The Era of Slavery

In 1619 the first African slaves were brought to the recently established British colonies in the “New World.” This chapter covers the period from that date until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Later chapters in this book cover a decade or two in the same amount of space. The fact that this chapter can cover 250 years of literature indicates that there is relatively little of it. This is no coincidence. The practice of teaching slaves in the colonies to read and write was discouraged, and even outlawed in 1740. Slave owners regarded literacy – and education more generally – as powerful tools, which indeed they were. An educated slave would inevitably understand the injustice of his or her condition, and literacy also allowed for widespread communication (and possibly rebellion) amongst a people who had been deliberately separated from their communities and families. Moreover, slaves did not have access to publication venues. Thus any publication by a black writer prior to the Civil War is something of a wonder, and contemporary readers should bear in mind the number of obstacles that stood in the way of any enslaved writer. The black literary voice was systematically suppressed during the era of slavery

not only through legislation, but at every conceivable level. Racial prejudice was instilled in daily conversation and reinforced by those in power, including clergy and politicians. Take, for example, Thomas Jefferson in Query XIV of his 1787 book Notes on the State of Virginia: “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration….Among the blacks is misery enough, but no poetry” (163-164). In this same chapter, full of disturbing generalizations, he proclaims that “[blacks] astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory” and even says “In music they are generally more gifted than the whites” (163, 164). Jefferson purportedly uses his own observations to make such claims, but he is speaking on behalf of a vast number of people and about a vast number of people as he does so. Jefferson’s generalizations not only indulge in ridiculous bombast, but

they also uphold the false system of logic that made slavery possible. The binary oppositions that inform his perspective are striking: between white and black, European and African, free and slave, we and they, etc. Jefferson blends his literary opinions here with the practice of racial stereotyping. His authority as a “founding father” who drafted the Declaration of Independence and went on to become the young nation’s third president is incontrovertible, and he attempts to use legalistic logic to further substantiate it. It might be possible to read Jefferson’s pronouncement as a challenge to black

people to do what white people claim they cannot do. But it’s also possible to question the very nature of this dynamic: who has the right to dictate the terms of African American literary expression? Should the standards of literary taste Jefferson employs be in any way honored since they come from the perspective of a slave owner who bases his judgment on a repugnant ideology of racial difference? Rather than seeing it as a challenge, would-be writers in the era of slavery (and afterward) might have seen Jefferson’s query as a signpost pointing in the wrong direction: African American literature had to originate and evolve on its own terms, and in spite of the appalling circumstances in which its authors lived. The era of slavery produced the genre that many critics believe is the first – and

perhaps the only – literary form indigenous to the United States: the slave narrative. Most authors of slave narratives wrote little or nothing else: very few African American authors before 1865 could be considered professional writers who earned a living at their craft. Toward the end of the period, however, a few black authors emerged as authors of multiple works, and one, William Wells Brown, wrote the first novel by an African American and became relatively prolific in multiple genres, including drama. The subject matter of early African American literature certainly was bounded by slavery, but the treatments of this subject vary widely enough to make it a fascinating and essential period.