Tag: history
Williams Wells Brown – Novelist
We have talked about some of the first black poets. Now, Williams Wells Brown is considered the first African American to publish a novel (recorded). Brown was born into slavery to a black mother and a white slave owner. Wells served various masters before escaping slavery in 1834. He then took on the name of a Quaker who helped him in his escape, Wells Brown, and in 1847 published a slave narrative, A Fugitive Slave. Brown’s only novel, Clotel was published in 1853 and tells the story of the daughters and granddaughters of President Thomas Jefferson and his slave woman. Wells also wrote a play “The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom” in 1858, along with other historical writings.
Race and Rights
When did race and rights become separate entities? Since when has the black problem in America not have to do with both race and rights? Dare you to walk the streets of the 1920s and 40s and 50s with your prophet scented blood and expect to transgress the law of separatist signage. That “Whites Only” sign ain’t there by mistake. The one that says Negroes like you must order from the back door. Yo money may be colored like your skin but green has always been worth more than brown. I don’t like to have to go back to slavery. After all, it ain’t like I lived it and yet I can never forget what it feels like. But since we on the subject of feeling, I’m feeling like the same blood pulsing underneath my ancestor’s skin now pulses through mine so what they felt I feel it too. Perhaps I too was a slave long ago and its just taken me this long to find my voice. So, therefore, let me tell you something about what it means to be a slave. A slave is never granted the same rights as a free man, not a physical slave or a psychological one. An inferior race is never granted the same rights as a superior one. Thus anything that’s got to do with rights has also got to do with race. For the Black problem in America has always been centered around identity and always will be. Rights would have never been a problem if the problem wasn’t race. If the hierarchy of the superior and the less superior didn’t exist. If black people never walked around with bywords and proverbs tattooed on their skins there wouldn’t have been a need for them to watch movies in the Nigger Heaven1 of southern movie theaters. Would have been no need of me taking my seat alongside Miss Parks or Miss Morgan all them years ago. A Black Man’s rights and his race are always connected here, like the careful structure of his bones before he emerges from his mother’s womb. It’s the yearning for freedom written in his DNA. Black America’s rights have always and always will be centered around their identity because their problem is not physical it is spiritual. And because a spiritual problem has been long fought with physical weapons the condition of black people in America continues. And so their fight has always been and always will be centered around their freedom.
1. Nigger heaven, n. a designated place, usually the balcony, where blacks were forced to sit, for example, in an integrated movie theater or church as part of Jim Crow Laws.
Lucy Terry Prince
Aside from the renowned Phillis Wheatly, Lucy Terry is another black poet recognized as one of the first African American poets. Born in Africa, her village was raided when she was a girl and the institution of slavery brought her to America. She was sold to Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her one and only poem, “Bars Fight” is about the traumatic raid on her village by both white and Native Americans before her enslavement. As is one of her lines: “Eunice Allen see the Indians comeing….And hoped to save herself by running.”
Harriet Ann Jacobs – Our Self-Published Ancestor
By now many people are familiar with Harriet Jacobs, the African American writer who escaped slavery in 1842 after hiding in an attic above her grandmothers home for seven years. Harriet’s testimony was one of the many inspirations for the first book in my Stella Trilogy. Stella, like Harriet, was born a slave but did not know it as a young girl–not until after her mother died. But that’s not all Harriet and Stella have in common. Harriet’s biography “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” was also a Self-Published book back in 1861, under the pseudonym Linda Brent.
Olaudah Equiano
At the age of forty-four Olaudah Equiano wrote and published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa. Written by himself, he registered this writing at Stationer’s Hall, London, in 1789. More than two centuries later, his work was recognized not only as one of the first works written in English by a former slave, but in his narrative, Equiano recalls his childhood in Essaka (an Igbo village formerly in northeast Nigeria), where they practiced Israelite customs and traditions before both he and his sister were kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Ann Lane Petry
I’ve actually ordered her book, which should be here pretty soon.
African American writer Ann Lane Petry is said to showcase the range of the black and white experience in her novels, short stories, and other works. The Street, her most famous novel (the one I’m anticipating to show up with the mail man on my doorstep) is said to be a social commentary on the despair of black urban life in the 1940s. Published in 1946, the novel sold 1.5 million copies and brought Petry to national attention as the first black woman writer to sell a million copies of her book.
The PBS Blog 