearing only a ragged piece of cloth tied around her tiny waist. Kidnapped from her family in West Africa, probably by Africans, shipped on the slave ship Phillis to America, and sold to the prosperous and religious Boston merchant John Wheatley, the puny slave would later become known as a famous poet whose writings were cited by abolitionists to attack the institution of slavery. However, her inauspicious naming and identity (after the slave ship Phillis) were symbolically inscribed on her seminude body. Her body was displayed as a capitalist tool and product of the African slave trade and European expansionism, and she was forced to stand at auction, perhaps under the typical advertisement of the day: âA Parcel of Likely Negroes Just Imported from West Africa.â The public, partial nakedness of Wheatleyâs developing body becomes a symbol of inscription, for on her body was written her foreignness, a politically and socially constructed identity, based on her color, gender, and culture.
The historian Winthrop Jordan has noted, âThe Negroâs color attained [its] greatest significance not as a scientific problem, but as a social fact. Englishmen found blackness in human beings a peculiar and important point of difference.â11 Within the cultural context of difference and foreignness, black peoplesâ color became an issue of debate over its origin, its cause, and its significance, particularly at a propitious time in history with the growth of imperialism and the slave trade. Slavery was seen by many as a necessary evil in the development of European capitalism, but the stigma of color mitigated this evil in the era of colonialism. Africans or Negroes became âsubjects for a special kind of obedience and subordinationâ to Englishmen who were âenergetically on the make,â Jordan remarks, and âsought to possess for themselves and their children one of the most bountiful dominions of the earthâ12: land as property. The early pejorative association of blackness with heathenism and difference was one that ascribed to blacks a certain identity, emblazoned on enslaved bodies of which Wheatleyâs becomes the prototype. She is perhaps the first clear model we have of an object-turned-subject with a conscious awareness that by writing she was giving birth to a new self, as seen in one of her epistles.
Wheatleyâs Seminaked Body: A Symbol of the Dark Continent
Wheatleyâs body was indeed a symbol of Africa and social death. As an illustration of this idea, we must consider the following occurrences: 1) the establishment of scientific racism in the eighteenth-century; 2) the John Hancock committeeâs affidavit on Wheatleyâs poetry; 3) John Wheatleyâs separate statement about his slaveâs uniqueness; and 4) Wheatleyâs writing of a short, autobiographical poem, âOn Being Brought from Africa to Americaââdescribed as one of the most âreviledâ poems in the African American literary canon.13 The first of these, scientific racism, contributed to the overarching perception of blackness as a state of negation, a notion delineated in Carolus Linnaeusâs book Systema naturae (1758), in which the Swedish botanist, who invented the term Homo sapiens, divided the human race into four categories. These classifications were based on skin color, temperament, physical stance, and geographical region, hence Native Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Native Americans were defined as âred, choleric, uprightâ; Europeans as âwhite, sanguine, muscularâ; Asians as âpale-yellow, melancholy, stiffâ; and Africans as âniger, phlegmatic, laxus,â with capricious behavior.14 Although Linnaeus did not design his scientific grid of taxonomy âin the ranked order favored by most Europeans in the racist tradition,â15 Stephen Jay Gould explains, he nonetheless established a perception of race that clearly favored the âsanguineâ European over others, especially the âcapriciousâ African.
Perceptions of race as outlined in a grid form and as projected on Wheatleyâs diminutive body-in-crisis on a slave auction block helped to fix her body in the racist gaze of the dominating culture, leading to the undoing of her body as a human body. Hers was not a valued human body, except for reasons of economic exploitation. Empirical scientists such as Gould, social scientists from Michel Foucault to Jacques Lacan, and the feminist Luce Irigaray have theorized the disjunctive discourse on race and taxonomy and gender. To various degrees they describe the resulting fragmentation of identities, springing from an enduring low ranking of the cultural Other, ideas useful in a rereading of Wheatley. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould argues that Linnaeus is not truly responsible for the scientific establishment of racist thought in the eighteenth century, although he influenced it. Gould re...