The list of early African American fictions is unexpectedly provisional. Presently it includes “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown, The Garies and Their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb, The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857?) by Hannah Crafts, Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) by Harriet E. Wilson, Blake, Or the Huts of America (1859–62) by Martin R. Delany, and “The Two Offers” (1859) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. But the list has been evolving. The full text of Blake was not made available until 1969.1 Our Nig was not identified as an African American novel until 1982; The Bondwoman’s Narrative was not discovered to be an African American fiction until 2001. It has been identified by several kinds of forensic and scholarly tests as a manuscript written by an escaped slave woman.2 On the authority of its finder, Henry Louis Gates Jr., it is proper to treat that manuscript as authentic, but it is so newly found that it is also proper to retain the possibility that it might prove to be otherwise.
Early African American fiction is a decidedly unstable field. Our Nig had been thought to be a novel by a white woman. Another title which had been thought to be a novel by a white woman was shown in 19813 to be a genuine slave narrative written by an African American woman whose name is now on its cover: Harriet Ann Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.4 The border between fact and fiction is a broad territory, not a dividing line, and an item in the September 1859 issue of the New York Anglo-African Magazine illustrates the vagueness of the border. “Patrick Brown’s First Love” reports the story of a slave who has become free by default.5 So many of his masters have met violent deaths that nobody wants to buy him. Patrick Brown tells the reporter that he has secretly killed all the white men who mistreated him. It is remarkable that a slave should spend a lifetime concealing the fact that he is a murderer and then allow his story to be told in a newspaper. “Patrick Brown’s First Love” may in fact be the first African American short story, but it is only one of many items purporting to be true stories which appeared in anti-slavery newspapers and magazines. In the London Anti-Slavery Advocate in 1852, William Wells Brown wrote an article he called “A True Story of Slave Life.” It is an account of the sale of a beautiful mulatto woman on the auction block in Richmond, Virginia.6 The details are reproduced the following year as chapter 1 of Clotel, “The Negro Sale.”7 Fiction was emerging everywhere in African American writing in the decades before the Civil War, and there may be no definitively first story.
When African Americans made the move from the writing of narratives to the writing of novels, they were stepping across a void no matter how close the last narratives were to the first novels. At that moment the writers were giving up the authenticity of life for the authenticity of imagination, and the guarantee to the reader had to be of a different order. For Addison Gayle, that moment was one of failure because “ignoring their own history and culture, the early black writers attempted to create a literature patterned upon that of whites.”8 In the 1970s, Gayle was voicing an anger provoked by the ambiguities of early African American fiction: Was it black or was it white? Was it African or American? Was it a proud development of an authentic slave tradition or a poor imitation of the Victorian novel of manners? Did it help or did it hinder the African American cause? Answers depend on what you read as well as how you read. Gayle was reading a list of titles different from the titles now available, and the first answers come in response to another question: Where did early African American fiction come from?
Texts come from texts, and two answers have been given for the starting point of these texts: the black slave narrative and the white popular novel. The fact is that the African American fiction is rooted in both, but it owes its distinctiveness to the slave narrative. The greatest slave narrative is the eighteenth-century masterpiece, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,9 but it is not this treasure that was the direct model for the fictions being written in the 1850s. Equiano’s voice – aristocratic, genteel, Augustan, and deferential, more English than American – was not the voice being heard in the thirty years before the Civil War. The classic American slave narrative is democratic, businesslike, plainspoken, and self-assertive.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Boston, 1845)10 and the Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (Boston, 1847)11 work through a pattern of realization, resistance, flight, survival, and deliverance focusing on actions and themes that were not the commonplaces of the Victorian novel.12 They spoke of the human body with a directness which gave them an unrivaled impact in the nineteenth century. Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave” takes off from his Narrative to work though the story of a fellow fugitive whose acts of liberation bring death to his wife and freedom to his people. William Wells Brown’s Clotel has as part of its subtitle A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. Its introduction, “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown,” is a version of his 1847 narrative, and it stands as a guarantee of the authenticity of the fiction that is to follow. Frank Webb was a Free Colored man living in the North, but he begins The Garies with the flight of two families, and he goes on to show that fugitives from the South must keep running in the North. Hannah Crafts might have provided a classic slave narrative, one to stand alongside Harriet Ann Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, but she chose not to tell her story in that form. Instead Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative makes fiction out of three escape attempts in ways which contradict as well as confirm the slave narrative pattern. Harriet Wilson was a Free Colored woman living in the North, and there are no slave codes where the heroine of Our Nig lives, but “she was indeed a slave, in every sense of the word; and a lonely one, too.”13 Wilson’s novel presents another evolution of the slave narrative by universalizing the virtual slavery of so many caught in segregation’s trap and from which escape was less easy than from the plantation. Martin Delany develops the patterns of the slave narrative in Blake so that the escape from the plantation becomes a mission to “establish a Negro government.”14 Of the early stories and novels, only Frances Harper’s “The Two Offers” shows no link with the slave narrative.
Self-liberating African Americans produced first their own factual accounts of slave life and second, their own fictionalized versions of that life. But when Douglass and Brown impelled themselves into print in 1853, they did so because the most successful of all New England novels had appropriated their narratives and outstripped their sales. In 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe began publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly in serial form in the abolitionist National Era. At the end of 1852, she published it in book form,15 and over 300,000 copies were sold.16 Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an anti-slavery novel and not the first example of its kind. That had appeared in 1836 with the publishing of Richard Hildreth’s The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore.17 It described the experiences of a free black man kidnapped into Southern slavery. At first readers believed they were reading an authentic slave narrative, but the author was a white abolitionist.
The Slave was the most successful of fourteen anti-slavery novels published before Uncle Tom’s Cabin,18 and Stowe’s novel was remarkable not for its invention but for its success. She brought the anti-slavery novel to the attention of the whole world and at the same time exposed the limits of the genre. Part of her success arose from the fact that Uncle Tom was ambiguously placed between the anti-slavery novel and the plantation novel – celebrations of slavery which, beginning in the 1830s, constituted the first white Southern fiction. Despite Stowe’s support of the abolitionist cause, it was not clear to all her readers which kind of novel she was writing. In 1852, Lydia Maria Child wrote to a friend: “It is really droll to see in what different states of mind people read Uncle Tom. Mr. Pierce, Senator from Maryland, read it lately, and when he came to the sale of Uncle Tom, he exclaimed with great emotion, ‘Here’s a writer that knows how to sympathize with the South! I could fall down at the feet of that woman! She knows how to feel for a man when he is obliged to sell a good honest slave!’ In his view the book was intended as a balsam for bereaved slave-holders.”19
Contemporary African Americans saw Stowe as the strongest white fighter in their cause, and responses to her are everywhere evident in their fiction. Douglass’s master-murdering slave in his 1853 short story is the antithesis of Stowe’s master-submissive slave of 1852, and it is too easy to presume on the exact nature of contemporary African American responses to Stowe. Martin Delany headed the two parts of his novel, Blake, with epigraphs from Stowe’s poem “Caste and Christ,”20 and in the 1930s, Vernon Loggins, with only half the novel in front of him, presumed it was “among the numerous analogues of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”21 But the full text of Blake shows that any initial likenesses between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Blake were superficial. Frank Webb took advantage of Stowe’s name to have her write an encouraging preface to The Garies, but his novel is not anti-slavery; it is anti-segregation. Stowe was generous with her support, and African American writers were keen to take advantage of her name. At the same time, the source of Stowe’s success was the genre that had come to perfection in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave and the Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave.
Questions raised by the conflict between narrative and novel, between support and subversion of slavery, between collaboration and appropriation, entangle African American texts as much as they entangle Stowe’s text. Issues of authenticity have been central to the critical debate from the beginning: Have the texts been written by persons who are authentically African American? Have the texts been misrepresented by the mediation of white helpers and editors? Have the African American writers been true to black thinking and black values? These questions mix racial and literary issues in ways that obstruct theoretical rationalization. They were not resolved in the 1850s; they cannot be resolved now. The fictions and the questions require readers to negotiate, mediate, and judge. And when readers make their decisions, they will find they have had to compromise.
The first question – have the texts been written by persons who are authentically African American? – provides simple answers if the term “African American” is taken to mean an American with some degree of descent from a person of black African origin. It is in these terms that Our Nig and The Bondwoman’s Narrative have been declared African American texts. The second question – have the texts been misrepresented by the mediation of white helpers and editors? – raises questions that require a different kind of answer. Henry Louis Gates says of The Bondwoman’s Narrative: “never before have we been absolutely certain that we have enjoyed the pleasure of reading a text in the exact order of wording in which a fugitive slave constructed it.”22 The authenticity of Crafts’s voice seems to promise a great deal, but there are two important qualifications to be made. The first is that no one in the nineteenth century was writing in a literary vacuum. As Gates points out, “Dickens – and Bleak House in particular – was a fertile source for Hannah Crafts.”23 Literary and classical allusions are frequent, and her novel shows a full awareness of the contemporary white novel. Crafts trained in the same school of self-education as Douglass and Brown and was influenced by what she read, as they were.
The second qualification to any special claims for The Bondwoman’s unmediated condition is that there were a number of African American printers and editors in the 1850s. They set up business to trade for themselves and to be independent of white influence. Frederick Douglass’s Frederick Douglass’ Paper depended on some white financial support, but independence was his aim. Thomas Hamilton’s New York Anglo-African Magazine had no white support, and he told the readers of the January 1859 first issue that African Americans “must speak for themselves; no outside tongue, however gifted with eloquence, can tell their story.”24 Hamilton was an African American who encouraged other African Americans. He published a revised version of Clotel under the title of Miralda, he published Blake, and he published Harper’s “The Two Offers.”
Douglass and Hamilton failed commercially, but the fictions embedded in Frederick Douglass’ Paper or The Anglo-African Magazine took on the color of their papers. It was in the September 1859 issue of The Anglo-African that Hamilton published “Patrick Brown’s First Love.” The last sentence reads: “It was a strange feeling of horrid pity that reached back through my fingers, as I drove my sheath-knife through and through that man’s bowels.” Then the words “What is the matter with you, Laura, this morning?”25 as the reader is beginning “The Two Offers.” Hamilton radicalized its reading by linking Harper’s discussion of white women’s lives to Brown’s discussion of white men’s deaths. The bleaching power of Anglo-American culture takes effect when the Anglo-African frame is removed, and only Martin R. Delany’s Blake maintains its radical tone undiminished when read in isolation from the anti-slavery journal in which it was published.
The third question raised in relation to the authenticity of early African American fiction – have the African American writers been true to black thinking and black values? – implicates the most complex ideas, mainly relating to race. It is not a question that can be given any one answer at any one time. In 1854, in The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered, Frederick Douglass wrote: “The relationship subsisting between the white and the black people of this country is the vital question of the age.”26 Early African American fiction, recognizing that fact, is fundamentally about race, and race generates the oppositions on which the form is constructed. In the introduction to Clotel, William Wells Brown said, “there appears to exist a deadly antagonism between the white and coloured races” (22), and his use of the word “appears” is a signal to difficulties of meaning. Like Douglass, Brown believed that the human race was a single entity and that it was only in their own time that men had begun to argue otherwise. “I say it is remarkable,” said Douglass, “– nay, it is strange that there should arise a phalanx of learned men – speaking in the name of science – to forbid the magnificent reunion of mankind in one brotherhood.” His conclusion, one that Brown shared, was that the men who needed to deny the unity of the human race were slaveholders who wished to maintain a belief in the Declaration of Independence (Claims 10–11). The unexpected effect of the Declaration was the theme of Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, provocative not because it pointed to the promiscuity of a president but because it pointed to the lie on which the American Republic was founded.
In Our Nig and Blake, slavery is presented as the white appropriation of black labor, but in Clotel, The Garies, and The Bondwoman, slavery is presented as the white ownership of the black body. It is an emphasis that leads repeatedly to the subjects of black–white sexual relationships, the mulatto, and passing. Those were radical subjects in the 1850s. Paradoxically, the preoccupation with plantation sexuality over plantation economics meant that in the twentieth century what had once appeared radical was seen to be reactionary. The action of Clotel focuses on five mulatto heroines: daughters and granddaughters of Thomas Jefferson. For constructing such a plot, Addison Gayle accused William Wells Brown of surrendering “his racial identity to the American Mephistopheles for a pittance that Faust would have labeled demeaning.”27 But when Brown chose to write about mulattoes, he was not turning away from his condition but towards it, and it is only by the standards of an absolute black nationalism that he can be accused of denying his people. Like Frederick Douglass, Brown hated what his white father had done to his black mother, but the mulatto’s repudiation of whiteness was not an option offered in Clotel. Brown’s “racial identity” was not a single matter. In 1853 and living in England, he was rejecting a world divided into black and white. By 1860 and living in the United States, he had begun to abandon the hope that his selves – white and black – could be accepted by both black and white. The introduction in Miralda of a “perfectly black” hero28 in place of the hero of Clotel (222) “as white as most white persons,” represents Brown’s reactions to a renewed experience of American racism. The hero and heroine of Clotel live happily in England as white; the hero and heroine of Miralda live happily in France as black. So do the hero and heroine of the third version of the novel – Clotelle, 1864. The hero and heroine of the fourth version of the novel – Clotelle, 1867 29 – return to take part in the Civil War during which the hero is killed. In none of the versions does Brown imagine his couple living peacefully in the United States.
Four of the five white-skinned heroines of the 1853 Clotel die unhappily, and the type came to be called “the Tragic Mulatto,” but William Wells Brown did not invent the type. He took his model directly from Lydia Maria Child’s story, “The Quadroons.”30 In Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, Werner Sollors shows that Child in turn took her model from a tradition that traced its origins to a story published in London in 1711.31 Sollors believes that Sterling Brown was the first critic to identify the tragic mulatto as a literary stereotype, and Brown thought it was more attractive to white writers than to black. As Sollors says, that is not the case.32 The mulatto character appeared in African American fiction from the beginning, and William Wells Brown was followed by Webb, Crafts, and Wilson in making the mulatto the focus of attention.
Unlike Brown, Webb makes no attempt to create a space in which the mulatto might exist between the black and white races. The Garies explores the question through the stories of a brother and sister. The boy accepts the advice of white friends to repudiate all black links, is exposed before marriage to a white woman, and dies of symbolic fever. The girl accepts the advice of black friends, marries a black man, and lives out a useful life. The novel’s reiterated advice is: “‘You’ll have to be either one thing or other – white or coloured. Either you must live exclusively amongst coloured people, or go to the whites and remain with them.’”33 Webb denies the existence of the space that Brown failed to find, but that space is where the action of Crafts’s novel takes place. She describes seven versions of a type that she calls the “beautiful quadroon”34 – women who can pass for white. Some of them end their lives tragically but not all, and the heroine achieves freedom and happiness. The quadroons contrast with a character who “was a dark mulatto, very quick motioned with black snaky eyes, and hair of the same color” (203). This woman tries to destroy the heroine, and her coloring is emphasized to reduce the reader’s sympathy. The complex of meanings Crafts generates around black and white is deeply conflicted and worth a study in itself, but Crafts seems to have believed that a happy life between black and white was possible in the North.
The possibility of there being any such space is not debated by Harriet Wilson’s study of the mulatto. Her orphaned heroine comes to cultural consciousness in a white world which tells her she is black. She is set going on a process of slow destruction in a casually brutal community which can hardly bring her into focus. Our Nig owes nothing to the stereotyping of either Crafts’s “beautiful quadroon” or her “dark mulatto,” and Wilson rejects sentimental reverberations, romantic auras, and Gothic mysteries. It is the two Northern novels which hold out least hope for the mulatto. They are also the novels at a greater remove from the slave narrative. The fugitive’s formula for happiness – escape to the North – did not work in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
Wilson makes little of many issues that might be raised by the sexual union of black and white as she plausibly describes how a destitute white woman (the heroine’s mother) takes up with a less destitute black man (the heroine’s father). But though the focus of Wilson’s attention is on the destructive social and economic effects of white exploitation of black labor, still Our Nig is a novel about the mulatto. And even Delany, who does not focus on the mulatto and who expressed a dislike for “the lighter refusing to associate with the darker,”35 weds his black hero to “a dark mulatto of a rich, yellow, autumn-like complexion, with a matchless cushion-like head of hair, neither straight nor curly, but handsomer than either” (5). Why was there such a preoccupation with a group that made up little more than 10 percent36 of the African American population in the 1850s?
“The trope of appearance – the metaphor of the mulatta – was an awkward artifice that in some instances inadvertently constructed slavery as the greater tragedy of the nearly white,” says Ann duCille in The Coupling Convention.37 In The Foremother Figure in Early Black Women’s Literature, Jacqueline K. Bryant questions William Wells Brown’s attitudes to both race and gender, coming to the conclusion that Brown’s characterization of his heroines has “more to do with the way white men chose to perceive black women than the way black men perceived them or black women perceived themselves.”38 Jane Campbell attempts to save Brown (and by association Webb and Crafts, too): “The modern reader may react with anger and dismay at Brown’s dependence on the tragic mulatto motif, and rightly so. But for Brown, mythmaking was impossible without this motif.”39 It was not immaterial that five out of the seven writers of early African American fiction might have been counted “mulatto” in the census of 1850, but beyond that is the argument that Sollors develops in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: “the literary representation of biracial characters, whatever their statistical relevance may have been, does not constitute an avoidance of more serious issues, but the most direct and head-on engagement with ‘race,’ perhaps the most troubling issue in the period from the French Revolution to World War II.”40 In support of this, Sollors quotes Alain Locke’s argument that, by focusing on the mulatto in the pre-Civil War period, African American writers were exposing the myth of the South and striking where they considered the moral and political claims of the American South were weakest.
Those claims made the sexual politics of the plantation a shaping force in the plots of Clotel, The Garies, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and Blake. With variation those politics shape Our Nig since its plot equates the Northern home with the Southern plantation, and its story is put in motion by the liaison most denied on the plantation: the love of white woman and black man. Jim in Our Nig is the equal of President Jefferson in Clotel, Mr. Garie in The Garies, Mr. Vincent and Mr. Cosgrove in The Bondwoman and Colonel Franks in Blake. A restraining romance structure was trying to contain an uncontainable politics, and African American writers needed to amplify a repertoire of inherited characters to reflect actualities and ambitions not accommodated in the white novel and only hinted at in the slave narrative. In order to do this and to make a match for the tragic mulatto, early African American fiction introduced the character type of the noble African. This too was a creation of the English novel. In 1688, Aphra Behn fixed the type with her verbal portrait of the African prince Oroonoko: “He was pretty tall, but of a shape the most exact that can be fancied: the most famous statuary could not form the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot. His face was not of that brown rusty black which most of that nation are, but of perfect ebony, or polished jet.”41 Behn’s model was adapted to become the type of the heroic slave: reluctantly violent, uneasily Christian, magnificently male, and very black.
Crafts, Wilson, and Harper seem not to have met him, but the male African American writers celebrated the type: “Madison was of manly form . . . His face was ‘black, but comely.’ His eye, lit with emotion, kept guard under a brow as dark and as glossy as the raven’s wing” – Douglass in “The Heroic Slave”42; Jerome “was of pure African origin, was perfectly black, very fine-looking, tall, slim, and erect as any one could possibly be” – Brown in the Clotelle of 1864 43; “Mr. Walters was above six feet in height, and exceedingly well-proportioned; of jet-black complexion, and smooth glossy skin” – Webb in The Garies (121–122); “Henry was a black – a pure Negro – handsome, manly and intelligent” – Delany in Blake (16). The heroic slave as the violent slave was not a type found in either anti-slavery or plantation novels. It represented an innovation when imported and adapted from English literature by Douglass in 1853. Madison, Jerome, Mr. Walters, and Henry were African American answers to Uncle Tom, men who refused to be beaten, and some of them ready to kill.
The heroic slave was not the only figure in this literature to stand in contrast to the tragic mulatto. The field woman provided another opposition. Black-skinned women are infrequently developed as characters, infrequently given a name, and are infrequently made to speak. There are so many bit-part characters in the four versions of Clotel that Brown does have black women break the general silence in a way which reflects well on them, but more commonly he offers a character such as Dinah, a black cook, who appears briefly to make a cruel remark about the mulatto heroine (153). Webb has Aunt Rachel, another black cook, act the role of the mean and lazy servant on the watch for her stealthy mistress (74). Crafts does not give names to black female characters unless they are mulatto, and the black-skinned women only come into focus in ways which amuse the heroine – “fat portly dames whose ebony complexions were set off by turbans of flaming red” (119) – or distress her – “promiscuous crowds of dirty, obscene and degraded objects” (207). Wilson has no black women characters in Our Nig other than the mulatto Frado, and Harper has no black women in “The Two Offers.”
Only Delany breaks out of the conventional model to permit his hero to treat field women as his equals: “‘They allow you Sundays, I suppose.’ ‘No sir, we work all day ev’ry Sunday.’ ‘How late do you work?’ ‘Till we can’ see to pick no mo’ cotton; but w’en its moon light, we pick till ten o’clock at night’” (Blake 74–75). Although Delany treats his field women with respect, he has them speak in a dialect different from the hero, who speaks like a gentleman. The conventions of the nineteenth-century novel required that refined characters talk in a refined English and that common characters talk in common English. Refinement could be a matter of the soul as well as of rank, but the rule was observed in all English and American literary productions in the 1850s. Not to follow the rule was to show a lack of education. Robert Bone says that “dialect distinguishes the comic (folk) characters from the serious (middle-class) characters, who of course speak only the white man’s English,”44 but he overlooks the difficulties faced by writers breaking into the literary world of the 1850s.
Black English45 is used extensively for the speech of field blacks in early African American fictions though it is not used in all of them. Douglass does not use it for his non-heroic black characters, but he does give his low white characters dialect speech; Wilson hardly uses it; Harper has no call for it. Frank J. Webb alternates speech registrations so well in The Garies that he begins to show the way in which African American writers could solve a problem caused by a literary convention designed to express English class prejudice. But Brown and Crafts use Black English in a different way. Brown relishes the opportunities it gives him for comic writing. Some of his characters speak in a language so exaggerated that they become caricatures. Sam, the slave valet, and Pompey, the slave assistant, are examples. Brown has strangely purposive variations on the dialogue convention so that he makes the heroine’s mother speak Standard English when she lives independently with her daughters but makes her speak Black English when she becomes a kitchen slave. In The Bondwoman white-skinned characters speak in Standard English; black-skinned characters speak in Black English. There is one exception. A character, described as a “black man” (215), speaks Standard English. His exceptional language is matched by his exceptional character, and he is instrumental in helping the heroine in her final escape. Like Brown and Delany, Crafts was following English literary convention as they all would have found it in Dickens and the Brontës.
The earliest African American fiction is a literature of fusion. It fused slave narrative, Gothic mystery, satire, pastoral, novel of manners, document, and polemic. It fused black and white character, speech, and behavior, and it fused the African and the American in religion and belief. The Christian religion was one shared with slave-owners – a bond and a barrier. A solution was to contrast true religion with deformed religion, and Brown makes the hypocrisy of the slave-owning Christianity of the United States a theme parallel to the hypocrisy of the slave-owning democracy of the Constitution. He devotes nine chapters of Clotel to describing the world of a slave-owning minister who hires an even-more-degraded minister to preach pro-slavery Christianity to his slaves. The slaves fall asleep during a long sermon (93–98). Delany took the theme of deformed religion further. Asked by two pious old slaves to put his trust in religion, Blake answers: “‘Don’t tell me about religion! What’s religion to me? My wife is sold away from me by a man who is one of the leading members of the very church to which both she and I belong! Put my trust in the Lord! I have done so all my life nearly, and of what use is it to me?’” (16). Blake does not only speak religious defiance; he also acts it. In the Red River Country he meets slaves whose driver makes them work Sundays. “The next day Jesse the driver was missed, and never after heard of” (79). Murder becomes a religious duty in an ironic reinforcement of the Sabbath commandment. Rennie Simson argues that in early African American novels “neither the authors nor their black characters rejected the Christian religion; in fact, they displayed a deep faith in the principles of Christianity.”46 But Douglass, Brown, Webb, Wilson, and Delany display a formal Christianity with little warmth or religious feeling. The Bondwoman’s Narrative is an exception. Christianity pervades the work, and in the middle of the novel the focal point of the heroine’s world is a slave-owning minister, of whom she writes: “what language could portray the ineffable expression of a countenance beaming with soul and intelligence?” (124). The difference between her Christian slave plantation and Brown’s is striking. Ironic readings do not seem to be invited because signifying on Crafts’s minister involves signifying on Crafts’s Christianity.
For Brown religion functioned as a cultural as well as a spiritual resource – one that worked most effectively in the absence of white clergy and white people. Religion could then become a manifestation of the world which the slaves reserved to themselves. After the slaver’s sermon, the slaves hold their own more meaningful service (Clotel 99–100). Brown and Delany give the best access to this enclosed world, and Clotel and Blake are rich resources for black folkways, providing details of slave entertainments, dress codes, hierarchies, songs, and rhymes. There is a song to celebrate the master’s death – “He no more will hang our children on the tree” (Clotel 150). There is a rhyme to mock the master’s greed – “The big bee flies high” (Clotel 138) – possibly the first reference to this slave satire.47 Like Brown, Delany recorded African American song, and perhaps the most important recording of all is Delany’s rendition of the “men of sorrows” singing “Way down upon the Mobile river” (100) – possibly the first reference to sorrow songs.48
These fictions enter worlds so remote that in them slave hunters abandoned pursuit. Brown imagines a figure called Picquilo, who “had been two years in the swamps, and considered it his future home. He had met a Negro woman who was also a runaway; and, after the fashion of his native land, had gone through the process of oiling her as the marriage ceremony” (212–213). Brown gives the swamps a mysterious quality, a quality that Delany makes at once more exotic and more concrete. As Blake travels through North Carolina recruiting rebel slaves, Delany has him meet “some bold, courageous, and fearless adventurers, denizens of the mystical, antiquated, and almost fabulous Dismal Swamp, where for many years they have defied the approach of their pursuers” (112). These figures are High Conjurers, who “were regularly sent out to create new conjurers, lay charms, take off ‘spells’ that could not be reached by Low Conjurers, and renew the art of all conjurors of seven years existence” (114). Blake agrees to be anointed by the Swamp’s “ambassadors,” and his encounter with the “goombah” religion is as close to Africa as he comes before his actual voyage to the Gulf of Guinea. Chapter 52, “The Middle Passage,” starts Blake on his return to the New World as a crew member on a slave ship, and Delany has his hero listen to “the wailing and cries, groaning and moaning of the thirsty, hungry, sick, and dying, in tones of agony, such to rend the soul with anguish” (228). Blake is the first title in the great tradition of African American fiction which reenacts the ancestral tragedy, but before the Civil War it was being reenacted as a thing of the present, not of the past. Delany’s combined themes of the African American holocaust, the African homeland, and the black nation resonated powerfully in the 1970s at the time of the rediscovery of Blake, but they had helped to bury the novel in the 1860s when they timed out in the new political context created by the Civil War. Readings of these early novels and stories have been sensitive from the beginning to attendant conditions.
Their reception has been further affected by critical silence, title loss, and the late development of scholarly interest. As a result, it is only now that the title list is being rebuilt. The process cannot be presumed to be over, but it does mean that modern readers have a fuller knowledge and a fuller list than any previous generation. At the same time it implies that the inherited tradition of the African American novel has been damaged. Critical silence meant that William Wells Brown and Martin Delany were not reviewed in the white press. Racial isolation meant that Frank Webb in London, Harriet E. Wilson in New England, and Hannah Crafts in New Jersey could have no impact on their contemporaries. Silence and isolation prevented normal writerly exchanges of example, inspiration, and competition. Modern readers can bring the titles together and see patterns and influences, but there is a sense in which all of these titles stand apart. Each one represents a fresh start. The only title which has generated an uninterrupted pattern of creative action and critical reaction is the Clotelle of 1864.
Even so, in the long years from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Depression, Clotelle effectively dropped below the critical horizon. In a review of African American culture which W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1913, William Wells Brown is treated as a historian. No mention is made of his work as a novelist.49 When commentary begins to focus on early African American fiction in the survey work of the 1930s, it is negative. Vernon Loggins dismissed all African American novels with the remark: “When a really noteworthy American Negro novel is written, it will probably be on the theme which Webb attempted.”50 Sterling Brown followed suit: “Clotel is not well written or well constructed, but these failings are common to its type.”51 In the 1940s, Hugh M. Gloster passed over early African American fiction because “William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Martin Delany, and Frances E. W. Harper . . . generally exhibit the methods and materials of Abolitionist propaganda.”52 In the 1950s, Robert Bone presumed that there were only three full-length novels published before 1890 – in fact the number is thirteen – and judging by what he read, he came to the conclusion that “The early novel was an aesthetic failure largely because it never solved [the] problem of rounded characterization.”53
Serious study of early African American fiction, or study that took it seriously, did not begin until the 1960s and 1970s with the impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. It needed the appearance of the full edition of Delany’s Blake in 1969 to fire critical reaction, and it came most powerfully with Addison Gayle’ s The Black Aesthetic (1971), and The Way Of The New World: The Black Novel in America (1975). The new Blake was the book that Black Power critics were looking for: “Had Henry Blake become the symbol of black men instead of Mr. Walters, Bigger Thomas and his cousins would not have been necessary.”54
The 1980s saw an increasing development of scholarly resources; more and better edited texts were available. At the same time the expansion of the 1970s Black Studies programs into a network of African American departments throughout North America meant that there was an ever-growing body of studies of all kinds, but particularly historical, which gave the field breadth and depth. John W. Blassingame’s study The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the AnteBellum South (1972)55 not only revised the way that the plantation was to be treated by historians, but it also led to a recognition of the value of the slave narrative, first as a historical source and then as a literary genre. The rehabilitation, identification, editing, and publication of slave narratives have been instrumental in redirecting attention to early African Americans as writers of genius. One important effect has been the development of more inclusive and more sympathetic ways of reading texts. Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction (1978)56 not only gave a new impetus to the reading of the popular fiction that she treated but also showed a new way of reading Clotel and The Garies. With Henry Louis Gates’s recovery in 1982 of Our Nig as an African American text and his use of Baym to interpret the “new” novel, the strength of the feminist’s readings became apparent.57 Gates did more. The Signifying Monkey (1989) provided a new tool for reading early African American fiction. “Signifyin(g) is so fundamentally black,” he argued, that the potentiality for ironic reading must be held open for any black text of any period.58
Early African American fiction has profited from new scholarship that has seen the subject finally supported by the research tools with which other literatures have been supplied for the past fifty years. It has profited from newly generous readers willing to accept the fictions in the terms they set themselves. It has profited from a new appreciation of a literature of crossing, passing, and mixing.59 In its own language, it is a “mulatto” literature. It is a literature that does not wish to make clear distinctions between black and white, between African and American, between authentic and fictitious. Instead, it offers a complex view of life that speaks directly to the twenty-first century, a century in which we are all mulatto.
1. Floyd J. Miller, “Introduction,” Blake; or the Huts of America by Martin R. Delany (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. viii.
2. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Introduction,” The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. xiii.
3. Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’s Slave Narrative,” American Literature 53 (1981): 479–486.
4. Harriet A. Jacobs [as Linda Brent], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (Boston: Published for the Author, 1861).
5. Anon, “Patrick Brown’s First Love,” The Anglo-African Magazine (Sept. 1859): 286–287, rpt. in The Anglo-African Magazine. Volume 1–1859 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968).
6. William Wells Brown, “A True Story of Slave Life,” London Anti-Slavery Advocate 1.3 (1852): 23.
7. William Wells Brown, Clotel; or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1853), p. 62.
8. Addison Gayle, The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. xii.
9. Olaudah Equiano, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, ed. Joslyn T. Pine (New York: Dover, 1999).
10. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: Published by the Anti-Slavery Office, 1845).
11. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: Published by the Anti-Slavery Office, 1847).
12. See Bernard W. Bell’s discussion of the narrative pattern in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University Of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 28. The best study of the narratives is William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
13. Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. By “Our Nig,” ed. R. J. Ellis (Nottingham: Trent, 1998), p. 77.
14. Martin R. Delany, Blake; or the Huts of America, Introduction by Floyd J. Miller (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 270.
15. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852).
16. Peter M. Bergman, The Chronological History of the Negro in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 200.
17. Richard Hildreth, The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (Boston: John H. Eastburn, 1836).
18. Nicholas Canaday, “The Antislavery Novel Prior to 1852 and Hildreth’s The Slave (1836),” CLA Journal 17 (1973): 177.
19. Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883), pp. 69–70.
20. See Julia Griffiths, ed., Autographs For Freedom (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1853), p. 4.
21. Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), p. 186.
22. Gates, “Introduction” to Crafts, Bondwoman, p. xxxiii.
23. Gates, Notes to Crafts, Bondwoman, p. 331.
24. Thomas Hamilton, “Apology,” Anglo-African Magazine. Volume 1–1859 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), p. 1.
25. Frances Ellen Watkins [Harper], “The Two Offers,” New York Anglo-African Magazine (September, 1859): 288–291; (October 1859): 311–313.
26. Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered (Rochester: Lee, Mann & Co., 1854), p. 5.
27. Addison Gayle Jr., “Introduction,” in Gayle Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971), p. 412.
28. William Wells Brown, Miralda, New York Weekly Anglo African (Jan. 19, 1861): 1.
29. William Wells Brown, Clotelle; or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1867).
30. Lydia Maria Child, “The Quadroons,” Fact and Fiction: A Collection of Short Stories (London: William Smith, 1847).
31. Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 193.
33. Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (London: Routledge, 1857), p. 41.
34. Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857?), ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 119.
35. Nell Irvin Painter, “Martin R. Delany: Elitism and Black Nationalism,” Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, eds. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 165.
36. Bergman, Chronological History, p. 194.
37. Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 18.
38. Jacqueline K. Bryant, The Foremother Figure in Early Black Women’s Literature: Clothed in My Right Mind (New York: Arland Publishing, 1999), p. 17.
39. Jane Campbell, Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), p. 4.
40. Sollors, Neither Black Nor White, p. 235.
41. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or, the History of the Royal Slave. A True History (1688), rpt. in Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, Rover, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 108.
42. Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Mar. 4, 1853): 1.
43. William Wells Brown, Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (Boston: J. Redpath, 1864), p. 54.
44. Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 26.
45. Guy Bailey, “Speech, Black,” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Witson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 194.
46. Rennie Simson, “Christianity: Hypocrisy and Honesty in the Afro-American Novel of the Mid-19th Century,” University of Dayton Review 15.3 (1982): 15.
47. William Barlow, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 12.
48. Note to Blake, p. 100.
49. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro in Literature and Art,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (September 1913) reprinted in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: The Library of America, 1986), pp. 864–865.
50. Loggins, Negro Authors, p. 251.
51. Sterling A. Brown, The Negro in American Fiction (Washington: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937), p. 39.
52. Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), p. 25.
53. Bone, The Negro Novel, p. 27.
54. Gayle, Black Novel, p. 24.
55. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the AnteBellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
56. Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
57. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Introduction,” Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North by Harriet E. Wilson (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. xi–lix.
58. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 64.
59. A model of the new work is M. Giulia Fabi’s Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).