The Earliest African American Literatures

A Critical Reader

Zachary McLeod Hutchins, Cassander L. Smith, Zachary McLeod Hutchins, Cassander L. Smith

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469665610
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

With the publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019, a growing number of Americans have become aware that Africans arrived in North America before the Pilgrims. Yet the stories of these Africans and their first descendants remain ephemeral and inaccessible for both the general public and educators. This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to 1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the presence of black Africans in this early period. Brief introductions preceding each text provide historical context and genre-specific interpretive prompts to foreground their significance. Included here are transcriptions from manuscript sources and colonial newspapers as well as forgotten texts. The Earliest African American Literatures will change the way that students and scholars conceive of early American literature and the role of black Africans in the formation of that literature.

Part I

Spiritual Accounts

Spiritual conversion and Indian captivity narratives were two of the earliest genres to emerge in British North America, initiated by the spiritual fervor of the Puritans, then transformed by those Protestant denominations that appeared amid the First Great Awakening in the early eighteenth century. It makes sense, then, that some of the earliest African American literatures would come in these generic forms. In this first part of The Earliest African American Literatures, we highlight literary black Africans in a range of spiritual contexts that stretch the generic borders of the captivity and conversion narratives. They appear in these spiritual accounts as criminals, converts, and saviors. They proselytize, supplicate, censure, repent, condemn slavery, and, in one case, negotiate for improved living conditions. Several are as-told-to narratives that position black African lives as front and center in the texts.

Often, black Africans understood religious assimilation, specifically, conversion to Christianity, as a route to better treatment; for those enslaved, conversion held out the possibility for freedom based on common-law practice that discouraged the enslavement of Christians. In his 1789 autobiography The Interesting Narrative, Olaudah Equiano alludes to this common law in his attempts to thwart one enslaver’s efforts to sell him; he declares, “I have been baptized; and by the laws of the land no man has a right to sell me.”¹ Sold shortly after making that declaration, Equiano discovered what his black African predecessors featured in this reader discovered decades earlier. Christian conversion did not immunize black Africans from racial oppression. The texts included here illustrate black African efforts to integrate, to model the virtues and customs of the predominately Anglo-American communities in which they found themselves. In some cases, their efforts strained the pre-Enlightenment conceptions of race that located human difference in cultural markers like language, religion, and behavior. For example, a group of mixed-race men and women enslaved on a plantation in Virginia in 1723 appealed to the Anglican Church in London to emancipate them. They complained that their enslavement prohibited them from exercising good Christian values. In the effort to distance themselves from the Blackness that justified their enslavement, they argued that they were just as much white as Black, the brothers and sisters of those enslavers who held them in bondage. By emphasizing their faith, they also made claims about their commonality with their brothers and sisters in Christ. Their petition is included in this part, along with several other texts that employ a similar rhetorical strategy of racial elision. Presumably, living life as a good Christian could render one less “black.” Religion was one way early black Americans navigated enslavement and other forms of racism. Their efforts created a literary footprint.

CHAPTER ONE

Conversion Narrative of a Blackmore Maid, 1643

Introduction

“New England’s First Fruits” is the first in a collection of seventeenth-century missionary writings known as the Eliot Tracts, named after the Puritan minister and teacher John Eliot. The tracts are a series of eleven texts, written between 1643 and 1675, that detail the efforts of Puritan missionaries to convert Native populations, mainly in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A key feature of the tracts are the transcriptions—in the form of summaries, paraphrases, and quoted speech—of the conversion testimonies that Natives presented orally before church officials as proof of their conversion to Christianity. Those narratives have become rich source material for scholars of early American and Native American studies, who argue that even though the conversion narratives in the tracts are heavily mediated by English writers, they offer some of the earliest representations of Native agency in early American literature. Although the Tracts largely focus on the interactions between colonists and Natives, this first tract represents a black African woman convert living in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She is the only black African described in the text, which implies that her piety garnered her a measure of esteem among her white, Puritan counterparts. Rhetorically, her narrative seems anomalous, an odd digression. In the seventeenth century, American Puritans debated whether black Africans had souls and whether they could be converted. Therefore, with the inclusion of this woman’s testimony, the scope, the rhetorical aims of the entire tract expand, leading to questions about how black Africans fit into the colony’s larger missionary efforts. The moment also offers another perspective on black African agency and the experiences of black African women in colonial Massachusetts.

Text

From “New England’s First Fruits” (1643). In The Eliot Tracts: With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter, edited by Michael P. Clark, 55–78. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

There is also a Blackmore maid, that hath long lived at Dorchester in New-England, unto whom God hath so blessed the publique and private means of Grace, that she is not only indued with a competent measure of knowledge in the mysteries of God, and conviction of her miserable estate by sinne; but hath also experience of the saving work of grace in her heart, and a sweet savour of Christ breathing in her; insomuch that her soule hath longed to enjoy Church fellowship with the Saints there, and having propounded her desire to the Elders of the Church after some triall of her taken in private, she was called before the whole Church, and there did make confession of her knowledge in the Mysteries of Christ and of the work of Conversion upon her Soule: And after that there was such a testimony given of her blamelesse and godly Conversation, that she was admitted a member by the joynt consent of the Church, with great joy to all their hearts. Since which time, we have heard her much admiring Gods free grace to such a poore wretch as she was; that God leaving all her friends and Kindred still in their sinnes, should cast an eye upon her, to make her a member of Christ, and of his Church also: and hath with teares exhorted some other of the Indians that live with us to embrace Iefus Chrijl, declaring how willing he would be to receive them, even as he had received her.

Suggested Reading

• Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Bellin, Joshua. “John Eliot’s Playing Indian.” Early American Literature 42, no. 1 (2007): 1–30.
• Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Gray, Kathryn N. “Christian Indian Women in Seventeenth-Century New England.” In John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay: Communities and Connections in Puritan New England, 89–120. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013.
• Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14.
• Peterson, Carla. Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
• Smith, Cassander L. “Race.” In A History of American Puritan Literature, edited by Kristina Bross and Abram Van Engen, 211–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

CHAPTER TWO

Narrative of Ben, a Negro, 1699

Introduction

Jonathan Dickinson was a seventeenth-century Quaker and sea merchant from Philadelphia. In 1696, he was returning from a voyage to Jamaica when his ship wrecked off the coast of Florida. He, his wife and infant son, a score of sailors and other passengers, ten enslaved black Africans, and a Native girl were taken captive by Ais along the South Florida coast. In 1699, he published the journal he had kept during the ordeal. Of particular interest to readers and scholars of Dickinson’s journal are his descriptions of the Ais and other Native groups as animal-like, his fear of acculturation as a result of captivity, his use of religious rhetoric, and the cultural exchange between the (mostly) English colonists and the Natives. Throughout this text, Dickinson represents the enslaved black Africans as submissive, dutiful. He references them as a collective, anonymous body that works at the margins of the text. In addition, he portrays them as objects of commercial exchange between Ais caciques and himself. Some moments in the narrative, though, contradict that representational pattern. At times, Dickinson finds himself negotiating with enslaved black Africans much as he does with the Ais—and eventually the Spanish—on his way north to St. Augustine. At one point in the narrative, he portrays the actions of an enslaved man named Ben, listed on the title page as the property of the ship’s captain. As members of the shipwrecked party make their escape and flee up the coast toward St. Augustine, Ben endeavors to save one of Dickinson’s relatives who has fallen behind, but he does so only after Dickinson bribes him with undisclosed enticements. The excerpt below describes their exchange. On the face of it, the moment appears rather insignificant. Dickinson mentions it without reflection or additional commentary. It would seem that Ben simply fulfills the expected roles of submission and service. The passage is remarkable, though, because it suggests the level of autonomy and self-possession that Ben experienced during their mutual captivity orde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction: Toward a Theory of Black African Mediation, Authorship, and the Early American Literary Archives
• Part I: Spiritual Accounts
• Part II: In the Legal Records
• Part III: Runaways
• Part IV: Life and Travel Writing
• Notes
• Index