African-American literature

iv



INTRODUCTION

We have always been imagining ourselves...

we are the subjects of our own narratives,

witnesses to and participants in our own

experience.... We are not, in fact, “other.”

(Morrison, 208)

In this profoundly proud, eloquent, and bold
declaration, novelist Toni Morrison takes on those
“serious scholars” and new discoverers of what
she defines as a rich “Afro-American artistic pres-
ence” in Western culture in general and American
culture in particular. For many years Western
scholars considered the phrase African-American
literature to be either a myth or a contradiction
and either negated or dismissed the rich body of
writing by Americans of African descent.
As Olaudah Equiano declares in his 18th-cen-
tury autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of
Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African,
Written by Himself (1789), black Africans brought
with them to the strange land of the “New World”
memories of their traditions of dance, music, and
poetry, which, planted in the British colonies of
North America in particular, took root in the new
songs they sang. Today those songs run deep like
a river in the souls of black folks and reverberate
and resound in the antiphonal call-and-response

style that constitutes the foundation and heartbeat

of the African-American literary tradition.

During the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries,

unknown black bards, as James Weldon Johnson

recounts, placed their lips to the sacred fire of

poetry and created “sorrow songs” whose lyrics

responded to the dehumanization of the world of

chattel slavery, a world that, in the end, reduced

African Americans to “three-fifths other.” In their

songs, they registered their personal humanity

and simultaneously humanized the troubled and

troubling world around them. The lyrics of such

songs as “Steal Away,” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,”

and “Motherless Child,” as well as the didactic and

often humorous narratives and tales about Brer

Rabbit, Tar Baby, and High John de Conquer, com-

mented on current conditions, passed on tradi-

tions, entertained, and offered lessons in morality

and virtue in the “broken tongue” that black people

created. But when exposed to the written texts and

more formal language of Western culture, African

Americans also put pen to paper to create works of

merit. For example, kidnapped between the ages

of seven or eight, Ethiopian-born Phillis Wheatley

confounded the community of her New England

“city upon a hill,” the cradle of many Founding

Fathers, with her broadsides and eventually with