In his 1810 narrative, the African American Methodist deacon George White recounts a particularly terrifying dream he experienced following a camp meeting in 1804. Some time after awaking, White tells his wife about the dream and its visions of hell: "I related the whole to my bosom companion; who, having heard it with astonishment, and much affection, was desirous to know what I thought would be the result; concerning which, I gave her my opinion in full; and we covenanted together from that time, to be more faithful to God than ever, and to escape, if possible, the torments I had seen" (11). A similar moment of mutual "covenanting" occurs in the 1810 narrative of Boyrereau Brinch, which extends from Brinch's childhood in Africa through the Middle Passage to his service in the American Revolution and his struggle for economic independence in Vermont. In Barbados, where he and the other slaves are put up for sale, Brinch meets an African brother and sister who "had pledged themselves never to part but by death" (Brinch and Prentiss 101). Yet the brother, Bangoo, is soon sold to a man "who had doubtless been devoted to the covenants of our Lord and Saviour, perhaps had crossed himself before the image of Christ, suspended upon the cross" (101). What these passages, among many others in the literature of the Black Atlantic, help to illuminate is the power of "covenanting together" in the early slave narrative. (1) That phrase aptly captures both the religious and the personal dimensions of a whole pattern of meaning that runs throughout the genre, one in which the Christian doctrine of duty to God is mirrored and supplemented by, and at times even secondary to, an ethic of interpersonal obligation. For many writers of the Black Atlantic, the ancient notion of a covenant with God, rooted in biblical theology, provided a means of understanding suffering within a providential framework and promised that the faithful would be rewarded and the unfaithful punished. Yet an evolving intellectual and ideological environment rendered traditional covenantalism, in itself, insufficent as a strategy of either survival or literary rhetoric. "Man is accountable to God and his fellow creatures," wrote Adam Smith in 1761. "But tho' he is, no doubt, principally accountable to God, in the order of time, he must necessarily conceive himself as accountable to his fellow creatures, before he can form any idea of the Deity, or of the rules by which that Divine Being will judge of his conduct" (130n2). Not all of his contemporaries would have agreed, but Smith's observation, offered during his exegesis of moral judgment, reflects a subtle epistemic shift, toward a kind of ethical pragmatism whereby responsible conduct in this world becomes, "necessarily," a prerequisite to religious understanding. Here was a more secular form of thinking about duty, one less reliant on scriptural doctrine and more embedded in the evolving social currents of the eighteenth-century world. What I argue in this essay is that this expanded concept of human duty, especially as captured in the notion of a "social contract," functioned as a complex, unpredictable, and energizing force in the slave narrative during its formative decades. This perspective provides leverage on a key issue that has intrigued, even bedeviled, scholarship on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, namely the relation--philosophical, social, and material--between the emergence of Western "modernity" during this period and the African or "black" persons who found themselves caught up in the international system of commerce managed by European imperial powers. In any analysis of that relation, difficult questions press forward: How did Enlightenment liberalism--with its image of the rational, accountable, and essentially "free" human subject--interact with intensifying political debates surrounding slavery, abolition, and race? How were those debates influenced, and their participants imagined, by the testimony of African-descended persons; and conversely, how was this testimony itself shaped and constrained by the discursive protocols they observed? …

Irony and Modernity in the Early Slave Narrative: Bonds of Duty, Contracts of Meaning

In 1851, the former slave turned singer Elizabeth Greenfield traveled from her home of Philadelphia to Buffalo, New York, to pursue a career as a concert singer. This article explores the terms and reception of Greenfield’s tours of the northern United States and Upper Canada in the early 1850s, where she performed before predominantly white audiences. While white critics celebrated Greenfield in highly racialized terms as an untrained natural wonder, black activists like Frederick Douglass focused on the racist management of her career and criticized Greenfield for the segregation of her concerts. Told through analysis of reviews and promotional literature, the story of Greenfield’s early career makes visible the race and gender politics operating at the intersection of popular entertainment and black movements for racial uplift and equality in the antebellum North.

Black Swan/White Raven: the racial politics of Elizabeth Greenfield’s American concert career, 1851–1855

October 10, 1772. It didn't seem unusual for a gentleman to stop by the big house on King Street, a few blocks from the Long Wharf, and ask to see Susanna Wheatley's eighteen-year-old slave, Phillis, or hear her recite some of her own poetry. She was already famous, in and beyond Boston, for having written the best of dozens of eulogies published upon the death of the revivalist George Whitefield a year earlier. Hers had appeared in London as well as Boston. Phillis and Mrs. Wheatley had already put out proposals to publish a book of verse.But it was a bit different, because Thomas Woolridge was a bit different. He had certain connections. He wasn't local - or at least not in the way most of Wheatley's fans and gawkers were in 1772. He was an ambitious London merchant and sometime colonial official trying to make the most of his contacts and his East Florida land claims. He was doing business in New England, South Carolina, and the British West Indies. He was, in other words, the type of character who was trying to make the empire work. And in October 1772 he was especially excited because one of his patrons, William Legge, the Earl of Dartmouth, who also owned Florida lands, had six weeks earlier accepted the position of secretary of state for the colonies. By the end of the year he'd be asking for an appointment in East Florida.1Woolridge later told Dartmouth that he just couldn't believe his ears and eyes when he'd been shown Wheatley's eulogy to Whitefield. He had to see her for himself. Yet he had something else in mind as well. Woolridge's letters show the habits of courtier, or at least a lobbyist. Writing to Dartmouth later, he referred to Whitefield as "our mutual dear deceased Friend." Whitefield himself had flattered Dartmouth as a "truly noble man," in part because of his well-known charitable interest in the spiritual welfare of Native Americans and Africans. If Woolridge was going to keep the circle of praise going - and garner some of the reflected spiritual and material approval - he had to make, or keep, it real. Boston was very far away. Why should Dartmouth believe a secondhand story about an eighteen-year-old slave, no matter how much it might please him?So Woolridge did something that we might ascribe to outright racism, but which, in the context of his own desires, suggests that there was more going on: something that made his visit not a burden but rather an opportunity, for Wheatley as well as for himself. He said, flatly, that it wasn't enough to see several of Phillis's manuscripts. He wanted her to compose something on the spot.It wasn't Woolridge's own suspicions that concerned him. It wasn't his own curiosity, his later-stated shock at the slave poet's proficiency, or even rudeness that compelled him to be so demanding (a later historian of London's city alderman would call him renowned for his "effrontery").2 It was his own London audience - his desire to please the Earl.Apparently Wheatley understood - maybe more than Woolridge knew. When Woolridge later wrote of having heard about Wheatley, he may have had in mind friends of her owners. Brook Watson, later lord mayor of London, was a friend of John Wheatley who had spent part of his childhood in Boston. Whoever made the connection for Woolridge, Phillis Wheatley probably knew about him or her. She had served all the Wheatleys' guests at table. After she demonstrated her writing talents, she began to be invited to their houses.She knew more than who was who in Boston. She was well prepared to make the most of a visit from a friend of Lord Dartmouth. In addition to understanding Dartmouth's place in the government, she knew his reputation as a pious reformer mocked by some colleagues as "the Psalm-Singer." Of all the colonial secretaries who served in her time, none would have been as likely to take an interest in a devout slave poet as Lord Dartmouth. That is why she took a particular interest in him.3So she told her demanding auditor, Woolridge, in a distinctly ladylike fashion that nevertheless allowed for her slave status that "she was then busy and engaged for the Day," but he could "propose a Subject" and return for the results in the morning. …

The Wheatleyan Moment

Ioften wonder what the poet Phillis Wheatley thought about as she brushed her teeth. I've never come up with a definitive answer. At the time of this writing, there is no extant information about Wheatley's tooth-cleaning practices. (Historians have assured me, though, that toothbrushes were not available in the eighteenth century.) Whenever I think about Wheatley brushing her teeth or walking down the street or writing letters, I can't help wondering if she thought about her racial position or her enslavement all the time (e.g., "Dag, I'm still a slave"). I happened upon this question by accident when I tried to imagine Wheatley in the midst of her most mundane activities, such as cleaning her teeth. What if Wheatley didn't care about proving her humanity or how black she was or was not to anyone, especially historians, writers, and cultural critics, in 1774 or at present? (1) As the "first" in so many categories of African American literature, she is asked to prove how black she was; the proof--that she is black enough to lead a literary tradition--lies in the certainty of her suffering as a slave and as a black woman (Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations 31).(2) But when I listened for this certain suffering in her verses and letters, I didn't find it. I didn't hear the sadness or even the proof of a black agenda that would make her a likely predecessor of Frederick Douglass and onward of Toni Morrison. Her writings led me to another question: What else might have concerned Wheatley if she wasn't thinking only of her enslavement or the burdens of her black womanhood? When Phillis Wheatley writes letters to her friend Obour Tanner of Newport, Rhode Island, another enslaved woman, she doesn't lament her black skin or her enslavement. She doesn't belabor her sadness over how black she is or is not. Rather, Wheatley's letters to Tanner--only a handful of them, from 1772 to 1779, extant--are decidedly ordinary glimpses into a friendship between women.(3) Wheatley keeps Tanner abreast of her book sales, her bouts of sickness and asthma, her travels to the country and out of the country, even the death of her mistress, Susanna Wheatley. These seemingly mundane occurrences, in fact, serve a decidedly Christian end for both Wheatley and Tanner: to praise their "Crucified Saviour," for "[i]n his Crucifixion may be seen marvellous displays of Grace and Love, Sufficient to draw and invite us to the rich and endless treasures of his mercy" ("To Arbour Tanner" 19 May 1772). Each letter offers the mundane as the beginning of mutual prayer for continued blessings and God's mercies on their lives. Together, both women worship on the page as they might have at either of their respective Congregationalist churches: Tanner at Rev. Samuel Hopkins's pastorate, First Congregational Church in Newport, and Wheatley at New South Congregational Church and later Old South in Boston (Carretta, Phil/is Wheatley 42-43). Wheatley's letters document a collective worship and reveal a friendship that asks us to consider what pleasure and friendship might look like to two enslaved women in New England. Their friendship asks us to confront a possibility that "Mammy, Jezebel, and Hagar were not the only names by which women of African heritage could or should be called" (Foster, "Mammy's Daughters" 281). Wheatley calls Tanner "friend" often. Yet, it is not often that scholars speak of black women as friends now, and it is even less common to speak of friendships among the enslaved then. That slaves had friendships with each other presumes a kind of leisure that may be misconstrued as a moniker for "happy slave" or a kind of normalcy that should not make sense in the midst of the horrors of enslavement. But here are two women who understand that their mutual fellowship is a friendship between one another and with God. Theirs is a story that dares us to rethink what kinds of sociability are possible between black women in the revolutionary era. …

Phillis Wheatley on Friendship

Phillis Wheatley exacerbated and made manifest the double meaning, and risks, of the classical and republican revival in the context of slavery. She did this, in part, by re-creating herself through the Greek and Roman classics—as a neoclassical poet—and by making the relationship of the patriots’ dilemma to the ancient and modern politics of slavery a key theme of her very public project. Wheatley’s own realization that she could address her African and enslaved experience as well as her captors’ prejudices and practices through an engagement with the Mediterranean heritage—a heritage seen by her captors as at once distant (ancient) and universal—was pivotal. Her profundity and political effectiveness derived not just from her classicism but from its studied inflection of her Africanism—and her womanhood. Ultimately Wheatley followed through on an increasingly complex set of analogies regarding time, space, empires, barbarisms, and liberties that proved useful in confronting the American Revolution as well as slavery

Ancients, Moderns, and Africans: Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Empire and Slavery in the American Revolution

This essay challenges the image, popularized by Henry Louis Gates Jr., of eighteenth-century African American poet Phillis Wheatley "on trial" before a jury of eighteen white male judges. Brooks argues that there was no trial and that Wheatley instead made her career by cultivating an intricate network of relationships to white women. Because Wheatley crafted elegiac and occasional poems for her white female auditors in exchange for their support, these women exerted a disproportionate influence over the shape of her published Poems (1773). Their participation in this transactional, sentimental culture of mourning enabled white women to indulge feelings of self-consciousness, self-regard, and willful passivity imbricated with their increasingly privileged merchant-class status. It also allowed white women to evade taking responsibility for their economic privilege-a privilege capitalized on the unfreedom of enslaved men and women like Wheatley-and ultimately to evade their responsibility to the poet herself. This essay, then, explores the racialized and gendered dynamics of sentimentality in eighteenth-century American literature as well as their continuation in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminism.

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Joanna Brooks

Papers

Our Phillis, Ourselves