Cassander L. Smith
Understanding how and why black Africans found themselves in early America requires examining the nature of precolonial contact between sub‐Saharan Africa and Europe. Mid‐fifteenth‐century interactions between peoples in Europe and the Guinea region of West Africa were not initially fueled by slavery, as some might expect. Instead, European interest in the continent of Africa and its people was prompted by classical theories of cosmography, the science of how features of the universe relate to each other. There was a long‐standing belief in the medieval and early modern ages that the creation of valuable substances (and anthropomorphic beings) was the result of climatological anomalies. Specifically, they believed that gold was created in extremely hot environments, like those found in sub‐Saharan Africa. Early travel accounts of sub‐Saharan Africa frequently described the land as full of monsters and gold‐rich kingdoms. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were the first to establish a steady, consistent trade with nations on the West Coast of Africa. The trade between the two regions was robust – so robust, in fact, that the demand outpaced the supply. To supplement the gold trade, African nations began offering as trade commodities prisoners of war, that is, slaves. In the wake of Columbus’s travels and Spain’s expansion of its empire into the Americas, the laws of supply and demand prevailed, and enslaved bodies became the primary commodity.
The transatlantic slave trade and its devastating, catastrophic effect on black lives shaped the cultural and sociopolitical presence of black Africans in early America. The historical archives proffer traces of black lives that tell us something about how they negotiated systems of enslavement and, in some cases, created countercultures that were key in the development of racial, religious, economic, and other cultural structures. Black Africans appear in the textual archives in a variety of forms and genres: court documents, captivity narratives, poetry, journals and diaries, political broadsides and pamphlets, sermons. This chapter provides a survey of those textual archives and examines the literary consequences of black African presences in early America with a particular emphasis on the region that would become the United States. It explores four basic questions: Where and how do black Africans appear in early American textual archives? Why do they appear? What are the textual (more precisely literary) consequences of black African presences in early America? And finally, what can we know and not know about the cultural and sociopolitical experiences of black Africans in this period based on the textual record? The discussion begins with an overview of black African (forced) migration to the region we now call the United States of America, then turns to an examination of the cultural consequences of their arrival. The chapter ends with a few speculative remarks about where the study of black Africans in early America might go in the years to come.
The common view is that the first black Africans arrived in what is now the United States as slaves. Spain, not Portugal, is afforded the infamous distinction of being the first European empire to introduce slavery to the Americas in the early sixteenth century, and records at colonial Jamestown tell us that the first black Africans arrived in the British American colonies in 1619. Whether they arrived at Jamestown initially as slaves or indentured servants, though, has been the source of debate for decades. It should be noted that some black Africans arrived in America for reasons other than servitude, equipped with their own sociopolitical motivations that render them agentive presences in the landscapes. Like their European counterparts, some came to the Americas as explorers. Some came to trade. And some black Africans came to reinvent themselves. Take, for example, the black African conquistador Juan Garrido. In the early sixteenth century he joined expeditions to discover Florida and California. He also joined Hernán Cortés to invade Mexico in 1519. By 1538, he had married, created a family, and settled in New Spain. To support his family, he petitioned the Spanish Crown for compensation and recognition of military service. In his two‐page petition, or probanza, he declares:
I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when […] [Cortés] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out […] all of which I did at my own expense without being given either salary or allotment of natives […] or anything else. […] And also […] I was the first to have the inspiration to sow maize here in New Spain and to see if it took; I did this and experimented at my own expense.
(Quoted in Restall 2000: 171)
Using a popular generic form – the military petition – Garrido narrates himself into a body politic. His letter is especially crucial because it illustrates explicitly the manner in which those of African descent engaged the New World situations in which they found themselves and constructed identities in that landscape.
At the same time that Garrido was settling in New Spain, Esteban the Moor, another black African conquistador, was testing the limits of self‐autonomy and reinvention in the American Southwest. Although enslaved, in the 1520s and 1530s Esteban moved around present‐day Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico with a freedom and self‐possession we do not typically ascribe to the enslaved. He served a vital function as a scout, translator, and cultural mediator between the Spanish and Native Americans during two key Spanish expeditions: one to settle Florida in 1527, the other to discover the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, a rumored land of wealth, in 1539. Unlike Garrido, Esteban did not narrate his own deeds. Most of what we know and speculate about him comes from the narratives of others, two texts in particular. The first is Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 Relación, which recounts the harrowing experiences of the only four survivors (of a crew that began with some 600) of that 1527 Florida expedition. The expedition’s mission was to explore and claim the western region of Florida, facing the Gulf of Mexico. It encountered a number of disasters that crippled the mission, including disease, hurricanes, bad leadership, and hostile encounters with Native American groups living along the Gulf Coast. Only 300 men actually made landfall near present‐day Tampa Bay. Over the course of two years that number dwindled to four men, Esteban and three Spaniards, among them Cabeza de Vaca. For nearly a decade, those four survivors wandered through Florida and then Texas before making their way south and west into New Spain. In his narrative about their experiences, Cabeza de Vaca (2003) explains Esteban’s crucial role in the men’s survival: “The black man always spoke to [the Natives] and informed himself about the roads we wished to travel and the villages that there were and about other things that we wanted to know” (153).
The experiences of the survivors prompted a second expedition in 1539, this time led by the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza and with the mission to find Cibola. The Cities of Cibola were based on a legend that dated back to 1150 CE when Moors captured a region of Spain and seven bishops, fleeing from the invasion, took to the seas in search of a land where they could reestablish their settlement. According to legend, they eventually found a large island and set up seven settlements that grew into huge, prosperous cities. In 1538, Cabeza de Vaca claimed those cities existed in the regions out of which he had just traveled. Appointed as a scout for the mission, Esteban led the friar back into what had become for him familiar territory. Perhaps because of that level of familiarity, Esteban took certain liberties as they traveled along that, according to the friar, compromised the mission. Specifically, Esteban accepted tributes from Native communities they passed along the way, and eventually he abandoned the friar in the Arizona desert to arrive first at what they believed was the first city of Cibola. It was actually the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh. According to the friar’s account, Esteban arrived at Hawikuh accompanied by an entourage of 300 and loaded down with turquoises and other valuables, including a symbolic gourd rattle; he demanded entrance to the city and royal treatment. Deeming him a threat, the elders at Hawikuh demanded he turn back. When Esteban persisted in his efforts to enter the city, Zuni warriors killed him and members of his entourage. Arriving several days later, the friar opted not to enter the city. Instead, from a spot upon a hill just outside the city, he claimed it for Spain.
Upon his return, the friar wrote his account, “Relación del descubrimiento de las siete ciudades,” often translated and referred to simply as “the relation of Fray Marcos.” In the narrative, he largely relates and condemns the actions of his black African guide. Much of what he tells readers about the “Seven Cities” is necessarily based on Esteban’s encounters there, not his own. Because Esteban takes center stage in the narrative, the friar is just as much a chronicler of Esteban’s deeds as he is of his own.
Archival traces of black African lives overwhelmingly follow the form of Esteban rather than Garrido. That is to say, it is rare to find texts narrated (or written) by black Africans in early America, at least before the mid‐eighteenth century. We mostly glean information about black lives from the accounts of European travelers, priests, slave traders, pirates, and so forth, who often represent black Africans in marginalized roles that render them secondary or inferior presences in the sociopolitical landscape. Black Africans flit into and out of the texts, their presences often indiscernible or discernible as oddities, a kind of “extravasant blood,” as Samuel Sewall described black Africans in colonial Massachusetts in 1700 (2).
To be sure, black Africans appear in some of the most widely studied texts from early America. If we focus on the British American mainland as an example, there are a number of instances in which Anglo‐American writers mediate black presences. For instance, Increase Mather, in his A Brief History (1676), and William Hubbard, in A Narrative of the Troubles with Indians in New England (1677), both mention a black African man held captive by the Wampanoag chief Metacomet (“Metacom”) during the 1675 King Philip’s War. At some point, the man escapes and comes back to New England with crucial information that saves a settler village from attack. In 1643, an anonymous writer of a collection of Indian conversion narratives titled “New England’s First Fruits” describes a “blackmore maid” (61). She apparently is the model of Christian conversion and proselytizes to others. The literary corpus of Puritan minister Cotton Mather is especially rich source material. In addition to advocating for the baptism of enslaved black Africans in his essay “The Negro Christianized,” published in 1706, Mather writes in his diaries and letters (Silverman 1971) of the conversion efforts of an enslaved man named Onesimus, whose knowledge of smallpox inoculation (carried from his homeland in Africa) becomes the focal point of Mather’s own campaign to bring a vaccine to colonial New England. In 1721, Mather also delivered an execution sermon in Boston centered on the dying confession of a black man, Joseph Anno, condemned for murder. Mather published the sermon, “Tremenda,” and attached to the end of the publication Anno’s last words, a kind of conversion narrative.
Particularly in the seventeenth century, colonial American courtrooms were effective venues for black Africans to assert themselves and narrate their life stories. Among the more commonly studied court cases is that of Elizabeth Key. In 1655, Key, the daughter of a black enslaved woman and white Virginia planter, petitioned a Virginia court for freedom by evoking an English law that stated a child assumed the legal status of the father. After a year of legal wrangling, the court agreed with Elizabeth. The trial testimonies of Candy and Mary Black, two black women servants accused of witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials, offer representations of self‐assertion. Several years later, a black African man named Adam living in Massachusetts sought legal intervention to force his master, the Massachusetts judge and merchant John Saffin, to honor the terms of an indenture contract. The legal battle spanned three years of court rulings and appeals. During that time Saffin wrote a proslavery pamphlet entitled “Brief and Candid Answer to a late Printed Sheet, Entitled, The Selling of JOSEPH” (1701) that was primarily a response to the antislavery stance of another Massachusetts judge, Samuel Sewall. In an appendix to his pamphlet, Saffin directly addresses Adam’s legal efforts, representing Adam as violent, surly, and savage; Adam used the courts to construct a counter‐image, representing himself in court testimonies as a faithful and productive servant.
That the presences of black Africans in the early American textual archives are so heavily mediated – when present at all – has led many early Americanists to conclude that there is little we can know about the actual, historical experiences of black lives based on these mediated moments. In discursive studies of colonial contact literature, scholars commonly determine that the mediated representations of black Africans (and Native Americans) matter most because of what they can tell us about how Euro‐Americans endeavored (and in many cases struggled) to articulate imperial enterprises in the Americas. That is to say, for example, that the nameless “blackmore” maid in “New England’s First Fruit” or the representation of Onesimus by Mather reflect back on the worldviews of the writers, not those of the black Africans being represented. In this way, black African presences are objects of white, imperial ambitions and anxieties, reflecting what Toni Morrison calls in Playing in the Dark (1992) the “Africanist presence” in later American literature.
When accessing and assessing representations of black Africans in early America, we must make peace with the fact that there is a great deal we cannot know and will never know about the lives of black Africans in this earlier era. There is an irrecoverable aspect to the representations. However, as Saidiya Hartman notes in “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), those archival blind spots cannot lead us to an impasse, at the threshold of which we mimic the silence, the unknowingness. Indeed, those seemingly insignificant, mediated references about black Africans can be rich sites for cultural analysis that register the kinds of tense interactions that defined cross‐cultural contact in the colonial period. If we approach the textual archives with an against‐the‐grain lens, we can infer a great deal about the agentive nature of black Africans in the period. The 1699 captivity narrative of the Philadelphia Quaker Jonathan Dickinson is especially fascinating in this regard. In 1696, while sailing from Jamaica to Philadelphia, Dickinson shipwrecked off the coast of Florida, near present‐day Palm Beach. Dickinson, his wife and infant son, and a score of other passengers – including 10 black enslaved men, women and children – were taken captive by Florida coastal tribes. Displaying a great deal of social, political, and mercantile savvy in negotiations mostly with the Ais people who held them captive, Dickinson navigated his way up the coast toward St. Augustine, where he found shelter with the Spanish, who helped him and his party get back to Philadelphia.
In 1699, Dickinson published a journal of his captivity, God’s Protecting Providence, and in that text he represents those enslaved passengers who were also shipwrecked as a collective body. They fetch water, carry Dickinson’s baby, and travel as messengers and scouts to other parts of the coast. They function also as commodities, passed back and forth between Dickinson and the various Native American leaders with whom he negotiates to secure food, clothing, and other necessities. Dickinson’s construction of the enslaved passengers serves to recreate some semblance of colonial social and mercantile order. Their social status and their labor transfer unaltered into this new South Florida landscape, and their commercial value is discernible even to their Native captors. At one point, Dickinson explains his efforts to negotiate with one leader of the Jece people:
we asked for such things as they did not make use of; viz. a great glass, wherein was five or six pound of butter; some sugar; the rundlet of wine: and some balls of chocolate: all which was granted us. […] But the Casseekey [leader] would have a Negro boy of mine, named Caesar, to which I could not tell what to say; but he was resolved on it.
(16–17)
That Dickinson constructs the black enslaved passengers as mediated presences at the periphery is not surprising. One particularly striking moment occurs, though, nine months into their captivity ordeal. By this time, they have escaped their captors and are making their way mostly on foot to St. Augustine. Due to varying states of physical health, some travel faster than others. Some die, unable to endure the long journey barely clothed and during a frigid Florida winter. With the help of one enslaved boy, Dickinson ushers his wife and son safely to St. Augustine. However, he reluctantly leaves behind another sickly relative. He seeks the aid of an enslaved man named Ben, whose owner is the ship’s captain. Dickinson says that he “applied myself to the Negro, making large promises if he would fetch my kinsman; he offered to go back and use his endeavor, which he did” (59).
Dickinson mentions the moment without reflection or additional commentary. It would seem that the enslaved man simply fulfills his role. Yet readers might note that this man is particularized and named throughout the narrative, and Dickinson does not order him about. Instead Dickinson “applies” himself and “makes large promises.” Here he negotiates with a black enslaved man much the same way he negotiates with Indian leaders and eventually with the Spanish when they arrive in St. Augustine. What could Ben have possibly said or done to make promises necessary? Did he assume a certain stature as the slave of the ship’s captain? Perhaps Dickinson could not command Ben the way he could his own enslaved property. What kind of promises would have been large enough to convince Ben to risk his life to save another? What in Dickinson’s demeanor or plea led Ben to believe in his promises? Ultimately, what was the source of Ben’s leverage? The answer to this last question perhaps resides in the precarious situation Dickinson, Ben, and the other travelers found themselves as English colonists, castaways, and mobile bodies attempting to navigate the increasingly volatile Atlantic Caribbean region, of which Florida was an extension in 1697. The region was so volatile, in fact, that when Dickinson’s party first embarked from Jamaica, they did so as part of a convoy to protect themselves from marauding French ships. Once the party shipwrecked, they posed as Spaniards, who had a friendlier relationship with coastal Florida tribes. To illustrate how quickly the political landscape changed, if the castaways had shipwrecked just six years later, they would not have found asylum among the Spanish in St. Augustine. By that time Spain and England would have been rivals in Queen Anne’s War. All of this is to say that Ben and Dickinson were operating in a space that was politically volatile and by extension socially volatile. Thus despite Dickinson’s general representations of the enslaved passengers as static bodies, his characterization of Ben suggests that the enslaved people negotiated their servant positions as they moved up the Florida coast, taking advantage of the region’s instability. When viewing Dickinson’s narrative from Ben’s perspective, we get a more complex understanding of the multicultural encounters that shaped Dickinson’s ordeal and the extent to which he finessed his interactions with Natives, Spaniards, and his fellow captives, including those enslaved.
In addition to revealing the agency of black African figures in early American textual archives, against‐the‐grain readings also tell us something about the extent to which black Africans influenced the literary landscape. Consider, for example, the seventeenth‐century travel journal of John Josselyn, an Englishman who traveled twice to New England, in 1638 and 1663. He kept a detailed journal from both trips, which he edited and published as a single travel narrative in 1674. The text is organized as a series of dated, episodic entries designed to inform English readers about the colonial New England landscape. In the journal, he relates an incident during his first voyage in which a distressed black enslaved woman complains to him of having been raped. The encounter occurs during his stay with a Massachusetts colonist named Samuel Maverick. Josselyn describes the encounter:
The second of October about Nine of the clock in the morning, Mr. Mavericks Negro woman came to my chamber window, and in her own Countrey language and tune sang very loud and shrill, going out to her, she used a great deal of respect towards me, and willingly would have expressed her grief in English; but I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment, whereupon I repaired to my host, to learn of him the cause, and resolved to intreat him on her behalf, for that I understood before, that she had been a Queen of her own Countrey and observed a very humble and dutiful garb used towards her by another Negro who was her maid. Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a breed of Negroes and therefore seeing she would not yield by perswasions to company with a Negro young man he had in his house; he commanded him will’d she nill’d she to go to bed to her, which was no sooner done but she kickt him out again, this she took in high disdain beyond her slavery, and this was the cause of her grief. (26)
Based on archival work, historian Wendy Anne Warren (2007) surmises that the woman was among the first group of enslaved Africans to arrive in the Massachusetts Bay Colony by way of the Caribbean Providence Island in 1638. Warren argues that such fleeting moments in early American texts provide rich opportunities for historians to gain a deeper understanding of the complex multicultural interactions that shaped colonial American history (1033). Just as Warren addresses the historical import of this moment, we can say also something of its literary significance. Reading this as a mediated moment, our first impulse might be to render the woman a product of Josselyn’s literary imagination. A cursory reading confirms Josselyn’s narrative control. He represents the woman as a novelty based on her dress, her utterances (she speaks to him in her own language), her stately deportment, which is rendered as a bit absurd given the circumstances and her social position as a slave. What is more, the moment comes on the heels of a grotesque description of the monstrous birth of Mary Dyer, a Puritan‐turned‐Quaker who was one of the leading supporters of Ann Hutchinson during the Antinomian Controversy in 1637. Immediately after describing Dyer’s stillborn baby, he regales readers with a moment equally novel and perhaps also monstrous in its bodily violence. After the enslaved woman approaches him in what he describes as a pitiful, lamentable state, he resolves to come to her rescue by “intreating” Maverick “on her behalf.” He sympathizes with the woman. Equally interesting, he abandons the sympathy after talking with Maverick and discovering the “cause of her grief.” After the two men’s conversation, Josselyn takes a leisurely stroll in the woods behind Maverick’s house where he finds a new fascination, pineapple‐like fruit “plated with scales” and “as big as the crown of a Womans hat” (26). By the end of the journal entry, Josselyn appears the gazing traveler relating a series of interesting episodes in his New England adventures. The enslaved woman’s story, then, serves a rhetorical purpose in helping him offer a “description of the country, natives, and creatures” of New England, as outlined on the title page.
In general, Josselyn dons the persona of a detached and well‐informed observer, cataloguing a host of information for the easy comprehension of English readers, members of the Royal Society in particular, to whom he dedicates the text. He roves over New England with what Mary Louise Pratt (1992) would term “imperial eyes.” As he writes about his encounter with the enslaved woman, he appears a sympathetic observer, but even as he displays a measure of empathy, he controls and contains the moment through his writing. By the end of their encounter, the woman has transformed from a woman in “grief” into a commodity. There is, however, a counter‐narrative running through the scene. Josselyn makes clear this woman has actively resisted her enslavement, which is most clearly evident in how and why Maverick orders the rape in the first place: “she would not yield by perswasions.” Josselyn’s telling registers her resistance in more subtle ways, as well, such as her insistence on maintaining her cultural status as royalty, signified by the presence of a maid who addressed her in a “very humble and dutiful” manner. She garners a measure of respect and influence and not just among her fellow captives. Remember that the default approach Maverick adopts in his efforts to “breed” her is “perswasion.” He does not immediately attempt to subdue her with force, recognizing that a more subtle form of management might be more productive; physical abuse might reduce her economic value. Her influence perhaps is most evident in her interaction with Josselyn, who is so moved that he “intreats” Maverick on her behalf – but even more important, writes about her.
Here we have a black enslaved woman actively attempting to manipulate her surroundings. That manipulation affects Josselyn’s narrative in several respects. First of all, it complicates his self‐representation. What Josselyn sees and renders in prose is controlled in part by the woman, who went to his “chamber window,” initiating contact and pulling him into the moment. Suddenly, he shifts from observer to participant. Once he is pulled into the scene, the tone and diction also shift. What had previously been clinical, descriptive language in the narrative turns sentimental as he identifies with this woman’s plight. He breaks from descriptions of flora and fauna, details of travel, and instead homes in on this her grief. She complains “very loud and shrill,” he says, moving him so much that he becomes her advocate.
This encounter illustrates the limits of Josselyn’s imperial gaze, his ability to stand back as an observer in control of the information he shapes and relates. As evident by the shifts in narrative position, tone, and diction, the woman unsettles his position just for a second. Part of the reason it is difficult for him to control the information he conveys is that the woman about whom he writes limits access. Remember that when she approaches Josselyn, she does so speaking her own language, not English, as if daring Josselyn to interact with her on her terms. He dismisses this display of agency, saying she “willingly would have expressed her grief in English,” but there was no need because he could read the signs of her “countenance and deportment.” Deprived of the understandings made possible by verbal language, he deciphers her trouble through a series of physical signs. His access to the subject about whom he intends to write, Josselyn tells us, is controlled quite literally by the very actions of that subject. Ironically, the moment tells us just as much about his limits as a writer as it does about his power to chronicle events.
Notably, the narrative shift is short‐lived. The text quickly reverts to its scientific, descriptive language once Maverick provides to Josselyn the explanation for his actions. However fleeting the moment, we see that the woman’s representation is not completely a result of Josselyn’s own literary imagination. An equally important factor in how this moment takes shape textually is the woman’s agency: she packages the information she presents to Josselyn and moves him to chronicle the encounter. Her actions lead him to take on a new role, one counter to anything he has assumed in the narrative to that point or even afterward. For sure, this moment materializes on the page because Josselyn deems it a fascinating moment to share with his readers, because he himself was intrigued by this woman’s cultural oddity and perhaps felt some measure of compassion. The moment also materializes, though, because the woman did something off the page (and we can only rely on Josselyn’s testimony for the details) that compels Josselyn to write about her.
This discussion about mediation becomes more complex when we turn our attention to the mid‐eighteenth century. This is the point at which black Africans overtly begin to exercise control over textual forms and their literary representations, some through self‐writing poetry and prose, others through narrating their life experiences to amanuenses – but all still grappling with the mechanics of mediation. The consensus is that Lucy Terry Prince is the earliest known black writer – and we should add the caveat “writing in English” – in the United States. She penned a poem titled “Bars Fight” in 1746, though it was not published until a century later. Job Ben Soloman was a lesser‐known contemporary of Prince and could read and write in Arabic. He was captured in West Africa, along the Gambia River, and sold into slavery in Maryland in 1731. He was one of the estimated 10–15% of black African Muslims who were captured and enslaved in America. Soloman’s literacy skills and religious devotion compelled a white benefactor to purchase his freedom only a couple years into his enslavement. While enslaved, he wrote letters in Arabic and in London reproduced the Qur’an from memory. In addition, he left behind an as‐told‐to memoir written in English and published in London in 1734. Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon were two other early black poets, who published verses (and some prose) in the second half of the century.
Like Soloman, a number of black Africans produced biographical texts, including Briton Hammon, an enslaved black African (or possibly an indentured servant) living in colonial Massachusetts. In 1747, he sought permission from his master to go on a trading and sailing expedition down to Jamaica. In the summer of that next year, he found himself on a ship off the coast near Cape Florida. Native Americans attacked the ship and killed everyone aboard, except for Hammon who became their captive. That event initiated a nearly 13‐year ordeal in which Hammon was held first by Natives in Florida and then by Spanish forces in Cuba. All the while, he longed to return, and eventually did, to his master in Massachusetts. In 1760, he related his ordeal in a captivity narrative titled A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon (Carretta 2006), which he might or might not have written himself.
Following Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Olaudah Equiano, and Venture Smith produced narratives in the 1770s and 1780s relating their experiences of being taken from their West African homelands and being sold into slavery for varying lengths of time in what is now the United States. As adults, all three men procured their freedom. In 1785 John Marrant, born free, narrated his experience of spiritual captivity while wandering through what he describes as the wild landscapes of the southeast United States in A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings. As he grew in religious fervor, due mostly to the proselytizing efforts of the famed Methodist minister George Whitefield, Marrant traveled through the countryside missionizing to Cherokees and enslaved black Africans. One of the more ubiquitous textual forms in which black lives appeared in the eighteenth century was the criminal confession narrative. A type of gallows literature, these typically brief, tabloid‐esque narratives offered biographical accounts of the lives of convicted criminals, with a special emphasis on their criminal pasts and, if applicable, their spiritual conversion and repentance. Examples of black Africans appearing in this form of literature are Joseph Mountain (1790) and Thomas Powers (1796). Both men were convicted of rape and condemned to hang at the end of the century. All of these biographical narratives are crucial because they initiate a tradition of black life writing that would gain even more prominence in the next century with the emergence of the slave narrative.
Many of those early black narratives still were mediated, so much so that John Sekora (1987) determined that first generation of black writing largely consisted of a black message wrapped inside a “white envelope.” Powers, Mountain, Smith, Marrant, and Gronniosaw all told their stories through amanuenses. The texts were collaborative efforts, fusing the voices and rhetorical aims of the narrating subjects and the amanuenses. At the end of the preface to Marrant’s (Carretta 2006) narrative, his amanuensis, William Aldridge, insists, “I have always preserved Mr. Marrant’s ideas, tho’ I could not his language” (111). Similarly, when Wheatley sought to publish her poetry volume in colonial Massachusetts – the first black African to do so in that region – it was an impossible sale until she earned the validation of 18 of the colony’s most influential white, male citizens. When the book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was finally published in 1773 in London, not Massachusetts, Wheatley’s was not the first voice represented. Instead, the volume’s front matter contains the names of those 18 “most respectable characters of Boston,” who all “assure the world that the poems [in the volume]” were in fact written by “a young Negro Girl.” (7). In addition, Wheatley’s master writes a prefatory letter in which he attests to how quickly she learned English and mastered poetic forms, “to the great astonishment of all who heard her” (6). His words help to authenticate and authorize her poetic voice.
Although this chapter has largely emphasized mediation as it relates to black Africans in the early Americas, mediation in general was a common feature of the literary age. Many of those seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century Puritan captivity and conversion narratives about Anglo‐Americans’ encounters with God and Native Americans were as‐told‐to accounts and/or heavily crafted by community ministers. The same can be said of early criminal confession narratives. Still, the fact that many of these stories are written down by amanuenses does not mean we can assume that the subjects of the narratives were what we would consider today illiterate. Maybe Powers, Mountain, Smith, or Hammon (if he wrote through an amanuensis) could read but not write, or maybe they could do both but deferred to people they thought more skilled than they? Perhaps some, like Job Ben Soloman, possessed literacy skills, just not in English. The British colonies were very much cosmopolitan spaces. Gronniosaw (2001), for instance, learned to read; he received a formal education while enslaved to a Dutch minister in New Jersey. However, he “could not read English” (32). Marrant (Carretta 2006), too, says that he “was sent to school, and taught to read and spell” until he was about 11 (112). Not incidentally, Marrant began school in Spanish St. Augustine.
These earliest iterations of African American literature, then, are remarkable not because they move us away from issues of mediation but because they evidence the conscious efforts by black Africans in America to imagine and shape identities using the textual forms of the day. Wheatley (1773), for example, makes use of a neoclassical style in her poetry to construct a persona in line with Virgil and Homer. In her poem “To Maecenas,” she imagines “O could I rival […] Virgil’s page, / Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage; / Soon the same beauties should my mind adorn, / And the same ardors in my soul should burn” (10). And in a praise poem to another black artist in colonial Massachusetts, she claims immortality, musing “Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire / To aid thy pencil, and they verse conspire! / And may the charms of each seraphic theme / Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!” (114). Equiano (1789) understands his literary efforts in far less ethereal terms. He explains at the beginning of his memoir, “I am not so foolishly vain as to expect from [the writing of his autobiography] either immortality or literary reputation.” Still he hopes it might “promote the interests of humanity” (19–20).
That Wheatley, Equiano, and their black African contemporaries exhibit a literary consciousness is a point on which scholars more or less agree. There is far less certainty about the extent to which these same writers consciously intervened in the racial discourses of the day. In many of these narratives, the black subjects seem to accept their circumstances simply as vicissitudes of life rather than consequences of racist ideologies, and often they acknowledge God’s divine intervention in improving their circumstances. When he finds himself a captive on a ship heading for Rhode Island by way of Barbados at the tender age of eight, Venture Smith (1798) does not resist the captivity. Instead he “promised faithfully to conform” to the demands of his new master (14). Perhaps the greatest irony in Briton Hammon’s captivity narrative is that he does not remark on his servitude. Rather, he celebrates his deliverance from a captivity that restores him into another. Both Wheatley, in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and Equiano represent their capture from West Africa and subsequent enslavement as a “fortunate fall,” a phrase Vincent Carretta (1996) uses to describe the attitude adopted by some enslaved black Africans that “the discomfort of the slaves’ present life was overcompensated by the chance given them of achieving eternal salvation” (2–3). Attending to the degree of racial consciousness demonstrated in a text is all the more relevant because these early black texts – and a black literary consciousness – emerged in the British mainland colonies in tandem with the Enlightenment movement and its emphasis on, among other things, science and logic. As a result of “enlightened” thinking, those in Europe and America largely shifted their strategies for categorizing (and justifying the categorization of) humans, which was based previously on factors related to cultural traits, such as language, religion, and dress. With the Enlightenment, race increasingly became a pseudo‐scientific system rooted in somatic differences deemed immutably and inheritably hierarchical. The stakes, then, were particularly high for black Africans as the Enlightenment rationale for racial difference necessitated that black Africans prove their very humanity rather than having that humanity mediated solely through the perspectives of others.
As the examples throughout this chapter have illustrated, black Africans appear in a variety of textual forms and genres. Those wanting to get a better sense of black African presences in early America should be prepared to search in diverse archives, including those archives that predate the self‐writing and as‐told‐to narrative efforts of that first generation of black authors in the mid‐eighteenth century. Also, they should be prepared to read in creative, even speculative, modes, as most often black Africans appear in texts in mediated forms. Fortunately, we have arrived at a moment in which scholars are moving away from analytical models that understand black African representations in early America as only objects of white literary imaginations. Works demonstrating this approach include Dickson Bruce’s The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865 (2001), Kelly Wisecup’s Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (2013), Nicole N. Aljoe’s Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709–1838 (2011), and my own Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Smith 2016).
This work to reevaluate the literary significance of black Africans in early America potentially moves us toward new discussions about authorship, the origins of African American literature, and the role of ethnicity and race in early American literature. For sure, authorship matters in the production and study of early African American literature for the reasons Karen Weyler has outlined in Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America (2013): it allowed black Africans to pronounce their humanity and validate their own life experiences in relation to changing sociopolitical meanings attributed to authorship. Our modern‐day understanding of authorship as proprietary and creative invention has much to do with transformations in literary, legal, political, and commercial structures related to copyright law, printing, and politics. Prior to the end of the eighteenth century, authorship commonly was conceived of as a humanist endeavor in which writers did not necessarily create literary material; instead they imitated, renovated, translated, and compiled textual matter for communal enrichment. As Andrew Bennett notes in The Author (2005), our modern conception of authorship emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century with Romantic poets who understood their products as correlating with their subjectivities. According to this Romantic notion of authorship, the identities of authors and their roles in creating texts became just as important as the texts themselves. Writers more often claimed text as personal property that reflected their intellectual pursuits. Specifically addressing colonial America, Grantland Rice (1997) argues that this conceptual transformation occurred because of the “rise of economic liberalism” in America at the end of the eighteenth century (4). The emergence of the modern author as subject was not only an impetus on the part of the writer to own the text, as Michel Foucault describes in “What is an Author?” (1969), but also an imperative of the state to identify (and prosecute) the source of ideas propagated in a given text – particularly if it perceived those ideas as seditious. All of this is to say that black Africans in the British mainland colonies started writing or narrating their stories at a moment when authorship was becoming more frequently synonymous with subjectivity and therefore even more consequential for the writer. For black Africans writing in early America, like their Anglo‐American counterparts in the latter eighteenth century, authorship was inherently an act of accommodation, resistance, and self‐affirmation.
Equally important are those texts in which black presences appear before the mid‐eighteenth century, because those even earlier texts – that narrate the experiences of Ben, Esteban, an enslaved woman who was raped – remind us of the extent to which authorship was (and still is) a social practice formed by the interconnections among a writer and others whose actions come to bear on the final text. David D. Hall (2009) explained that “to be a writer was to enter into a relationship of dependence” (76). As we advance the literary study of black Africans in early America, we might ask ourselves what is the relationship between those earliest black mediated forms and those of figures like Hammon, Wheatley, and Gronniosaw, whose texts appear on the eve of changing conceptions of authorship? We could also think more about the consequences of positioning authorship, understood in its modern iteration, as the defining marker of African American literature, an approach which limits what we can say about how, when, and in what forms black Africans participated in the literary life of early America. Notably, the contributors in the essay volume Early African American Print Culture (2012), edited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, already are testing these limits in terms of late eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century American print culture as they consider African Americans’ literary production not just as authors but, in the words of the volume’s co‐editors, “as narrative protagonists, performers, booksellers, editors, and signifiers” (15). Building on the work of studies that have illuminated the significance of black Africans in the cultural landscape of early America, it becomes possible to interrogate the ways in which black African presences in America came to bear on authorship well before the mid‐eighteenth century, not through writing themselves but through cultural contact that necessitated textual collaboration and accommodation. In other words, cultural encounter was important to the creative process of early American writing. We are poised to expand the temporal and archival boundaries of African American literature and in the process further challenge assumptions about the archival silence and invisibility of black Africans in early America.
See also: chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820); chapter 15 (writing lives); chapter 20 (the first black atlantic).