Frederick Douglass

from slaveryinamerica.org

Link to a timeline of Douglass's life

Notes of a Native Son

Baldwin states “to think of him is to think of statistics, slumps, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, and skirmishes” (Baldwin 25). This was a powerful statement from Baldwin referring to African Americans in that time.  Baldwin gives off an indignant tone throughout his entire essay when he makes claims about how blacks/Negros is looked at through the eyes of Christians/Americans. I was really amazed when he compared blacks to “cancer” and “tuberculosis”, both diseases which take over your body and makes you weak (Baldwin 25). Which is a real good analogy in regards to discrimination and slavery because it is like a disease; a disease that painful and sucking the life right out of you.  

Baldwin also states this very interesting comment about the image of black people; “In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics. It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us” (Baldwin 28). Could the “beast” in this sentence be the white man or is he referring to all the torture and oppression blacks went through that people think is appropriate. According to the oxford dictionary, statistics means “an event or person regarded as no more than such a piece of data” (Oxford). Yet Baldwin states at the end of his comment “the beast in our jungle of statistics” (Baldwin 28). This is a very interesting phrase which I would like to look more into and understand who the beast is and what does Baldwin consider to be “statistic.

 Another I would like to briefly reflect on is even though blacks were thought of in a negative way back then, America has progress, but  I don’t believe that we “have walked together into that dazzling future when there will be no white or black” (Baldwin 45). Whether you like it or not there are people  still being thought of as injustices, statistics, losses, and gains. What Baldwin means when he states “the battle is elsewhere” is that once people get pass our colors, we still have to battle with “greed and guilt and bloodlust” (Baldwin 45).

en,wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_of_a_Native_Son

David Walker

Class was a little hectic towards the end today -- thankfully we still have Thursday to discuss David Walker's incredible pamphlet. As I suggested in class, the mostly mysterious young Walker was known as having been born to a free mother and enslaved father (remember: legally, the child follows the condition of the mother) in Wilmington, North Carolina in the Cape Fear region. Some people suggest that his father might have been Anthony Walker, who lived in that region and was a Nigerian Ibo named "Obato" or "Umboto," but Anthony Walker married a Native American woman who had been adopted by the Revolutionary War Major General Robert Howe. He is not listed as a legitimate child of Walker's marriage to this Native American, though he could have been born out of wedlock. On the other hand, Henry Highland Garnet's biography of Walker in his reprint of the "Appeal" claims that he was very dark and likely not of mixed race. It also suggests that his father died before he was born, and Anthony Walker lived for some time afterward.

Cape Fear Region of North Carolina, from Peter Hinks's edition of the "Appeal"

And as Jackie pointed out, the southeastern seaboard (the states on the coast) were notorious in past centuries for their swamplands. In particular, the Great Dismal Swamp was known as a hotbed for Maroon or fugitive activities -- the word Maroon coming from the American/Spanish word marronage, literally meaning a fugitive or runaway who lives on mountaintops (dry land in the swamps).

Great Dismal Swamp, Fugitive Slaves, Virginia -- by David Edward Cronin, 1888

And here's the title page of the 1856 novel Dred; a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp by Harriet Beecher Stowe (the (much better) book that she wrote after Uncle Tom's Cabin:

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp

I reference Stowe here to bring up the subject of this book. Dred takes place in the Carolinas around the Great Dismal Swamp and it describes the efforts of the son (Dred, possibly named for Dred Scott) of executed insurrectionist Denmark Vesey to continue his father's revolutionary legacy. Vesey was active in the early 1820s in Charleston where the site of his former home was named a National Historic Landmark in 1976. At the time, Vesey was Public Enemy #1, and he, like David Walker, was an active member of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Charleston. This church was razed to the ground after the conspiracy was revealed -- in case you were wondering why Walker really hates snitches. Afterwards, a lot of free blacks in Charleston got as far away as possible.

You'll read about what happened to the slaves after an insurrection was discovered in Harriet Jacobs' narrative -- she lived in Edenton, North Carolina around this time. Basically their homes were ransacked, many of their possessions were stolen by white mobs, and sometimes their worship places were closed on account of their being places where uprisings could be plotted. David Walker fled from this oppression and likely traveled around for a few years, going south (likely to Savannah), west (he writes of the "west" at this time with familiarity), and ultimately north. He probably visited Richard Allen, the founder of the AME denomination -- which split from white Methodism on account of increasing efforts by white church leaders to control black churches -- in Philadelphia before settling in Boston.

What we do know is that by 1825 (according to the residence and tax rolls) Walker was living in Boston and had already started up a used clothes shop. Used clothes dealers, hairdressers, barbers, and bootblacks were actually middle class and could afford to live in racially mixed areas of the city at this point in time.

From Hinks's edition of the "Appeal"

Walker also made good professional decisions -- he was a Prince Hall Mason or African Lodge Mason. Although most of his powerful professional contacts were Black Baptists (also known as African Baptists), Walker remained devoted to the AME church -- an indicator that he had likely been exposed to it while in the South and remained loyal to his denomination.

Several quick points about the AME church and Walker's education in the South:
- The AME church frequently ran programs to educate free blacks and some slaves. These programs were sometimes called the Associates of Dr. Bray - a literacy promotion program that went on about this time.
- Walker was probably educated in one of these programs, though no records exist. Public schools in North Carolina in the early 1800s were closed to blacks.
- Walker probably associated with slaves in his early life -- free blacks in NC typically were socially grouped with slaves and sympathized with their condition.

In the reading for Thursday, you'll see a mention of a Camp Meeting in Charleston. Scholar Peter P. Hinks uses deductive logic on Walker's reminiscence of  the Camp Meeting, "for which [he] embarked on a Steam Boat at Charleston, and having been five or six hours on the water, we at last arrived at the place of hearing"(Walker 59) -- a large Camp Meeting (like a revival, but typically continuing over several days).

Hinks suggests that the event could not have occurred before 1816 or 1817 because there were no steamboats on the rivers up to that point. Hinks also notes a newspaper advertisement in the April 17th and April 21st issues of the Charleston City Gazette that mentions revivals at Goose Creek and Sullivan's Island. The trip to Sullivan's Island would have taken much less than five or six hours, so Hinks argues that Walker went to Goose Creek. This places him in Charleston in the early 1820s, around the time of the Vesey conspiracy. Evangelical Camp Meeting religion is quite relevant to Walker's appeal, as is the background of slave insurrection.

Title page of the third edition (1830), from UNC DocSouth

On Thursday, we'll discuss Walker's blend of evangelicalism and natural rights discourse as well as the fact that Walker, like Vesey, acknowledged that change might require a violent uprising or revolution. I am curious how all of you will situate Maria Stewart into this framework. Like Walker, she was born free (in Hartford, Connecticut), but she was soon orphaned and raised by a white minister and his family.

Phillis Wheatley

Wheatley was born in Africa, little more is known about her past. She was "brought" to Boston, Massachusetts on the schooner Phillis, from which she derived her first name. Her last name came from her Mistress and Master, Susanna Wheatley (1709-74) and Boston merchant John Wheatley (1703-78). Susanna Wheatley was ill and Phillis was initially taken in to be her personal maid. The Wheatleys also had two eighteen-year-old twins, Mary and Nathaniel, as well as several other slaves.

Mary Wheatley was Phillis's tutor in religion and language and under her guidance Phillis studied the "Bible, English (language and literature), Latin (language and literature), history, geograhy, and Christian principles" (3). Julian D. Mason, editor of the 1989 edition of Wheatley's poetry issued by the University of North Carolina Press writes that Wheatley gained "as good an education as (and probably a better one than) most Boston women had" at the time regardless of race (3).

Wheatley's spiritual influences are clearly evident in her work. Her literary influences are less so in the poems we read for today. She read a lot of the classics and imitated the neoclassicists popular in the late eighteenth century. She read Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Terrance, Pope, and Milton. Her political influences were equally important. Wheatley lived in Boston at the time of the revolution and had both loyalist (Tory) and revolutionary (Whig) friends and supporters in the city.

Wheatley's poetry was promoted by her mistress, Susanna, and she was behind the failed proposal to publish in the U.S. and the successful London proposal. Wheatley was allowed to ignore household tasks to write, her bedroom was heated and lighted at night (partly because of her frail health but also because she tended to dream her poetry and forget it upon waking. Wheatley went to sea and to London for her health in 1773 with Nathaniel.

In order to publish her book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in London, Wheatley had to remove revolutionary poems and anti-English poems in order to make her work appropriate for British audiences. Her poems were published by Archibald Bell, a religious bookseller in London, only after the authenticity of the work had been attested to by John Wheatley and other prominent Boston citizens. Bell contacted the Countess of Huntingdon, who was fascinated by the novelty of a black American woman poet and insisted that "'Phillis's picture'" appear in the frontispiece. According to one of Wheatley's letters, Huntingdon "'Questnd [Bell] much, whether [Wheatley] was Real without a deception" (7).

The Countess of Huntingdon

Many of Wheatley's poems are about death. This makes them elegies or poems written in the elegiac mode. Poems in this genre are typically both occasional -- inspired by an event or occasion -- and popular among a large number of readers at least for some time.

I'll leave you with a tribute to Wheatley by Jupiter Hammon, one of the earliest black writers. Wheatley was probably the first African American to publish a book of poetry, but she was not the first published African American writer. Generally scholars identify Briton Hammond (author of the lengthily titled:


A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man,--Servant to General Winslow, of Marshfield, in New-England; Who Returned to Boston, After Having Been Absent Almost Thirteen Years. Containing an Account of the Many Hardships He Underwent from the Time He Left His Master's House, in the Year 1747, to the Time of His Return to Boston.--How He Was Cast Away in the Capes of Florida;---The Horrid Cruelty and Inhuman Barbarity of the Indians in Murdering the Whole Ship's Crew;---The Manner of His Being Carry'd by Them Into Captivity. Also, an Account of His Being Confined Four Years and Seven Months in a Close Dungeon,---and the Remarkable Manner in Which He Met with His Good Old Master in London; Who Returned to New-England, a Passenger in the Same Ship.

Unlike Wheatley, Hammon's and Hammond's narratives were published in the United States. Here's Wheatley's American obituary, emphasizing the occasional nature of her American publications in various magazines, pamphlets, and other popular forums:

"'Phillis Peters formerly Phillis Wheatley aged 31, known to the literary world by her celebrated miscellaneous poems'" (quoted on 12).

Source: Wheatley, Phillis. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, second ed. 1988. Print.

Many Thousands Gone

As I read the essay, Many Thousands Gone by James Baldwin, one thing that really stood out to me is the comparison of Negros and cancer, and tuberculosis, “which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured.” This statement in particular surprised me because it shows just how much the black race is degraded. I got from the sentence that the Negro race could be bound by slavery or Jim Crow laws, but like tuberculosis the Negro race will not disappear. In the “social arena” the black race have been described as the lowest of low, animals, the bottom of the barrel, and Baldwin expresses that in the story. “He is a social and not a personal or a human problem;” simply explains how society sees the Negro race, as “statistics, slums, rapes, injustice... “ The Negro man and race have been historically thought of as lazy, useless, animal-like, wild, violent, etc. Since the days of slavery there have always been inferior characteristic linked to the Negro race. A Negro was not supposed to be successful In America, but to remain a servant, someone incapable of thinking for themselves. A Negro was thought of as uneducated and ignorant.

 This is still relevant in today’s society because the Negro, now known as black, man/race still have the same statistics and stereotypes associated to him/it. Statistics show that a black male is more likely to go to prison before he graduates with a degree from college. The stereotype linked to that is all black males are criminals. Statistics also shows that black males are still at the bottom of the workforce and have a harder time moving up in a business. The stereotype linked to that is blacks aren’t educated enough to earn a high salary, or smart enough to move up in the workplace. A black man is still discriminated against and thought of as inferior. As Baldwin states, “a negro is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes;” I believe this means a Negro man is supposed to be continuously faced with hardships, fights and live on an everlasting rollercoaster because of his race and the statistics/stereotypes that is associated with him and the race.

The link I found deals with some of the statistics and stereotypes of a black male.  http://www.lohud.com/article/20070204/NEWS01/702040354/Statistics-stereotypes-fuel-negative-perception-black-males-advocates-say

Response to "Many Thousands Gone"

Response to “Many Thousands Gone”

One thing that definitely caught my attention was the sentence we mentioned, briefly, in class: “Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens.” (pg. 27, Many Thousands Gone) This is what gave me some perspective as to the image of modernity and the progressive nature of the black community, at least according to Baldwin. On a more personal note, I have to say that his phrasing and attitude approaching it was particularly enjoyable. The idea that the slaves that had landed in the United States had faded away - not into oblivion, as he mentions that it is a “sentimental error...to believe that the past is dead” - and its essence has been reissued, reborn, so to speak, into this new, “ferociously literate” people, free and with more than just a few words to say, is something I can visualize very well. Given the right to freedom, they have taken the tools of the arts by storm, using literature, music, dance, imagery, colour, anything to get their message - their very strong message - across after what has veritably been generations of suppression of any such artistic, or creative urges. Baldwin’s clever acknowledgment that though they have come from Africa, it is not home to them any more. A part of them is from there, permanently marked on their skin - no one will deny that claim. However, they are now “almost as dark” - in other words, no longer as dark as they were. They have assimilated, gotten “well-dressed and scrubbed”, became a functional and significant part of the modern community. Baldwin recognizes that this is a part that comes into “[t]he making of an American” (pg. 29), where an American “adopts the vesture of [their] adopted land.” This is done with some disdain, but it is clear that he knows that it happens and that it has happened. After all, in making this acknowledgment, he identifies on multiple occasions as one of those that changes so dramatically that they now identify more with a Western perspective than any other. For he is one of these new people. He is one of the new, tempered, steaming machination, filled to the brim with literary impulses, a being who has discovered their eyes in a dark room, accidentally flipping on the light switch to find tales, stories, words, and finally, a pen and an oh-so-blank sheet of paper.

Jemima and Tom

     A non-fiction book, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and it was published in 1955 as his first non-fiction book. The book starts with sentence 

    “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America – or, more
    precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the
    story of a people is never very pretty.  … One may say that the Negro
    in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our mind.” (24 - 25)

 My first job was that understand this paragraph. How come “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America”? I pick this sentence for In-class Exercise and asked the reason to my classmates. They said African Americans stated to move in the United States as slaves when white people establish the country. African Americans were regarded as a precious property not a human being to white people.  Although in 1862, Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, after that, white people’s discriminations to African American still remain. This is really brief version of African American’s story but it helped me to understand the sentence, why African American’s story is the story of America and why it is not pretty at all.

 As I keep reading the essay, I got another problem, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom, they were unfamiliar to me, and I did not know what they mean. James Baldwin talked about typical idea of Aunt Jemima, such as big black woman, usually shown in the kitchen, cooking for white people. Uncle Tom is similar function as man. James Baldwin says, ‘‘There was no one more forbearing than Aunt Jemima, no one stronger or more pious or more loyal or more wise’’(28) Uncle Tom is ‘‘trustworthy and sexless.’’(28) Baldwin says those two quotes are the public images of African American. The fact is Aunt Jemima is faithless, vicious, and immoral; Uncle Tom is ‘‘violent, crafty, and sullen, a menace to any white woman who passed by.’’(28) 

  According to the essay, it is their surface identity that most white people want to believe. Since white people wanted peace, white people wanted to believe in their artificial creation. James Baldwin stated that Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom was people’s creation and a device for “we” who hope peace.