“James” by Percival Everett

 

Think about what it would mean to be enslaved — utterly enslaved — to a master/owner who detested you and everybody like you. Imagine the worst injustices, cruelties, and aggressions you would be subjected to by totally unrestrained bullys. Imagine how humiliated and angry and desperate you would be. Imagine also how you would feel if these outrages were perpetrated without restraint on your own family and those you loved. Imagine being aware that any response you made could not only result in more punishment and outrage against yourself, but also vast injustices against your family and fellow slaves, or even against enslaved people you didn’t know.

Have you tried to imagine all this? You haven’t come close to what Percival Everett’s brilliant and penetrating novel James can show you about how a slave owner (or any random white person) in pre-Civil-War America could demean a human being who was “owned” and destroy both body and spirit. The absolute power of whites over blacks, even free blacks, at that time is nearly unimaginable, but Everett forces the reader to visualize the horrors. 

James, of course, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s masterpiece Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain forced the reader to see slavery from the eyes of a naive boy with an innate sense of justice, despite his social background. James goes beyond the original for the modern reader because the author’s  eyes are twentieth-century eyes; further, the author gives the character James a dual perspective, both as an educated man (self-educated) and as a helpless victim. 

James is a totally different book, and totally different from most retold stories. Its power comes from the juxtaposition of two visions from two authors and two eras. Impressively, it also captures — and extends — Mark Twain’s humor. In both books, humor enriches and transforms the sadness embedded in the novel. At least that’s how I see it.

The book is a best-seller and award winner, so there are plenty of reviews that unlike this one actually summarize the plot and compare the two versions in detail.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Zadie Smith: "The Fraud"

Zadie Smith: The Fraud

Genteel British society in the 19th century is at the center of a wide variety of fiction. Many famous authors at the time documented the ways of the British aristocracy and upper middle class, and many authors have continued to be fascinated by this era. It has featured in many TV treatments as well as novels. Rarely have these authors fully faced the source of the wealth and privilege of their subjects: many of them made their money as "planters" — and thus as slave owners — in the Caribbean island sugar and rum trade. 

Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, harvesting sugar cane (source)

Sugar cultivation, sugar refineries, and rum distilleries all functioned because they depended on the insanely brutal system of slave labor. The native populations of the islands had been driven to extinction by the early settlers through disease and slavery. By the 1800s, the enslaved workers were all African Black people and mixed-race African-British people. The system was utterly inhumane, and most writers who documented the white beneficiaries of the system didn't choose to mention the fundamental horrors of the system or to acknowledge the abolitionist movement that opposed slavery. The slave trade — that is, bringing enslaved Africans to the British colonies, officially ended in 1807. Continued enslavement of human workers was abolished in the 1830s when the British government generously repaid the slave owners for the loss of their human property, and their wealth was preserved. The slaves were never compensated for their losses. The British upper class beneficiaries quickly forgot the brutality of slavery, as well as the rebellion that preceded emancipation. Here’s a link about the rebellion that preceded emancipation.

Slaves working at a Caribbean rum distillery, 1800s. (From a rum advertisement: source)

In her recent novel, The Fraud (published last September) author Zadie Smith portrays a family of genteel white English folks very much like the ones in so many earlier novels. The details of the plot are based both on historic characters, particularly on a successful novelist of the time, now totally forgotten. and also on historic events, particularly a court case about a fraud that fascinated the public in the 1870s, as well as looking back on the lives of the characters from the 1830s onward. Themes in The Fraud include the relationships of literary figures of the time, as well as many political and social issues: it’s a complex novel with a complex central character, Eliza Touchet, through whose eyes we see political, social, and personal relationships. In the rest of this review, I'm concentrating only on the topics of race and slavery as the author presented them, but there is much more.

Smith uses the many events and characters with great success to illuminate these issues, including the attitudes of white people towards black people and towards the institution of slavery, for example, white women including Eliza who belong to abolitionist organizations. Smith explores the way that the black residents of England, who were often former slaves from the Caribbean plantations, reacted to a profoundly racist society, and how they formed their own way to see themselves. It’s subtle and detailed.

As the plot about the trial continues to unfold, there's a kind of a pause for a sequence of chapters about the life and family of Andrew Bogle, a former slave who played a big role in the notorious court case. Bogle’s father was forcibly brought as a slave from Africa, and his biography includes his experiences of slavery on Jamaican plantations and sugar mills. Bogle himself begins life as a slave and then as a freed man in England and Australia. 

Bogle’s story begins thus:

“‘My life has had many parts,’ said Bogle. ‘It is difficult to say how many lives I have lived, or where my story truly begins. One thing I know for certain: my story is not what it should be. I should have been a great man. I come from great men, on my father’s side. But I hardly remember my father and can only speak of what Myra told me. Myra was my mother, and much of what I know of my father’s life she gave to me. Poor woman, that she should have nothing else to give me but that!” (p. 239)

Bogle's father was born as an elite member of a tribe in Africa. As a boy, he was kidnapped and taken to Jamaica on a slave ship. Through the events of his father's life, Smith illustrates the way that all the enslaved African workers on the plantation were subjected to hardship, cruelty, and inhumanity. Bogle's story reveals the hardships of laboring on a plantation in the overwhelming heat of Jamaican summer, whether assigned to work in the offices, in the fields, or in the sugar refineries and distilleries. Eventually, he moved to England with his master and later, as a free man, went to Australia as a settler. Finally, he returned to England where he became a witness at the notorious trial that is central to the novel. 

Bogle is very aware of his place in English society as a black man, a son of an African tribal elite, an ex-slave, a witness in a highly popular trial, and as a relatively literate and politically aware person. Here are his thoughts as he reads about the 1831 slave uprising in the newspapers — at that time he was in London working for his former owner, Mr Doughty:

“Every evening, in the newspapers, the tale of this negro uprising expanded, and Mr Doughty expressed some variation on his relief to no longer be in any way involved with the ‘cursed sugar trade’. Bogle snuck the newspaper back to his quarters after dark and read the long columns by the light of a single candle, trying to understand if only the north coast was burning and who exactly was being executed in the town squares for refusing to work. But of all the negroes in Jamaica there was only one with a name, as far as The Times was concerned – Sam Sharpe – and after a while he understood that he was only upsetting himself. What he wanted to know no English paper would ever tell him.” (p. 308)

The rewards to the planters of using slave labor for growing sugar, refining it, and making rum are all very clearly described, but there’s little in the novel about the British side of this trade; for example, about the consumption of sugar and rum in England at the time. When the genteel people in the novel drink an alcoholic beverage, it would be an after-dinner glass of port, not rum! Though the content of their meals is sometimes described, the role of sugar isn’t much mentioned — in their world, sugar is mentioned only when the abolitionists ask housewives to boycott this product of slave labor. Sugared tea (I know from other sources) was the mainstay of the lower classes, but not relevant to the novel’s literary and social elite. I think this is an interesting choice on the part of the author.

The Guardian reviewer last August thus summarized the novel:

“Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were ‘two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined,’ joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s ‘secret word’: slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges.” (source)

Review © 2024 mae sander 

The Toledo Museum of Art

The Toledo Museum of Art is less than an hour’s drive from our house, and it’s quite an excellent museum. We visited there last Wednesday after spending the morning at the lotus ponds at Lake Erie Metropark, which is around half way from Ann Arbor to Toledo (photos here).

The museum has a magnificent facade and front entrance. The useful entrance is at the back
on the parking-lot side. A lovely mural is at the end of the hall by the stairs to the main floor.
This tile mural is titled “Apollo” and is by Henri Matisse.

The large and imposing entrance hall on the main floor was busy: the workers were installing a large sculpture
by Jeff Koons titled “Balloon Monkey.”

A special exhibit poster was very exciting to see! 

“Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club” documented the visits of American painter
Jacob Lawrence to Nigeria in the 1960s, as well as displaying works from a collective of African artists from that time.

“Beached” from the War Series by Jacob Lawrence.

Jacob Lawrence (1917 – 2000) was an American painter. His portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life is very interesting. His two trips to Nigeria gave him added inspiration, as well as personal contact with a group of dynamic modern African painters. 

A Nigerian market scene by Jacob Lawrence.

Cutout murals explained the art and artists in each section of the exhibit.

These cutouts were based on the mural on the art studio space used by the collective that Lawrence visited.

The exhibit invited visitors to sit and look through some examples of the journal published by these artists.

“The Lazy Hunters, and the Poisonous Wrestlers, Lizard Ghost, and the Cobra” by the Nigerian artist
known as Twins Seven-Seven (1944-2011).

“People in Other Rooms” by Jacob Lawrence.

“Slavery” by Jacob Afolabia (b. 1940)

An activity space for visitors to the exhibit.

Blog post and photos © 2023 mae sander.

Happy July Fourth!

Last year’s fireworks.

I love the Fourth of July, and I’m about to go out to the park and enjoy the day along with so many other people. Maybe I’ll see some fireworks tonight. But besides having fun on a beautiful summer day, I also feel that the idea of freedom and independence is of great importance, and I’m thinking about how much it means and how we still need to fight for the original ideals of our nation and what the Declaration of Independence should mean to us.

From Jamelle Bouie’s column in the New.York Times this morning, commemorating Independence Day:

“Read today, the Declaration of Independence is a freedom document. It stands for absolute human equality and represents the highest ideals of the American republic. On July 4, we celebrate it as much as we celebrate independence itself. …

“The Declaration as we understand it was forged by struggle. Not the struggle with Britain but the struggle within the independent United States for freedom and equality against the weight of the Constitution and the American political system. As you might imagine, the key that shaped our understanding of the Declaration was the fight to end slavery.”

The history of how the Declaration was used in the early days of our country to support the idea that slavery should be abolished in the American Republic is very fascinating — I recommend reading this whole beautifully written column for today’s holiday!

UPDATE: Fireworks!

Colson Whitehead: “The Underground Railroad”

 

The Underground Railroad, published 2016.

Imagining what it would be like to be a slave in the Old South is so painful that mostly, we don’t exert ourselves and do it. Colson Whitehead’s imagination in The Underground Railroad is so powerful that reading this narrative of slavery and dispossession of one’s own self forces me to imagine the horrors of being owned and having no agency to do anything but suicide or infinitely risky flight from home. He conveys with feeling the existential dread of how you and your parents or you and your children could be sold separately and never be reunited. 

Whitehead’s narrative creates such a vivid picture of both the mental and the physical torments suffered by American slaves before the Civil War that it’s almost unbearable to read. Despite the pain, it’s worth reading not only because it’s history but also because he’s a great writer. The plot is suspenseful and absorbing, the characters are likable or despicable, and the details are vivid. The facts about atrocities like the Fugitive Slave Laws and the resulting vicious Slave Catchers are compelling, moreso than in normal history books. A poignant device Whitehead uses is quoting of advertisements for runaway slaves at the start of each chapter: these contemporary descriptions of human chattel have always been an object lesson on the terrors of the institution of enslavement. Above all, what I found important in this book is that it's written entirely from the point of view of kidnapped Africans and their descendants.

The title of the book, The Underground Railroad, evokes a historic image, but in the novel, one does not find the famous Underground Railroad that existed before the Civil War which was a network of safe houses and secret routes known to “conductors” like Harriet Tubman and other infinitely brave heroes of American history. Whitehead’s novel creates a metaphoric version that paradoxically, is a literal railroad, with engines and freight cars that runs through underground tunnels to take escapees away from their enslavers. This concrete visualization of surreal underground tunnels and frightening engines contributes to the unreality of the whole historic nightmare. The Guardian review explained it this way: "Whitehead has taken that historical metaphor – the network of abolitionists who helped ferry slaves out of the south – and made it into a glistening, steampunk reality."

The New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani describes the book as “a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery.” The following quote from this review provides an insight about the variety and depth of the writing:

“One of the remarkable things about this novel is how Mr. Whitehead found an elastic voice that accommodates both brute realism and fablelike allegory, the plain-spoken and the poetic — a voice that enables him to convey the historical horrors of slavery with raw, shocking power. He conveys its emotional fallout: the fear, the humiliation, the loss of dignity and control. And he conveys the daily brutality of life on the plantation, where Cora is gang-raped, and where whippings (accompanied by scrubbings in pepper water to intensify the pain) are routine.” 

Whitehead also plays with history in various other ways, especially the way he portrays and exaggerates the extreme anti-black laws of North Carolina. The result of his counter-historical choices is to highlight the attitudes and evils of the enslavers; for example in his version of the town where the character Cora is hiding, a lynching occurs almost every day. 

Museums and historic houses that one visits may present the history (including slave cabins) of the Africans who did the work in the Old South, made their enslavers rich, and never received the profits, even for their distant descendants, even to this day. In the novel, a "museum" in the North Carolina town forced the hiding fugitives, including Cora, to play a role in very falsified narratives about the transport of Africans to the US and about their lives on the plantations. Cora was forced to enact a false image of slavery in this museum. Her thoughts as she looked out of the exhibit where she and other fugitives played the role of a boy on a slave ship or a woman servant:

"The stuffed coyotes on their stands did not lie, Cora supposed. And the anthills and the rocks told the truth of themselves. But the white exhibits contained as many inaccuracies and contradictions as Cora’s three habitats. There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers. The enterprising African boy whose fine leather boots she wore would have been chained belowdecks, swabbing his body in his own filth. Slave work was sometimes spinning thread, yes; most times it was not. No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach." (p. 116). 

Compared to the imaginary museum where Cora is on display, the African American History Museum in Washington, which I visited last week seems to me to be sincerely honest and accurate, as well as historically broad and detailed. However real and accurate it is in conveying the injustices done to African Americans for 400 years, though, this museum  didn’t work on my emotional imagination the way that Whitehead’s narrative does. He forces me to perceive enslavement in its true raw and poisonous viciousness, and to portray those who owned other humans as something below humanity themselves.

Note: This is the first time I have read this prize-winning novel, and I have not seen the TV miniseries based on the book. I've read a couple of other books by Colson Whitehead and I'm looking forward to the upcoming publication of his new novel Crook Manifesto next July.

Review © 2023 mae sander

Washington, DC

The Washington Monument and the National Museum of African American History and Culture

The exterior of the African American Museum is beautiful, a lace-like skeleton
with a repeated inverted pyramid shape.

Before entering the museum, we walked around the Washington Monument.

Inside, the architecture is fascinating, with carefully designed views of the exterior cladding.
This corner is open to all four upper stories. There are also three floors underground.

A viewing area allows one to enjoy looking towards the Washington Monument.

Looking down the escalator, another view of the dramatic windows.

Art and History in the Museum

We spent around five hours in the museum, including a break for lunch in the Museum’s Sweet Home Café, which “showcases the rich culture and history of the African American people with traditional, authentic offerings as well as present-day food traditions.” The four of us enjoyed fried chicken, mac and cheese, collard greens, cornbread, coleslaw, carrot cake, and a few other soul-food choices. Later, in the cultural expressions area of the museum, we enjoyed a historic presentation of the history of food in the American Black community.

We began our museum tour at the beginning:  a very large exhibit detailing the history of chattel slavery and racial consciousness/prejudice in the 1400s. The museum has a vast number of exhibits about the emerging North American establishment of the slave trade and of slavery in both the North and the South. The Revolutionary War, the early 19th century, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Twentieth Century are all covered in great detail. You learn about the economics, politics, personalities, and above all the suffering associated with slavery and the slave trade in centuries of history. It’s a challenging museum!

Separate exhibits describe the development of Black American music and art. The museum is vast and we didn’t see it all: you can’t see it all in just one day! And the museum is so popular that it’s hard to get the tickets (no charge because it’s one of our national Smithsonian museums). Here are a few photo highlights of our hours in the museum.

The history of slavery is illustrated with very dramatic murals.

A statue of the 18th century poet Phillis Wheatley, who was brought
from Africa as a slave, and sold in Boston at the age of seven.
Her white owners gave her a classical education, and she soon was recognized as an important poet.

The exhibit on the history of music by Black Americans has many entertaining illustrations.
This is Chuck Berry’s extraordinary red Cadillac!

In the music exhibit: lights, costumes, photos, sound tracks, and more.

An African statue that inspired the architect of the building, 

About the making of the museum:

“Lead designer David Adjaye and lead architect Philip Freelon, together with their architectural team Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup, won an international competition in April 2009 to design and deliver the museum to the people of the United States. Groundbreaking on the five-acre site took place in February 2012, with the Museum’s grand opening celebrated on September 24, 2016.” (Smithsonian Museum Documentation)

Discovering Artists that are New to Me

Among the many artists represented in the special exhibit “Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience,” I was particularly interested to learn about a 20th century artist named Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), who worked with Grant Wood when she was a student at the University of Iowa, and who did much of her work in Mexico.

 

This exhibit “looks at the ways in which visual art has long provided its own protest, commentary, escape and perspective for African Americans.” I found the selection of work to be very fascinating.

Elizabeth Catlett: “In Phillis Wheatley I proved intellectual equality in the midst of slavery," (1946)

Blog post © 2023 mae sander 

Dara Horn and Antisemitism

 Two Novels

Dara Horn is a fascinating author, and I’ve read several of her novels in the past, as well as her book of essays titled People Love Dead Jews. (Reviewed here.) Somehow I missed one earlier novel titled Eternal Life (published in 2018), but I have just now read it, and I find it compelling. All of her books are centered on Jewish characters in a very special way, intentionally different from most fiction that I read.

Eternal describes the life of a woman named Rachel, who was born at the end of the Second Temple era in Jerusalem (that is, in the first century of the common era). As a very young woman, Rachel made a vow that caused her to be unable to die. Therefore, at the beginning of the novel, she is an elderly woman who lives in modern America, though her memories span 2000 years.

The details of Rachel's early life in Jerusalem in the first century are beautifully presented. Her memory of the burning of the Temple by the Romans is especially vivid: it “did not burn, not at first. It melted. Silver and gold plating on its surfaces heated until the precious metals shivered and slid down the massive limestone walls, solid becoming liquid.” (p. 201) After witnessing the destruction of Jerusalem, Rachel escapes, and survives to be old, but she doesn't die. Rather, she continues to lead new lives over and over again. 

Eventually, eternal life seems to her to be more of a curse than it is a blessing. Through her repeated experience of being a young woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, an old lady, and then starting over and repeating the same emotional and personal joys and sorrows, Rachel learns much, but feels a sense of futility: “Youth was no doubt wasted on the young, but only she knew how much of old age was wasted on those near death.” (p. 7)

Here is how Rachel sees eternal life: at first it seemed good, then not so much:

“I just thought I was lucky…. It wasn’t obvious, at least not right away. I still got hungry and thirsty every day like everyone else; I still had the same body, the same feelings. Years passed, and I even looked older, my face sagged, my skin loosened, my hair got lighter and thinner—maybe just from being exposed to the sun, or maybe it was more from suffering than from age, I don’t know. It was enough that no one who knew me noticed anything strange, and at first I didn’t either. But nothing else changed at all. Illnesses didn’t matter, injuries didn’t matter. Then there was a plague, whole neighborhoods were wiped out, but nothing happened to me…. And then years after that, the city was besieged and everyone starved, but for us it was irrelevant. When the city finally burned I saw that it wasn’t my imagination. I stepped through the fires and walked out the city gates.” (p. 27)

The main action of the novel take place in the early years of the 21st century; that is, now. Even cooking causes her to feel alienated by her extraordinarily long life. She prepares a Sabbath meal with dishes like kugel. Her 20th century family see it as old and traditional -- but it seems new to her. These dishes have only been invented for a few hundred years! 

"It wasn’t even possible to cook her childhood foods anymore. They required clay ovens, copper heating coils, inverted iron bowls over open fires, grains that no longer existed, animals whose parts were no longer for sale. Once, about seventy years ago, she had seen a jug of olive oil in a store, for the first time in over a century: ages had passed since she had lived anywhere near where olives grew, or near where anyone might buy them. Olive oil! She had felt a thrill when she bought it. But at home she had discovered that there was nothing to eat it with, and when she tasted it, the flavorless slick on her tongue bore no resemblance at all to what she remembered."  (pp. 82-83). 

Rachel makes an effort to find a way out of her predicament via modern technology -- but no spoilers! I was surprised at how suspenseful I found her story and that of both her past and of her current families.

A few years ago, I read Horn’s novel A Guide for the Perplexed, which is also historic fiction with magical realist leanings, and settings in three different historic eras. The unifying theme of the three parallel stories is memory. The unifying location is the Cairo Genizah, a storehouse of documents from the medieval era that was discovered in the late 19th century. The unifying philosophy comes from Maimonides' book A Guide for the Perplexed. Another unifying theme is the relationship of pairs of brothers or sisters; each of the three plot lines includes at least one and sometimes more than one set of siblings. There are similarities between the two novels, and both of them are very inventive and fun to read. (Though not everyone agrees with me that they are good to read!)

American Antisemitism as Dara Horn Observes It

From The Atlantic, April 3, 2023. (Article Here)

In the Atlantic this week, Dara Horn documents the constant barrage of minor antisemitic insults and comments that many Jewish people have recently been experiencing. She writes: “At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.”

The Atlantic article is mainly about Horn's view of the purpose and content of Holocaust museums and Holocaust education in American schools. She suggests several penetrating questions about how these efforts affect living people, and if they change anyone's attitudes or behaviors. Horn writes:

“American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering. ...This erasure feels completely normal. Better than normal, even: noble, humane.

“But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting it. That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters. It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.”

Many and complicated issues arise in Horn's treatment of the many holocaust museums and their approach to Jewish life, Jewish history, and Jewish identity. Mostly, they do not deal with current issues of any kind, and in fact avoid discussing anything contemporary. Her observations about why and how they avoid facing the currents of antisemitism in our society and internationally are very penetrating. I recommend this article, but I don't want to try to summarize the entire document. Please read it!

Reviews © 2023 mae sander. 

Phillis Wheatley Reconsidered

Boston in the mid-18th century was home to many enslaved Africans and also free men and women of African descent living there, along with the White, mainly British, inhabitants. My knowledge of this era was minimal, and reading The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatly by David Waldstreicher offered me a hugely interesting education in that time and place. 

Boston residents at the time were beginning to question the moral and religious implications of enslaving other human beings. As the century proceeded, antislavery sentiments became more and more mainstream and normal. Principled opposition to slavery grew simultaneously and in concert with the opposition to British rule.  The Revolution was coming!

Phillis Wheatley, the subject of this history, is frequently remembered in historic accounts because of her prominence as a poet. Waldstreicher portrays her in the context of the era and the intellectual climate of the times. She arrived in Boston in 1761 as a small and not-very-healthy child of around seven years old, who had been torn away from her father in Africa. She was purchased by the Wheatley family who lived in the center of the city. Her age was estimated by the fact that she was missing her front baby teeth; she was so young and small that they paid a low price for her. Within a few years, she learned to speak, read, and write English, and began to write impressive poetry in the classical style of the era. As I read this, I was deeply disturbed by imagining such a small and vulnerable child being kidnapped, sold as property, and valued only as a slave.

In both Boston and London in the 1770s, there were active and important intellectual and political debates about the moral and historic issues of slavery. As Phillis Wheatley’s poetry became known and admired, prominent members of society in Boston as well as visitors from London sought to meet her, and even requested that she write poetry to commemorate some of the participants in the debate, In particular, by request she wrote a poem about Lord Dartmouth, who was a proponent in British political life of the American requests for more respect, more economic freedom, and less tolerance for enslavement of Africans. 

Eventually, her family/owners determined that she should travel to London for the occasion of publication of her first book. Also for this book, they felt that she should have a portrait painted; the artist was probably Scipio Moorhead, another enslaved African who was unusually gifted and accomplished. Again, I cringe when I think of the horrific loss of opportunity for the African captives who served in the homes of these Bostonians: people who manage to have such a pure reputation in history as I was always taught it. 

An engraving of the portrait. The original oil painting is lost.

"Contemporaries would have recognized at once the pious and the literary conventions in the portrait, or at least the engraving based on it. The now famous image of Phillis Wheatley is the 'portrait of a young bluestocking.' ... The narrow black band around her neck may be a subtle variant on the metal collar that had been a convention in portraits of African slaves. Nevertheless, this is the portrait of a lady as a poet, a thinking person, who rests her arm and elbow on her own table, her own papers." (The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. p. 206-207).

Phillis Wheatley's book of poems was successful in many ways, including as a sort of autobiography: "The poems ... tell a story. They chart her development as a poet, her fulfillment of her early promise, and her development into a sophisticated adult worthy of patronage, capable of wisdom on 'various' topics, Christian but literate in the classics, African and American but also decidedly British." (p. 262). 

To London and Back

The description of Phillis Wheatley's trip to London is fascinating. She visited famous places, such as the Tower of London and the new British Museum, which was just receiving material from the voyages of Captain Cook. She met famous people, both British and American -- including Benjamin Franklin. And her accomplishments as a poet were greatly appreciated by the local people. 

Upon her return from London, “Eleven newspapers in the colonies announced Phillis Wheatley’s return as a passenger on a ship laden with goods…. These reports were even more effusive than the advance notices and initial reviews of her book.” (p. 274) She was treated as a celebrity, and participated increasingly in the ongoing controversies about abolition and the morality of holding slaves. Her book was selling; what’s more, her opinions and her status became important in the public eye.

Another cringey subject in this book is the way admiring Bostonians related to Phillis Wheatley, both recognizing her genius and accomplishments, but also reacting with bigotry. They often wanted to meet her and take tea or dine with her, but were halted by prejudice, which for her created "an everyday balancing act, always knowing her audience at least as well as they knew themselves." (p. 145). Specifically: 

“…after her return from London, Phillis did take tea at the same table with white women—but only when they insisted. Eunice Fitch—none other than the second wife of Timothy Fitch, owner of the [ship] Phillis, who had sent a slaver to Africa as recently as 1771—overruled her anxious daughters and stepdaughters, ‘who could not bear that they should sit down at table with a colored person’ (as someone who had heard the story later put it using polite nineteenth-century language).” (p. 144)

Emancipation

Phillis Wheatley became a free woman in the autumn of 1773. The process of emancipating a slave in Boston at the time was complicated and could be expensive. Details of exactly how and by whom she was made free are not clearly known. Her freedom seems due mainly to the fame and fortune that she acquired in London. Fame: because she was recognized there as an important and to some extent symbolic person, a key indicator of the evils of enslaving human beings. Fortune: because funds from the sale of her book of poetry and also other rewards she received were significant, though complications later ensued. 

Although she was no longer enslaved to the Wheatley family, Phillis Wheatley continued to live in their large home as a free person. Susanna Wheatley, the matriarch of the family and original purchaser of the young Phillis, had been ill for a long time prior to Phillis’s voyage to London; on her return, Phillis attended to Susanna in her final illness, and mourned her deeply when she died a few months later. It’s complicated —

“Susanna was her enslaver and yet something like kin by adoption. Phillis did feel in some measure chosen, rescued from a still worse fate: ‘I was a poor little outcast & a stranger when she took me in: not only into her house but I presently became a sharer in her most tender affections.’” (p. 294)

Boston, 1775 and After

The anti-British sentiment in Boston grew, and soon became an armed conflict. Bunker Hill, Lexington, and Concord are all familiar names to any American who knows even a small amount of history (like me). Phillis Wheatley was present in Boston, and then evacuated when things became dangerous. Though the loyalty to the American side by enslaved or free Africans was not assumed (the politics are very complex), Phillis was on the side of the rebels. Among other things, she wrote an ode to George Washington and wrote letters directly to him during his early campaigns, which he acknowledged publicly and answered with letters directly to her.

In Massachusetts, there was a hot war, which is well-covered by the standard histories of the time. During the war years, there was also a constant debate about enslavement of Africans, and about the various views of racial differences. As the principles of citizenship and democracy were explored, the civil rights of non-European, non-White residents, including voting rights were discussed, and legal rights for all races (men only, of course) were eventually achieved. Eventually,"the bill of rights in the actually ratified Massachusetts constitution of 1780 did include language about 'all men' being 'born free and equal.' Enslaved people began to use that provision in court when suing for their freedom. No single decision banned slavery, though judges seemed reluctant to enforce hereditary bondage." (pp. 359-360). \

Much of the remainder of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatly covers these issues in very interesting detail, though Phillis Wheatley's role was often as a symbol, not a speaker. Her accomplishments were seen as proof that race didn't result in any natural inequality of human beings. 

In her own life, in 1778, she married a man named John Peters, and lived with him through some very hard times; she died in 1784. Little is known about her final years with Peters. Her second book was never published, so she had little or no income. In fact, the manuscript with her second collection of poems was lost and never recovered.

"The ambiguities of emancipation persisted and magnified throughout the final years of Wheatley’s life and shaped the actions she took. She tested the meaning and substance of her freedom. She experienced on a personal level many of the triumphs and the tragedies of the first U.S. emancipation, which might also be called the first Reconstruction." (p. 360).

The final chapter of this biography summarizes the reputation and readership for Phillis Wheatley and her poetry throughout history, and the way she influenced later Black poetry and other intellectual history.

What I learned

Before I read The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley I had minimal knowledge of the events, such as the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party that preceded the American Revolution. I had even less knowledge of the development and publication of the ideas of liberty and the anti-slavery movement in Boston and their influence on the same thoughts throughout the British colonies that became the United States. In particular, I learned that both the British loyalists and the revolutionaries both tried to claim the loyalty of the African-Americans, both free and enslaved. 

In reading this book, I learned much more about the development of the principles of liberty for both Whites and Blacks. I also learned that writers opposing slavery and denigration of Africans often invoked Phillis Wheatley's accomplishments of proof of their point about racial justice. 

As I read about Phillis, her emancipation, and her growing participation in the anti-slavery movement, I learned a lot about the legalities of slavery and the challenges of emancipation in that era. Further, I learned about the challenges of making a living as an author in that time, and about the dependence of authors on patronage by wealthy, noble, and prominent sponsors.

Above all, I learned about the life and work of a great American poet. Much of Phillis Wheatley's work is quoted in the book, with interpretations and explanations of the way the poetry fit into its time and place. As I understand it, author David Waldstreicher. has reinterpreted many of the poems in the light of the historic events and controversies of the era, especially the anti-slaver movement. Recognition of Phyllis Wheatley’s poetic accomplishments was widespread in America, England, and even in France, where Voltaire mentioned her success. 

In reviewing this book here, I didn't try to create a full summary of the many interesting features of the poet's life and times, or of her poetry, which was covered in quite a lot of detail. My review is very incomplete -- if you want to actually know about Phillis Wheatley, you should read more, definitely not just my brief thoughts!

Review © 2023 mae sander

“How the Word is Passed”

“Our country is in a moment, at an inflection point, in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today. But it seems that the more purposefully some places have attempted to tell the truth about their proximity to slavery and its aftermath, the more staunchly other places have refused. I wanted to visit some of these places—those telling the truth, those running from it, and those doing something in between—in order to understand this reckoning. In How the Word Is Passed I travel to eight places in the United States as well as one abroad to understand how each reckons with its relationship to the history of American slavery. I visit a mix of plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, historical landmarks, and cities.” (p. 6)

This quote explains the central goal of Clint Smith’s book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.

This is a powerful book. Each chapter explores the durability of what slavery meant to America, how we still live with it whether we bother to think about it or not. One chapter describes the author’s visit to a southern plantation that focuses on the experience of the enslaved people; another describes his painful experience attending an enthusiastic meeting of the Sons of the Confederacy (who haven’t really given up their cause). He also participated in a Juneteenth celebration in Galveston, Texas, where the original announcement of the end of slavery inspired the traditional holiday. 

These experiences make me think about how we live with our past whether our own personal ancestors were participants in the institution of slavery, or whether they arrived in our country later, whether we are descended from white or black ancestors, and so on.

Awareness of the Past: Views from the University of Michigan Museum of Art

A portrait by Kehinde Wiley in the central gallery, University o Michigan Museum of Art.

About this painting: 

"Wiley’s work challenges us to reconsider what and who contemporary portraiture can and should represent. He invites everyday people of color to select poses from historic paintings of kings, queens, gods, and saints. For this portrait, Wiley’s model—a young man named Keshawn Warren—chose the stance of Saint Francis in Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert. Warren’s open arms and upward glance mimic the Christian saint’s posture, but in Wiley’s reinterpretation, a lush and vibrant floral background wraps around Warren as he claims his space." (UMMA)

From How the Word is Passed:

“In the nineteenth century, Black people lived in fear that at any moment a slave catcher could snatch them or their children up, regardless of status or social position. In the twenty-first century, Black people live in fear that at any moment police will throw them against a wall, or worse, regardless of whether there is any pretense of suspicion other than the color of their skin.” (p. 224)

Randolph Rogers, “Lincoln and the Emancipated Slave,” 1866.

From How the Word is Passed:

“While running for the presidency in 1860, Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories, but he promised not to interfere with slavery in any of the fifteen states where it already existed. Despite his promise, many Southern leaders perceived Lincoln’s election as a direct, abolitionist threat to their enterprise.” (p. 150)

,

Samuel Levi Jones, “Promises,” 2014

From How the Word is Passed:

“I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it. In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.” (p. 64)

“The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.” (p. 288)

Review © 2023 mae sander.