Literature

By: Joanna Brooks, Jon-Christian Suggs

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Literature

[This entry contains two subentries dealing with African American literature in the United States from the seventeenth century through the late nineteenth century.]

Early African American Literature

From the first arrivals of Africans in the Americas in the sixteenth century through the dawning of a national movement for the abolition of slavery in the United States in the 1830s, African Americans established a powerful literary tradition. Enslaved and free African Americans developed a variety of oral and print modes of literary expression: song, storytelling, signifying, preaching, and public speaking as well as published poetry, narratives, journals, petitions, political manifestos, almanacs, letters, hymnals, and histories. Early African American literature embraces all of these forms. It documents a remarkable diversity of experiences, beliefs, desires, concerns, and visions among enslaved and free peoples of African descent. Most important, early African American literature demonstrates the crucial role of literacy and the imagination as tools of personal and collective emancipation.

African American literature from its beginnings has served as a venue for the assertion of the humanity and authority of black people against the inhumanities of racism and slavery. Europeans and Euro-Americans historically viewed print literacy as an essential feature of civilization, and they discounted the intelligence of Africans and African Americans, whom they incorrectly believed lacked literate culture. In fact, West African societies maintained highly developed, intricate oral traditions of history, narrative, and poetry. Universities in West Africa also attracted students from across Africa by offering instruction in written Arabic. The Africans carried away to the Americas as slaves brought with them this rich literary legacy.

Slavery played a powerful role in shaping new African American literary tradition. It induced African peoples of differing ethnic groups, religious traditions, and languages to develop a shared oral culture. Especially in the American South, where rural plantations housed large populations of slaves in close quarters, the developing African American oral tradition retained strong ties to West African and Caribbean storytelling. One important strand of this oral tradition is the trickster tale—including Brer Rabbit and John and Old Massa stories—which features an underdog hero who outwits more powerful opponents and overturns the established social order.

Regional differences in American colonial religion, literacy levels, and slaveholding economies fostered different literary developments among northern blacks. Many northern blacks lived as servants and laborers attached to white households and were isolated from large gatherings of blacks except on Sundays and holidays, at religious revivals and festivals, and in public and market spaces. Even though northern blacks were generally refused access to public education, they had better opportunities for learning to read and write from their slave masters' families, church-affiliated schools, and mutual aid societies. Under these conditions, the print tradition of African American literature began in the northern American colonies in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

African American Literature to 1800

Poetry was a favored genre for literary expression by blacks in early America. The first known African American poet is Lucy Terry Prince, an enslaved woman of Massachusetts. At age sixteen, Terry composed the song “Bars Fight” to commemorate an August 1746 skirmish between colonists and Native Americans at Deerfield, Massachusetts; the poem was not published until 1855, when it appeared in Josiah Holland's History of Western Massachusetts. The first published African American poet was Jupiter Hammon, a slave to the wealthy Lloyd family of Long Island, New York, whose poem “An Evening Thought” appeared on 25 December 1760. Hammon published several other poems and prose essays during his lifetime. Religious concerns dominate most of his writings, but even an apparently pietistic poem, such as “A Dialogue, Entitled, The Kind Master and Dutiful Servant” (1783), engages a matrix of scripture references to communicate a covert message of black emancipation. His poem “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly [sic], Ethiopian Poetess” (1778) and “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York” (1787) also indicate Hammon's concern for the welfare of his fellow African Americans.

The best-known African American poet of the colonial and early national eras is Phillis Wheatley. It is believed that she was born in Senegambia, West Africa, and kidnapped into slavery as a child. Phillis was purchased on 11 July 1761 by the influential Wheatley family of Boston. The precocious poet first won broad literary notice with the publication of “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield” (1770), a memorial of the transatlantic celebrity English itinerant preacher, which was published as a broadside and reprinted in newspapers throughout the American colonies. Whitefield's sponsor, Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, a powerful force in English religious life and culture, subsequently facilitated the publication of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

In June and July 1773 Wheatley herself traveled to England to arrange for publication; while in England, she cannily utilized her social contacts with such English nobles as the Countess of Huntingdon to secure a promise of manumission from her master, John Wheatley. Wheatley's poetry uses neoclassical poetic conventions to engage themes of freedom, power, memory, imagination, subversion, and spirituality. Many of her elegiac poems commemorate difficult ocean crossings, family separations, and lost loved ones, images reminiscent of Wheatley's own Middle Passage experience. Besides writing poetry, Wheatley also maintained an extensive correspondence with her close friend Obour Tanner, a black woman of Newport, Rhode Island. Despite worsening economic circumstances, a difficult marriage, and the loss of three children, Wheatley continued to write poetry and develop unsuccessful proposals for new books. She died on 5 December 1784.

Phillis Wheatley, in a portrait of 1773 by the African American engraver Scipio Moorhead. It was the frontispiece in Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Library of Congress.

view larger image

Life narratives constitute another important set of early African American writings. The first autobiography published by a black author was A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (1760), a story of the enslaved Hammon's thirteen-year adventure around the Atlantic littoral as a sailor, Indian captive, prisoner of war, and impressed marine. In A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black, Taken Down from His Own Relation (1785), the freeman John Marrant related his dramatic religious conversion by George Whitefield, his captivity among Indians in South Carolina, his ministry among enslaved blacks, his adventures as an impressed British sailor during the Revolutionary War, and his ordination in the evangelical Huntingdon Connexion. (In 1790 Marrant also published a Journal of his mission to exiled black Loyalist communities in Nova Scotia.)

The most famous and influential eighteenth-century narrative of black life belongs to Olaudah Equiano, whose Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789) describes in vivid detail childhood experiences in Africa, the Middle Passage, enslavement in America, travels on the high seas, conversion to Christianity, and the beginnings of the movement for black resettlement in Africa. While certain historical documents suggest that Equiano may have been born in the American colonies and thus fabricated the account of his early life in Africa, the Narrative is still considered a landmark work of early black literature. It is likely that the politically savvy Equiano included episodes of childhood and kidnapping in Africa to influence British debates over the abolition of the slave trade.

Other eighteenth-century life narratives were written by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Boston King, David George, Venture Smith, and John Jea. Most of these narratives do not conform to the classical slave narrative formulas developed in the nineteenth century by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. They do, however, share some common features. One is the trope of the talking book—first identified by the literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a symbol of how black authors negotiated the divide between traditional African orality and the print literacy valued by Europeans and Euro-Americans as a marker of civilization—which appears in the narratives of Gronniosaw, Equiano, Marrant, and Jea. Many of these narratives also employ conventions of religious autobiography to frame the black experience of enslavement and emancipation as a spiritual journey.

A third body of early African American literature comprises prose political writings, such as sermons, speeches, petitions, letters, and appeals. These texts document a foundational phase in black intellectual, religious, and political history. During a 1789 visit to Boston, John Marrant delivered and published his Sermon to the African Lodge of the Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons, the first black Masonic lodge in the United States. Marrant's Sermon crafted an ennobling vision of black history featuring African figures from the Bible and church history. The African lodge founder Prince Hall followed Marrant by delivering two Charges (1792 and 1797) to the black Freemasons of Boston, which affirmed the intellectual capacities of black people, criticized white supremacy, and promised that Africans throughout the diaspora would soon rise up and govern themselves. Other important political writings from this era include Benjamin Banneker's letter to Thomas Jefferson (1792), A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia (1794) by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, and the constitutions of the African Society of Boston (1796) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1796).

African American Literature, 1800–1830

The early nineteenth century saw the growth and maturation of black churches, conventions, mutual aid societies, schools, and reading groups, which promoted literacy and served as centers for literary activity. Writings by African Americans addressed the slave trade, slave emancipation, colonization, and the welfare of free black communities. The legislated end to American participation in the international slave trade on 1 January 1808 inaugurated a new tradition of commemorative New Year's Day sermons, such as those delivered and published by Absalom Jones in Philadelphia (1808), Peter Williams Jr. in New York (1808), and Henry Sipkins in New York (1809).

Other publications informed American blacks of political developments throughout the African diaspora, including the sailor, businessman, and colonizer Paul Cuffe's Brief Account of the Settlement and Present Situation of the Colony of Sierra Leone in Africa (1812), Prince Saunders's Haytian Papers (1816), and Robert Alexander Young's Ethiopian Manifesto (1829). The first black newspaper in the United States, Freedom's Journal, appeared on 16 March 1827 in New York City. The publishers Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm declared, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” During its two-year run, Freedom's Journal served as an important venue for advocating the abolition of slavery, debating African colonization, and promoting the social and cultural achievements of African Americans.

The early national era of black literary production concluded in 1829 with the publication of two important works. George Moses Horton, a slave of North Carolina, published a volume of poems entitled The Hope of Liberty (1829). A self-taught reader, Horton first won recognition for his talents from students at the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; remarkably, Horton did not learn to write until 1832, and he relied upon the novelist Caroline Lee Hentz to transcribe his poems for publication. Although proceeds from poem sales allowed Horton to purchase time from his master, several campaigns to secure his freedom undertaken by friends and supporters proved unsuccessful.

The year 1829 also saw the publication of David Walker's incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker was born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1785; during the 1820s he moved to Boston, where he became an agent for Freedom's Journal and an activist in the growing abolitionist movement. His Appeal issued an uncompromising call for immediate abolition, encouraged slaves to rise up against their owners, and rejected colonization as a solution to racial conflict in the United States. It is believed that Walker mobilized a clandestine network of couriers, including black sailors, to carry copies of the Appeal into the South to ensure that his message reached slaves. After drawing tremendous criticism and vengeance, especially from southern whites, Walker died under mysterious circumstances in 1830. Both of these publications signal that in the late 1820s, as a national movement for the abolition of slavery took shape, the South began to claim a new place in African American literature as a site of literary imagination, production, and reception.

Black authors in the colonial and early national eras created a strong foundation for the development of African American literature. Working in diverse literary forms and genres, from neoclassical poetry to sermons to petitions, early African American writers claimed the imagination and defined black literary tradition as key venues for the creation and realization of freedom.

See also Autobiography; Allen, Richard; Banneker, Benjamin; Black Press; Cuffe, Paul; Equiano, Olaudah; Folklore; Freedom's Journal; George, David; Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw; Hall, Prince; Hammon, Briton; Hammon, Jupiter; Horton, George Moses; Jea, John; Jones, Absalom; King, Boston; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Marrant, John; Oratory and Verbal Arts; Petitions; Prince, Lucy Terry; Robert Alexander Young's Manifesto; Russwurm, John Brown; Saunders, Prince; Sipkins, Henry; Slave Narratives; Smith, Venture; Trickster; Walker, David; Wheatley, Phillis; and Williams, Peter, Jr.

Joanna Brooks

African American Literature From the Antebellum Era Through the Post–Civil War Era

The events of late August 1831 in Virginia marked, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the end for any Edenic visions of an America rooted in a slave-based economy. Nat Turner's rebellion changed the face of slavery in the South and the rhetoric of abolitionism in the North. Each became harsher, and each helped shape the nature of African American literature for the next fifty years.

It is possible to note certain general tendencies and the historical conditions that framed the appearance of African American literature before and after the Civil War. For one, slaveholding America's reaction to the implications of the Turner rebellion was to pass scores of new, restrictive laws governing every aspect of slaves' lives. In addition, the traditional and customary restraints of slave life were intensified, and social and emotional distances between the enslaved and their enslavers grew. One such distance was intellectual; almost every jurisdiction in traditional slaveholding states placed severe limits on the rights of enslaved persons to achieve literacy where such limitations did not already exist. Punishments were prescribed for slaves found to be literate and for whites or others found teaching slaves to read or write. Further restrictions on travel, residency, and association created an isolated culture among slaves, most of it transmitted orally and sometimes cryptically, as through the coded patterns in handmade quilts, which gave directions for escape to runaway slaves, whose numbers increased significantly between 1830 and the onset of the Civil War.

Antebellum African American Literature

African American accounts of slavery and flight from slavery make up the bulk of African American literature between 1831 and 1865. The mediums through which these stories were channeled included the traditional genres of poetry and expository prose; stories were usually printed in the North in either black-owned and black-edited newspapers—such as the Colored American (1837) and the Mirror of Liberty (1838) in New York; the National Reformer (1838) in Philadelphia; Martin Robison Delany's Mystery (1843); and Douglass's North Star, Frederick Douglass' Paper, and Douglass' Monthly (1847–1863)—or the newspapers and journals of white abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, whose Liberator (1831) and Emancipator (1833), published in Boston, communicated the fight over slavery across the country. Non-news periodicals provided outlets as well. Those established by African Americans included the AME Church Magazine (1841) and its successor, the Repository of Religion and Literature and of Science and Art (1858), and three incarnations of a single venture, the Anglo-African, the Anglo-African Weekly, and Pine and Palm (1859–1861).

The roll call of antebellum African American poets is essentially a list of antislavery poets, most of whom published in the newspapers and journals already named or in even more transient journals, some self-published. Black men and women of letters, some who were born into slavery but escaped or were manumitted and others free born—teachers, ministers, lawyers, or still slaves—produced lyrics, epics, sermons, satires, and “freedom” songs. Authors included George Moses Horton, Charlotte L. Forten Grimké, Elymas Payson Rogers, Charles L. Reason, Ann Plato, Joshua McCarter Simpson, James Monroe Whitfield, George Boyer Vashon, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alfred Gibbs Campbell, and James Madison Bell.

Although many were self-educated, almost all eventually found some formal training beyond grammar school. While none were experimental in their poetic practices, all were at least fine imitators of the best English prosody. None chose to capture the essence of life under slavery through the use of nonstandard language. There was no antebellum “dialect” poetry of the kind that became so popular among white readers and practiced, usually out of economic necessity, by some black writers by the end of the nineteenth century. Topics like the nobility of suffering, the perfidy of whites, the majesty of the law, the certainty of God's justice, and occasionally the solace of earthly love and devotion called for the most elevated language possible. While this poetry was offered as testimony, it was also intended as both argument and propaganda, as seen in Alfred Gibbs Campbell's 1856 poem, “The Doom of Slavery”:

Slavery, Union, Compromise,
(Foulest of all trinities)
Throned upon a tower of lies,
Are the nation's deities.
Hurl these false Gods from their throne!
Snatch from Slavery's brow the crown!
Tear the blood-stained Union down!
Trample Compromises down!

High seriousness was the order of the day, with only the rarest exceptions.

Many of the religious figures among the poets, as well as Harper, Grimké, Plato, and Maria T. Stewart, were also essayists. Their polemical confrontations of slavery appeared in the same venues that published poetry. In most cases, the audiences for these pieces were white readers. Occasionally, however, a text addressed an African American audience directly. For example, the early black newspaper Freedom's Journal, published in New York between 1827 and 1829, carried the earliest version of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), a call to arms to African Americans.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), in an engraving from William Still's The Underground Rail Road, 1872. Harper was an abolitionist as well as a literary figure; her poetry and her novels depicted the evils of slavery, especially as inflicted on slave women.

Library of Congress.

view larger image

David Walker's Appeal stands in the tradition of revolutionary essays, whose long history in English prose begins at least with John Milton and was mastered in America by Thomas Paine. Walker's argument was entirely race specific, calling attention to the dreadful consequences of racial oppression as an economic principle. Those of African descent in America were in such a position of degradation that, for Walker, the only hope for his people lay in their taking matters into their own hands; he implored African Americans to strike for freedom and gain separation from iniquitous overlords, associating black American prospects with those of people of color around the world and, while not rejecting the possibility of white allies, calling for the use of violence to the point of killing white masters. The seditious impact—or, more accurately, the fear of the seditious effect the Appeal would have—was further impetus for the restrictions on black literacy passed after 1831, and the tract itself was banned in most of the slaveholding states.

Antebellum African American periodicals served up a body of short fiction as well. In black periodicals published between 1827 and 1865, ninety-nine fictional pieces can be identified; most of these works, however, are partial-page anecdotes or very short stories, and it is not clear how many are by people of color. A few of these stories have been collected in the works of individual authors, but the great majority of them have not been published since their first appearance.

The African American experience gave rise to a new genre as well: the slave narrative—or, more properly, the fugitive slave narrative—and its nearly identical formal cousin, the slave autobiography. Finally, late in the years before the Civil War, African Americans produced novels depicting the black experience in America's “peculiar institution.”

Slave Narrative and Autobiography

African America autobiography had started, it can be argued, with the selfreferential notes in the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (c. 1754–1784). There is general agreement, however, that the genre formally emerged with the account of Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). Equiano's colonial narrative, which has traditionally been received as authentically firsthand in its description of the narrator's African origins and early life, has come under scrutiny for its author's apparent use, more extensive than was originally realized, of previously published sources. Nevertheless, certain basic characteristics of the slave autobiography are present in the text. There is the need to give testimony, on the one hand, to the redemptive “accident” of enslavement—namely, the introduction of the subject to Christianity—and, on the other, to the barbarism of slavery itself, in ironic contradistinction to the supposed savagery of Africa, or “African-ness,” mediated by the Christianity of the enslaved convert. The centrality of Christo-historical intervention is also evident in a much later piece, The Memoir of James Jackson, the African American teacher Susan Paul's 1835 biography of one of her pupils, a studious, pious six-year-old free black in Boston. Not only is this possibly the first African American biography, but it is also one of the few documents extant that describes the lives of free black children in antebellum America.

While the basic autobiographical and biographical tropes became less useful characteristics of the fugitive slave narrative that emerged in the republican America of the 1830s, other elements of the Equiano-ist narrative occur there. These elements are associated primarily with the need of the text to do political work while telling a story. The fugitive tale had as its intended audience white northerners whose active sympathy for a moral campaign against slavery as an institution needed to be recruited. Therefore, the expository function in the narrative had to be more than illustrative or descriptive; it had to be instructive and, ultimately, argumentative in effect. To enhance the likelihood that the reader would identify with the narrator, language had to be accessible and familiar to the reader, echoing his or her ethnic and class assumptions about language as a marker for identity. Consequently, language in narratives of the era approximated that of the audience, and the everyday, or “traditional,” speech of nonliterate characters was avoided. Finally, there was the problem of the narrator's subjectivity. In most fugitive slave narratives, the subject, though a “real” person, is “invented” in the sense that she or he is a conscious construction designed by the author to carry both the narrative and its didactic intentions to realization.

Over some 170 years, an estimated six thousand personal narratives of race-based slavery were publicly distributed. Of the hundreds of fugitive slave narratives composed and published before the war, more than seventy were of at least pamphlet length, and forty-four were of book length. The remaining prewar accounts were published in journals and newspapers or as broadside sheets. Not all of these narratives were written by the fugitives themselves, in the most literal sense of putting pen to paper with one's own hand. Many were told to white or black abolitionists, who redacted the stories and shaped them for reading, drawing upon a range of literary conventions. Regardless, many were the direct expressions of the writers' own experiences, usually powerfully and movingly put down. Of these, the two most famous are Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)—along with his two subsequent autobiographical works, My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, issued in 1881 and 1892—and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

Douglass's original work has long been considered the “master” narrative of its genre for several reasons. One is the simple impact of the longevity and public stature of its author. Douglass was nineteenth-century black America's foremost public intellectual. The three versions of his narrative, his newspapers and periodicals, his essays, his novella—The Heroic Slave—his oratory, and his published speeches constitute a record of change and growth unparalleled in the century. Douglass had been recruited by William Lloyd Garrison to work as a paid speaker on the abolitionist lecture circuit. His gradual awakening to the limits of Garrison's arguments for the suasive power of moral rhetoric to change history eventually led him to distance himself from that approach. The first visible consequence of that break was the publication of his narrative.

Both Douglass and Jacobs make specific, personal arguments about slavery and its effects that reveal idiosyncratic and individualized responses to the difficulties of liberation. Jacobs's story is so obviously structured by her gender identity that it throws Douglass's into relief; for all his childhood dependency on the very institution that enslaved him, nothing in Douglass's life matches the complexity of concerns and constraints that shape Jacobs's. Thus, her equation of the condition of women under the impress of the codes of gentility and motherhood with that of blacks under slavery, while it is subtextual, is absolutely essential to her understanding of what she underwent. Both of these narratives stand “above” other narratives of flight, owing to the singularity of their narrators.

Antebellum African American Novel

The African American novel in the years before the Civil War stands in contrast to the slave narrative in one very important aspect. While the slave autobiography or narrative is the express “invention” of a racialized genre situated in a specific economic context, the early African American novel is an exercise in adaptation to an already extant, nonracialized genre that had emerged within a different economic context. Put briefly, the economic context from which the slave narrative emerged was that of a neofeudalistic agrarian culture based on nonwage slave labor. The novel as a modern genre, on the other hand, emerged from a primitive capitalist culture oriented around wage-based labor, open markets, and credit.

Inasmuch as the only reasons the enslaved population existed in America were economic, and because only persons of African descent were enslaved, African American cultural production particularly reflected the shaping influence of economic relationships. Slavery was becoming a stagnant economic form, while capitalism was evolving into a complex arrangement of competing dialectical forces. Consequently, the formal characteristics of the slave narrative remained more or less fixed, and the genre itself gradually vanished with the end of slavery. The slave narratives that were produced after the Civil War had less to do with resistance to slavery and the argument over Africans as fit to sit at the table of human interaction than with an evocation of the mechanics of slavery and the effects on those who had been subjected to the institution. Almost none of the postwar narratives were written by former fugitives; they were instead either transcripts of interviews with slaves who had not escaped or the memoirs of those slaves written after they had become literate, usually during Reconstruction.

The novel in general, meanwhile, evolved as a biographically centered narrative that sought to treat the story of an individual as the subject of history. As the relationships among competing forces in capitalist societies became more complex, so, too, did the possibilities for storytelling within the novel genre. Still, the centrality of an individual consciousness to narration remained constant, just as the individual as a monadic figure capable of owning private productive property, usually in the form of capital, remained at the center of capitalism's own self-referential myth.

The African American antebellum version of the novel had several manifestations, as writers adapted the genre to fit the particularities of the black experience in America. In one incarnation, the novel could be a fictionalized recounting of a real person's experience, as was the case with Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859). In another it could be an imaginative setting forth of the interplay of social forces illustrated by their effect on a single fictional personality or consciousness, as in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853) and its subsequent revisions (1860–1861, 1864, 1867). In yet another form, the novel could be a saga of family fortunes framed by the implacable hostility of the laws and customs of both capital- and race-based slavery, as in Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857). Then again, the novel could be a picaresque adventure of resistance and rebellion embodied in the personality and integrity of a romantically imagined hero, as was the case in Martin Robison Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859–1861). This list exhausts the titles of well-known antebellum novels, with the possible exception of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (ca. 1857), an unpublished narrative thought by its editor to be a novel authored by a slave; the text was rediscovered in 2001, and scholars are divided on its authenticity.

In each case, the adaptive program of the African American novel was to capture the validity of the reader's interest in an individual despite that individual's isolation from most of the dynamics of expectation that drove narrative development in novels written for and about whites: the prospects of futurity; the accessibility of capital after a period of hard work or testing; the securing of fortune by virtue of one's relations with a wider world, including and often especially through marriage; the unexpected loss of fortune; and recovery through effort and strength of character as well as familial support. Given the constraints placed on blacks in America before the Civil War, including free persons of color as well as those enslaved, the novel was an awkward fit as a vehicle for the narration of their experiences.

With the exception of William Wells Brown's play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858); some one hundred pieces of short fiction, such as Victor Sejour's “The Mulatto” (1837), published in French in New Orleans and the earliest known short story by an African American; Frances Harper's “The Two Offers” (1859), the first short story published by an African American woman; and Frederick Douglass's novella, The Heroic Slave (1853), the remainder of antebellum African American literature consisted of antislavery essays, appeals for the temperance movement, and small anecdotes of moral uplift, almost all published in abolitionist newspapers and journals or in the aforementioned black-run newspapers.

Postbellum and Reconstruction Writing

After the war, African American book-length fiction almost vanished for a quarter of a century. With the exception of Thomas Detter's Nellie Brown; or, The Jealous Wife (1871) and Harper's Minnie's Sacrifice (1869) and Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story (1876–1877), serialized in the Christian Recorder, there seem to have been no novels published by African Americans between Emancipation and the end of Reconstruction and for some ten years beyond. Nonfiction prose continued to be published in various black-owned periodicals and occasionally in white magazines, and, as has been noted, slave autobiographies also continued to appear. Individuals such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and various church- and upliftoriented figures also published or self-published tracts, “histories,” poetry, and memoirs.

The canon of African American literature since 1831 had served some four masters: abolitionism, Christianity, temperance, and belles lettres. It had, for the most part, developed independently of the rest of American literature, evolving into new genres out of necessity and adapting old ones where possible, yet it lacked a large core of African American readers and had only a few consistent practitioners. After the Civil War the black canon's white audience of abolitionists vanished rather quickly. What poetry and short fiction remained was either religious in nature or propaganda for the temperance movement. What promised to be a new era of freedom for African Americans would prove to be, ironically, a relatively sterile ground for black imaginative literature. Only the arena of nonfiction prose showed signs of innovative life.

The secular essay was one genre that persisted in African American writing after Reconstruction. Like Reverend Edward Bryant's “Our Duties, Responsibilities—Negro Literature” (1885), though secular in subject matter, many such essays were written by ministers in church-sponsored journals. Others were written by lawyers; although there were only about seven hundred black lawyers in the United States in the nineteenth century, and while many of those were relatively ill-educated and faced considerable barriers in their practice, the very best wrote about the issues of their day. In 1886 the AME Church Review carried both Alexander Clark's essay “Socialism” and E. J. Waring's “The Judical Function in Government”; in 1888 Aaron A. Mossell's essay, “The Unconstitutionality of the Law against Miscegenation,” appeared in the same journal. The next year the New York Independent published Charles W. Chesnutt's, “What Is a White Man?” and the AME Church Review offered T. McCants Stewart's “The Afro-American as a Factor in the Labor Problem.” These essays and two score like them not only examined the intersection of constitutional law and African American life but also critiqued white stewardship of the federal government, proposed economic reform, sought changes in the American penal system, and extolled the benefits of secularized higher education.

The most anomalous African American literary event of the post-Reconstruction era was specifically concerned with constitutional law. In 1889 Lippincott and Company published an anonymously authored 578-page analysis of certain post-Emancipation constitutional issues and the case law and legislation surrounding them. Underwritten by the Brotherhood of Liberty, an association of African American clergy and businessmen from Baltimore, Maryland, Justice and Jurisprudence: An Inquiry Concerning the Constitutional Limitations of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments is a compendium of legal analysis, legal theory, legal history, moral philosophy, fiction, poetry, anecdote, and essay. It addresses most particularly the failure of the post-Reconstruction legal system to protect the rights of Americans of African descent as set out in the three aforementioned postwar amendments. Nothing like this tome appears elsewhere in nineteenthcentury African American or American literature or law. It remains one of the least-known and least-examined African American texts of the period.

One reason for its neglect is that, despite its prescient understanding of the impending dismantling of Reconstruction's reengineering of the American rights landscape, most blacks in America were still too uneducated—or outright illiterate—to read it, and most whites, at every social and economic level, stood to gain too much from the disestablishment of black rights. The obvious failure of the reforms of Reconstruction to outlive the election of 1876 would not be ameliorated by theory or analysis.

African American Voice in Literature

In sum, African American literature from the early Republic to the last decade of the nineteenth century emerged from two imperatives: desire and necessity. African American poetry of the century was for the most part formally imitative and not particularly adaptive. Yet the genre's sentiments were illustrative of a desire on the part of its practitioners to find a voice for devotional praise and sentiments extolling political freedom and release from spiritual and physical bondage. No new formal ground was broken by black poets except with regard to the appearance of a poetic dialect of racial identity that, by the end of the century, was widely imitated by whites in popular entertainment, both public and private.

African American nonfictional prose, too, was not original in form but was particularized by its content. African American essayists of the nineteenth century addressed issues of specific interest to the affairs of the race, from Emancipation to miscegenation. The primary venues for nonfiction prose by black writers were, for almost the entire century, black-run newspapers and church-based journals. African American newspapers, from their origins in the 1820s through the rest of the century, promoted literacy not only as evidence of black American potential for citizenship, to be noted by white readers and supporters, but as a means of promoting widespread African American identity and solidarity with a common core of issues. Black journals and other periodicals became the venues for more intellectualized discourse, drawing their readership from what would become, after W. E. B. Du Bois's metaphor at century's end, the Talented Tenth—the members of the literate 10 percent of the black population that was more or less secure in their homes, professions, and families.

Lawyers, ministers, and the remnants of the professionalized abolitionist activists published essays and reviews on matters of church discipline, constitutional law, higher education, astronomy, and foreign affairs. The evils of socialism were pointed out, even as the promise of socialism was heralded. Pamphlets and histories on people of African descent in America were staples, and there was throughout the century a growing interest in the African past, as news of Liberia and Sierra Leone made its way in the popular press alongside the colonial exploits of various Britons and Belgians. For African Americans this burgeoning interest stimulated articles and essays on the heritage of Ethiopia and the glory of Egypt.

But it was the African American prose narrative, rising out of the necessity of finding a voice for the black experience with slavery, that was to result in the most lasting literary tradition. Beginning with the accounts of fugitive slaves, the African American narrative proper began to reshape standard American autobiographical practices and then adapted itself to, while adapting in kind, the bases of the English-language extended narrative form that came to be known as the American novel. While the English novel took as its premise the social and economic fortunes of an emerging middle class, the African American novel took as its premise the struggle for a stable and functional legal identity for its protagonists and their families, immediate and extended alike. Both are narratives of rising and falling fortunes, but the African American novel, until the end of the nineteenth century, charted those oscillations along the axes of American law. If the English and their white American cousins consumed stories of the acquisition, loss, and reacquisition of fortune as property, African Americans told themselves stories of the fate, not fortune, of being property and of the irony of a postproperty life to which an entire nation had to adapt.

The fortunes of African Americans as revealed in fiction took on characteristics similar to those of whites in extended narratives only in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. By then the first stirrings of a series of demographic shifts were being felt. Prompted by increasing evidence of the failure, twenty years earlier, of Reconstruction to secure either rights or liberties in what was blithely called the “New South,” African Americans turned their attention “up south” to the urban North and moved there in increasing numbers. Plessy v. Ferguson and the sanctification of state-regulated racial segregation across the old Confederacy would become the backdrop against which a growing black bourgeoisie would write and read fictions about their American fortune.

See also Abolitionism; Africa, Idea of; African Diaspora; Anglo-African Newspaper; Antislavery Press; Brown, William Wells; Christian Recorder; Civil Rights; Delany, Martin Robison; Douglass, Frederick; Douglass' Monthly; Emancipation; Frederick Douglass' Paper; Garrison, William Lloyd; Heroic Slave, The; Jacobs, Harriet; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; My Bondage and My Freedom; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; North Star; Oratory and Verbal Arts; Reason, Charles L.; Slave Narratives; Turner, Nat; Vashon, George Boyer; and Walker, David.

Jon-Christian Suggs

processed xml | source xml