sign in sign up
<<
Home , Abdelazer, Atlantic slave trade, Black Glory, Clotel, Danish slave trade, Haitian emigration

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts

THE BLACK AVENGER IN ATLANTIC LITERATURE

A Dissertation in English

by

Grégory

© 2012 Grégory Pierrot

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2012

The dissertation of Grégory Pierrot was reviewed and approved by the following*:

Aldon Lynn Nielsen George and Barbara Kelly Professor of Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Carla Mulford Professor of English

Paul Youngquist Professor of English

Linda Furgerson Selzer Associate Professor of English

Jonathan Eburne Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English

Shirley Moody‐Turner Assistant Professor of English

Garrett Sullivan Professor of English Director of English Graduate Studies

*Signatures are on file at the Graduate School

Abstract

The fear that an African American nation might rise out of slave has been on Western minds since the late seventeenth century. The black avenger trope is a singular and lasting cultural product of this anxiety, which my dissertation explores more specifically in French, English and American culture and history. A variety of authors, among whom , Abbé Raynal, Jean‐Jacques Dessalines,

Marcus Rainsford, Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker, , Martin

Delany, Charles Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Boris Vian, Chester Himes, illustrate the trope’s ubiquity and persistence through time in cultures of the . The modern nations of the Atlantic world imagined, analyzed and represented black revolt through the prism of black avenger narratives, whose reach and influence knew no national or linguistic bounds. The significance of the black avenger trope goes even further: this dissertation demonstrates that the trope was central to the way nations of the Atlantic and related communities of the imagined and re‐imagined themselves as they evolved. This dissertation explores a line of black avenger narratives and their connection and relevance to their immediate historical context, showing how the black avenger trope contributed crucial patterns to national narratives at defining moments in the history of ,

Great Britain and the . Modern nations imagine themselves as reading communities; producing and interpreting black avenger texts have ranked among the self‐defining actions they perform, and remain a pertinent key to better analyze the textual ties that bind notions of race and nation.

iii CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER I 20 Changing Moors: and the Revenge Tradition

CHAPTER II 72 The , a Tale of Two Avengers

CHAPTER III 135 Going to America

CHAPTER IV 215 An American Tradition

CONCLUSION 289

WORKS CITED 303

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to François and Germaine Pierrot, my parents, in hopes that they eventually get to read it in my native language. To Peggy and Philippe Pierrot, my siblings, who may get to read it sooner.

To the members of my committee: Aldon Nielsen, Linda Selzer, Carla Mulford, Jonathan Eburne, Shirley Moody‐Turner, with a special mention to my friend and model in all things scholarly, Paul Youngquist.

To Dustin Kennedy, Nancy Cushing, Micky New, Emily Sharpe, Hannah Abelbeck, Jesse Hicks, Angela Ward, Michael DuBose, Josh Tendler, Yann, Johanna and Sascha Heuzé, Manolis Galenianos, whose friendship, questions, comments and presence proved central to this endeavor.

To Katharine Tune Pierrot, whose love and support made this project possible, and Chloë Pierrot, my beacon in the darkness. Here’s to the next stage of our trip. Tshenbé red, pa moli!

v Introduction

The July 1966 issue of Marvel Comics hit series Fantastic Four is mostly remembered for the guest character it featured: the "sensational Black Panther."

The Black Panther's story was in many respects rather formulaic. Much like , with whom he shared an entirely black, animal‐inspired costume, the Black Panther was a wealthy heir with access to the most advanced technology, and who initially became a vigilante in order to avenge the murder of his father. Yet the Black Panther made history for something much more singular, something that set him apart from every other in 1966: under the Panther's mask was comic book history's first black superhero. The Black Panther is T'Challa, son of T'Chaka, king of

Wakanda, a mysterious and virtually unknown country hidden in the middle of the

African continent. is the only place in the world with access to vibranium, a mineral extracted from a meteorite, which helped Wakanda become the most technologically advanced country on Earth. Wakanda still respects tradition, though: the country designates its kings through a centuries‐old ritual in which incumbent

Black Panthers have to prove their worth against challengers in hand‐to‐hand combat.

Wakanda, as represented by scenarist Stan Lee and illustrator Kirby, was an odd juxtaposition of the racist visuals typical of Western popular culture's depictions of the dark continent (spear‐shaking warriors wearing animal skins and tooth necklaces) and of the ultra‐technological science‐fiction for which the

1 Fantastic Four had become famous. The strong contrast was in part a function of Lee and Kirby's naked attempt at subverting the racist conventions of the “jungle comics” which until then had dictated portrayals of Africans: in the words of popular culture scholar Gerald Early, “the jungle of the civil rights/ era is not a backward place of savages who need white , Africans who act like children and have no scientific understanding of the world, but rather a place of technology and advancement disguised as jungle.”1 Early sees the Black Panther as the expression of the cultural changes brought about by the in comic book form.

Lee and Kirby's Black Panther was the educated expression of its cultural surroundings, resounding with both the racial hang‐ups and the progressive intentions of its time. But I argue that he was also grounded in a Western tradition of commentary on, and appropriation of, African and African diasporic culture and politics. More specifically, the Black Panther is but one iteration in a cultural history of representation of black rebellion across the Atlantic world spanning some four hundred years. A cultural product of the transatlantic slave trade, the black avenger has played an important role in the construction of the very notions of race on which it appears to rest. In the image of its early incarnation,

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), the black avenger was born—and regularly reborn—at the of African (and African diasporic) cultures and Western culture. A sophisticated (i.e., European‐educated) African prince kidnapped by

1 Gerald Early, “The 1960s, African , and the American Comic Book,” in Strips, Toons and Bluesies: Essays in Comics and Culture, D.B. Dowd and Todd Hignite, Eds. (New : Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 68‐69.

2 British slave‐traders, Oroonoko goes through the and arrives in

British‐occupied Surinam where he leads an ill‐fated slave revolt and is executed by the colonial authorities. Sometimes considered the first British , Behn's

Oroonoko is also often portrayed as groundbreaking for featuring a positively portrayed African as its main character. It is also worthy of note for setting the standards of the black avenger trope.

African characters were not unheard of at the time; Behn's creation breathed into a inherited from the revenge tragedy tradition the novelty of modern racial relations as revealed in such brutal, head‐on encounters as portrayed in the novel. Part of the novelty of this trope is precisely how black avenger narratives tend to downplay their cultural origins and emphasize the alleged newness of the cultural clash. From Oroonoko onwards, one can read through black avengers and recover a history of the cultural representations of these clashes and encounters. We can see how these representations of black avengers in turn influenced the terms in which these encounters were, and would be, understood.

Each iteration adds layers to a phenomenon that can be read like a two‐tone palimpsest of cultural representation and interpretation. Thus Ottobah Cugoano’s

Thoughts on the Evil of (1787) works in contrast to the “black avenger of

America” figure presented in the texts of abbé Raynal and Sébastien‐Louis Mercier in the preceding decade to introduce the possibility of a collective black agency in the service of godly revenge. These two related but distinct sources announce in turn the modes of representation of the Haitian revolution (1791‐1804) in Atlantic

(French, British and U.S. American) newspapers and fiction in treatments of Haitian

3 revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, and later more specifically in U.S.

American variations on the black avenger theme, from Confessions of Nat Turner

(1832) to Douglass’s (1854) and Martin Delany’s Blake (1859‐

1861). I trace the figure through the nineteenth century and its revisionist adaptation to the postbellum African American context in Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio (1899), Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Robert L.

Waring’s As We See It (1910) and show the connections between the

Americanization of the turn of the century and the fundamental reconsideration of the figure in the writings of Chester Himes and Boris Vian in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This cultural phenomenon promotes and is necessarily dependent on a notion of races as distinct, separate and often irreconcilable, notions that gain extraordinary valence in the modern era and around the issue of the . The early black avenger figure was a sign of the rise of modern notions of race that it, in turn, contributed to install.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the black avenger is not just any literary avenger or national redeemer. His most striking, novel feature lies squarely in his skin color. That this characteristic would be so important implies a vivid and strongly visual contrast none of the authors I will discuss shy from using. He is not merely a fictional figure either, a variation on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth; the character bleeds from and into historical writing and reasoning, as well as in political thought, and it is grounded in the economics, politics and history of the modern Atlantic world. The trope forms a complex textual accretion, covering historical writing with literary adaptation, political propaganda with critical

4 diversion. The black avenger figure is inseparable from separation, be it ethnic, racial, or cultural. The diverse incarnations of this character are underlain by a notion of distinct black and white worlds, and the presentation of their encounters as a head‐on collision. Through him, dialectical, often Manichean visions of race are revealed, two‐toned contrasts that leave little possibility for gray zones.

Black avenger figures are built around the same themes, over and over again: wrongs suffered and inflicted in the cultural collision between white Western and

African (diasporic) cultures, the morals of retaliation and retribution, the idea of justice, the possibility of peace, the necessity of revolution.

The black avenger stems out of the racialization of the Atlantic slave trade; the implied recognition of the moral evil of slavery is the fountainhead for all its further developments. Black avenger narratives are expressions of this recognition turned into cultural currency, script useful to express outrage as well as to undercut it. Black avengers are not merely rebels, revolutionaries, warriors, although they are generally one or all of those things. What sets black avengers apart from other black protagonists is the centrality of revenge and its attendant moral implications to the narratives in which they’re involved. Their rebellions, revolutions and all stem from personal revenge.

Critics have worked on the black avenger previously. The figure appears under this name in studies around the 1970s, which should not be surprising; the term “black avenger” seems a fitting description for many protagonists in blaxploitation movies, as noted by John Cawelti.2 If these “new” characters were

2 John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago:

5 clearly related to the cultural and political changes brought about by the civil rights movement, so was the rising interest in black characters in fiction, which can be tied directly to the introduction of Black studies on American campuses. Starting in the

1970s, scholars in African American studies such as Catherine Juanita Starke exposed the black avenger figure as one of the standout representations of blackness in American and African‐American literature. In Black Portraiture in

American Fiction (1971), Starke offered a of black avengers with extending “back to Sutton Griggs's Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave... and possibly farther,”3 though she considered them a staple of 1960s African American literature. More recently Jerry H. Bryant’s Victims and Heroes (1997) extended the genealogy to the character of Picquilo in 's (1855).4

Working from a different cultural angle, Hazel Waters’s on the Victorian

Stage (2007) explores the black avenger tradition in British theater. Although she does evoke the close ties binding nineteenth‐century British theater to American culture and politics, Waters’ conclusions are somewhat constrained by its narrow historical and cultural focus.5 To understand the importance of the black avenger, one has to study the figure in an international context that includes non‐fictional texts and representations. These studies all provide invaluable information on the black avenger phenomenon, but they work within national and cultural limitations that are in some cases effects of the black avenger figure itself. The black avenger is

University of Chicago Press, 1976). 3 Catherine Juanita Starke, Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters, , and Individuals (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1971), 225. 4 Jerry H. Bryant, Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel (Amherst: University of Press, 1997).

6 best assessed as a global phenomenon with ramifications into historical writing, newswriting, and philosophy.

This appears clearly when one investigates the role played by the black avenger figure in our understanding of the Haitian Revolution. This historical event has been at the center of extensive scholarly interest of late. C.L.R. James's landmark history of the Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938) showed how central the Haitian revolution was to its French counterpart. This book can be seen as a watershed for historical recovery. The minute archival work undertaken by David Geggus since the early 1980s6 has also contributed to reposition the revolution as political event of global proportion, and such recent books as Laurent Dubois's Avengers of the New

World (2007) perpetuate (maybe to a fault) James's endeavor.7 More recently, history and literary scholars such as Matt Clavin or Ashli White8 have shown how how representations of Toussaint circulated in the Atlantic world and more specifically how the ripples of the revolution reached U.S. American shores up until the beginning of the Civil .

Useful for the wealth of sources they display, these studies tend to ignore the

5 Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 6 Geggus authored Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793­1798 (: Oxford University Press, 1982); Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: University Press, 2002), and also edited several important collections for the field of Haitian Revolutionary studies: A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) with Barry Gaspar, and more recently The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009) with Norman Fiering. 7 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the : the Story of the Haitian Revolution (New haven: Belknap Press, 2005). 8 Matt Clavin recently published Toussaint Louverture and the : The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and Ashli White wrote Encountering Revolution: and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns

7 very premises they work from, i.e. ensconced in dubious racial and historical visions, themselves a function of the very figure of the black avenger.

Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past (1995) shifted the focus of Haitian

Revolutionary Studies to questioning the sources that make and unmake the memory of the event. Historical remembrance is also a selective forgetting, as

Trouillot reminds us, and the Haitian revolution has been forgotten and remembered in very peculiar ways.9 David Scott’s work in Conscripts of Modernity

(2003) thus sheds light on the making and remaking of Toussaint by C.L.R. James as a tragic figure for specific political purposes.10 Scott's insight stops short of discussing Toussaint Louverture's characterization by James as a function of a more general pattern of characterization, not only in historical writings but also in their philosophical foundations.

Scott's work, like Sibylle Fischer's Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the

Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (2004), considers the revolution as a foundational event for Western understanding of modernity, in particular for the role it played in influencing the philosophy of Hegel. Though many scholars have discussed Hegel's master/slave dialectic in the light of Atlantic slavery, Susan Buck‐

Morss first evoked the possibility of a Haitian connection.11 In a call for a less

Hopkins University Press, 2010). 9 Michel‐Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (: Beacon Press, 1995). 10 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 11 Frantz Fanon had early questioned the validity of Hegel's master/slave dialectic from the position of the oppressed in Black Skin White Masks (New York: , 1967). More recently, read Hegel in the light of the slave trade in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Press, 1993); so did in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770­1823 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). In The Slave's Rebellion:

8 simplistic and righteous, more complex approach to historical study, she declares that "the less we see historical actors playing theatrically coherent roles, the more universally accessible their dilemmas become.”12 Though she notes this theatrical tendency in representations of the Haitian revolution, she stops short of connecting it to the representation at work in Hegel's own dialectic, and of questioning representation in the sources she presents as influences over Hegel. My goal here is not to critique the limitations those authors chose or had to choose for themselves, but rather to point out that in doing so they also generally failed to address the possibility of cross‐cultural influences in the understanding of the black avenger figure. This elision might not be so important were it not, as I believe, a function of its own topic. Scholars of the Haitian revolution have long had a tendency to perpetuate the conditions of the revolution's silencing by reenacting a

“discovery” of the revolution. Authors have never ceased to write about Haiti in the two hundred years of its history, yet somehow the revolution is being rediscovered on a regular basis. The rhetoric of discovery is a result of the successful silencing of the revolution in Western culture. It is on full display in the vision of black rebellion that the black avenger trope contributed to construct. The black avenger has to be unique, extraordinary, and spring out of the fountainhead of Western narrative fully armed, an anomaly even as one discusses his origins.

I propose to analyze the import of the black avenger figure on our

Literature, History, Orature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), Adélékè Adéèkò offered his own and rather original take on Hegel's allegory, stating that "the master is not, as such, defined alone by the will to live..., but also by the will to prevent the defeated from dying, either by suicide or through a rebellious " (17). 12 Susan Buck‐Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,

9 understanding of the Haitian revolution and black rebellion at large. I present the black avenger not only as an international cultural fixture, but also as a concept central to modern understandings of black/white race relations across the . The scope of this study must of necessity be more limited than it should; yet,

I intend to use works from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, by writers from France, Great Britain, the United States, and the African diaspora. The evolving black avenger figures displayed throughout these literatures cannot be read in isolation, as they most certainly influenced each other as much as they developed in contrast to each other. The black avenger is all the more important in that it brings together the modern dilemma of fighting for freedom and no less modern notions of race and nation. In tracing the history of the black avenger I hope to contribute a crucial aspect of the conceptualization and perpetuation of modern notions of whiteness and blackness. The black avenger is a modern myth inasmuch as he is a fictional and symbolic embodiment of black/white racial relations. It is a trope born of the Atlantic slave trade, and it survives it, adapting throughout time the way notions of racial separation do to this day.

I examine a variety of authors and texts featuring black avenger figures. My first chapter traces the origin of the black avenger figure up to Aphra Behn's

Oroonoko (1688). Critics such as Anthony G. Barthelemy, Derek Hughes or Hazel

Waters have thoroughly documented the presence of black characters on the British

2009), 145.

10 stage from medieval times onwards.13 The theme of revenge is as old as literature. It catalyzes fundamental civilizational discussions around the notion of justice, violence, tradition and morals. Christian morals played an important role to render vengeance morally inexcusable in Western culture. In Christian thought, revenge is a divine prerogative. Studies in English revenge tragedy have long shown how the genre evolved along with laws limiting dueling and individual justice.14 This is relevant as background for my dissertation, but also because I see a direct relation between the revenge tragedy genre and the rise of the black avenger.

The influence of French heroic tragedy over Oroonoko is usually presented as the most important, yet I will argue in my first chapter that the British tradition of the revenge tragedy has a much more important, though no less obvious imprint on the play. Behn was a famous and successful playwright who had participated in the revenge tragedy revival of the 1670s. She infused her narrative with the main concerns and characteristics of the genre, operating profound changes from the traditional ways in which these were treated. In Oroonoko, Behn subverts theatre conventions and mixes them with historical and fiction writing. If the result may be considered the first English‐language novel, it is also an interesting snapshot of and commentary on the era Great Britain was about to enter through its expanded participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Laura Doyle sees in Oroonoko a tale of transition from the social constrictions of British womanhood to the broader

13 Anthony G. Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: the Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: State University Press, 1987); Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery from the Seventeenth Century, Derek Hughes ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Hazel Waters, op.cit. 14 I am thinking here of the canonical work of Ashley H. Thorndike, Tragedy (New York; Cooper

11 community of whiteness, “from an English 'us' aligned with Oroonoko to a white 'us' aligned against him.”15 Joining whiteness in Oroonoko also means joining the readership/audience of a style of writing that blurs the limits between reality/history and fiction. The novel discusses slavery to evacuate it.

Racial slavery is dismissed as a play, on a faraway stage. More importantly, it is presented as a revision of the standards of the revenge plot. Oroonoko introduces the notion of collective revenge against slavery, only to undermine it through individualism: the passive slaves are roused to action by a noble Oroonoko bent on personal revenge, and he eventually turns to despising them when they prove incapable to follow through. In the end, he is only successful in killing his pregnant lover, and later welcomes an ignominious death.

It is crucial that the threat of glimpsed in Oroonoko is introduced as a side effect of personal vengeance, and thus evacuated in the same movement. The novel introduces an extraordinary African who may be admired inasmuch as he is a spectacle, a fiction, one whose rules and customs are foreign to him. Oroonoko is written in the mode of the immediate history, a format that emphasizes novelty to the detriment of background and suggests that its historical value is precisely in its immediacy, its alleged status as eyewitness account. To this day, how much Oroonoko might be based in fact remains a question. This blurring of the frontier between fact and fiction is central to the circulation of the black avenger.

Square, 1908), and Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy: 1587­1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940). 15 Laura Doyle, Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640­1940

12

My second chapter focuses on the Haitian Revolution (1791‐1804) and its representations throughout the Western world, but most particularly in Great

Britain and France through the figure of Toussaint Louverture. I argue that to this day, our understanding of the Haitian Revolution comes through the prism of the black avenger figure. Representations of the charismatic leader Toussaint

Louverture have been variations on this theme since the revolution, and, arguably, before it even occurred, as portrayals of Toussaint were very early merged with the black avenger described by French authors Mercier and Raynal in the 1770s. Much has been made of these portrayals along the years, especially as French General

Laveaux named Louverture “the man of Raynal’s prophecy.” Before the expression became an easy shortcut to define Louverture in relation to canonical

Enlightenment literature, this expression came heavy with race‐inflected connotations. Portraying Louverture as Raynal’s hero also amounted to drafting him and Saint Domingue’s black laborers as allies of white Republicans against the threat—real and imagined. Both Toussaint and French Republic authorities could profit from the strict racial lines implied in this expression.

As argued by Michel‐Rolph Trouillot, if Raynal's hypothetical black avenger appeared successful it was mostly as a rhetorical device, a warning to . The actual rebellion was "unthinkable” (Trouillot, 70‐108). Yet the black avenger became a way of thinking it in hindsight. The omnipresence of Toussaint in accounts of the revolution is not merely due to his preeminent status among the leaders of the revolution. The conditions of his death and the very fact that he died

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 199.

13 before the revolution was successful are important aspects of Louverture's canonization. Through representations of Toussaint emphasizing the correspondences between his life and the black avenger pattern, the successful

Haitian revolution turned cultural defeat. The black avenger figure participated in a general whitewashing of Western cultures' involvement in and support for slavery, and in a rhetorical control of the narrative of the revolution. The British and the

French produced a flurry of textual variations on the black avenger theme around the Haitian revolution. The pamphlets and histories produced by James Stephen and

Marcus Rainsford supporting the Haitian revolutionaries against the Leclerc expedition also contributed in erasing Great Britain's earlier involvement in the island.16 Though these texts portray Toussaint or Toussaint‐like figures in positive light, they judge the revolution harshly, as a moral deadlock: wrought the same horror as their former masters, and therefore while they can be understood they cannot be excused, nor encouraged. The morally steadfast black avenger is again shown in contrast to the morally tainted rabble around him. The black avenger figure thus contributes to obfuscate the wrongs of slavery because, around his person, the object of moral quandary shifts from the reason for revenge

(slavery) to revenge itself. This reveals not only how the black avenger figure was central to the silencing of the Haitian revolution, but also the terms in which it was used by arguably well‐meaning abolitionists. In the words of Cora Kaplan, "The condition of martyrdom was essential to abolitionist representations of Toussaint‐‐ his martyrdom elevated their cause, confirmed black agency and both punished and

16 On this topic, see Grégory Pierrot, “'Our Hero': Toussaint Louverture in British Representations,”

14 exonerated the mode through which it had been seized.”17

A more radical strand of black avenger writings developed in parallel to this first strand, related in spirit if not in direct influence to the writings of Ottobah

Cugoano and of Louverture’s successor, Jean‐Jacques Dessalines. Throughout

Thoughts and Reflections on the Evils of Slavery (1787), Cugoano turns the language of British against itself, to advocate the kind of action none of the abolitionists would have supported. His black avenger is a collective will rather than a single person, and as such it takes the counterpoint to the black avenger figure discussed in the preceding chapter. As the first head of the free Haitian state,

Dessalines wrote much and his texts circulated widely, spreading an informed, self‐ aware variation on the avenger figure tailored to impress culturally and frighten.

Echoes of Dessalines’ media campaign were perhaps nowhere louder as in the

United States.

My third chapter discusses how the black avenger figures inherited from the

Haitian Revolution entered American culture. The double influence of Cugoano and

Dessalines is evident in David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

(1829), a text that for a time embodied the threatening qualities of the avenger figure appropriated by radical black authors. The Appeal offers a vision of the

African American reading community as the vanguard of the coming black nation, a group initiated into the conventions of history‐writing. In Walker’s text, the black avenger trope merges with the particulars of the black jeremiad, itself an adaptation

Criticism 50.4 (2008): 581‐607. 17 Cora Kaplan, “Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Literary Imagination,” History Workshop Journal 46 (1998), 50.

15 of the sermon style typical of Puritan preaching to black concerns.18 In this sense,

Walker’s Appeal can be seen as the introduction and adaptation of the black avenger trope into American public discourse. The use of the trope in antebellum abolitionist texts shows in turn characteristics reminiscent of Laveaux’s text on Louverture, and early examples of the discovery stance on Haitian history. White abolitionist authors present themselves as necessary spokespersons for the black revolutionaries of

Haiti. The somewhat ambivalent stance is as much a function of the avenger format as it expresses the particular set of racial beliefs of this time and place.

Martin Delany's Blake appears straightforwardly concerned with nationalism:

Blake's plot aims at taking over and turning it into the country of refuge for the black population of the American hemisphere. Interestingly, though, Delany only mentions Haiti to dismiss it as a political and narrative failure, which I believe suggests a complexity to Blake's black nationalist stance that is seldom recognized.19

Delany recognizes nationalism as a function of the black avenger tale, and the way he bends and toys with the conventions of the genre show the awareness with which he approaches the subject. Yet, to use the words of Katy Chiles, Blake is ultimately both “within and without raced nations,” both aware of the strictures of the black avenger figure and nevertheless constricted by them. Writing at a time when the race division the black avenger is based was taken for granted by all,

18 On this topic, see Wilson J. Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982); David Howard‐ Pitney, David Howard‐Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005; 1992). 19 Recent articles have given Blake its due at that level, such as Tommie Shelby's “Two Conceptions of : Martin Delany on the Meaning of Black Political Solidarity,” Political Theory 31.5 (2003): 664‐692 or Katy Chiles's “Within and Without Raced Nations: Intratextuality, Martin Delany, and Blake; or, The Huts of America,” American Literature 80.2 (2008): 323‐352.

16 Delany questions the pattern but cannot get away from it.

My fourth and final chapter studies the nationalization and individualization of this pattern in twentieth‐century African American literature. With white supremacist terror in the post‐bellum South and the rise of Jim Crow, African

American authors pondered ways to cope with their circumstances, and the ways in which revenge might affect African American life within the United States. Sutton

Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899) presents us with two avengers struggling against each other, only for the most separatist one to come out on top, killing his friend in the process. The novel stops short of describing the actual uprising supposed to lead to the creation of a separatist black nation in the state of Texas.

Indeed, the narrator betrays the Imperium—the secret black organization—and reveals its existence to the world “in the name of humanity.” The milder of the two heroes, Belton Piedmont, decides early in his life to forego revenge. He is tested throughout the novel and stays true to his word, while his friend, the typical Bernard Belgrave, is led by personal resentment to push for violent separation of the African American community from the U.S. Piedmont’s plan is milder, though just as separatist. Griggs rejects revenge, but uses it to offer the possibility of a black state within the American nation.

Chesnutt shows similar rejection of revenge as a driving force for collective

African American political thought. Josh Green, his black avenger in The Marrow of

Tradition (1901), finds the resolve for collective action in his individual hatred.

Although he succeeds in this endeavor, his revenge comes at a terrible price for the entire community. Chesnutt points at the problematic ways in which matters of

17 representation have become paramount for American race relations. At a time when white supremacist terror found in alleged individual fault justification for mass retaliation, Chesnutt rejects the logic.

In As We See It (1910), Robert L. Waring takes a distinct stand in support of individual revenge. Insisting on the value, if not the necessity of private justice in the face of lawlessness, Waring echoes the Western vigilantism made popular by such celebrations of frontier rough justice as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902). A declaration of patriotism, Waring’s novel is also a complete counterpoint from the black avenger tales of the previous century: his black avenger is a familial blood redeemer, but his loyalty is for the United States.

This trend can in turn be tied to 1950s efforts such as Chester Himes's The

End of a Primitive that engage representations of black avengers through an absurdist mode. In reaction to the white prejudice and African American “pre‐ individualism” which sees in every black protagonist a stand‐in for the whole race,

Himes toys with clichés and , presenting his pathetic protagonist as a modern day avenger. In this he echoes French author Boris Vian’s 1946 novel I Spit on Your Graves. Both texts are radical in their apparent nihilism: through the classical figuration of the race hero, they question the very validity of racial representation. Vian and Himes's texts point to a history of reception of black avenger texts and aim at shaking their readers awake: they play games with the conventions of black avenger narrative, but their protagonists are morbidly individualistic, rebels without a cause, empty shells left for the reader to race. This

18 transatlantic connection is especially important at a time when French intellectuals and writers thinking about the American race question were about to produce texts that in turn would prove influential in the United States.20 Himes and Vian's avengers are so repugnant because they manipulate racist stereotypes to no political end, but just to expose them.

What I hope to achieve with this project is to prove the relevance of the black avenger trope to modern representations of race and nation, exposing its persistence through time, how its meanings evolved through time, and analyzing its impact on contemporary Atlantic culture. Black avenger narratives are familiar to many Atlantic cultures, but they have not been analyzed as a transcultural, literary tradition. The story has a history, which this dissertation delineates.

20 I am thinking about Jean‐Paul Sartre's “Black Orpheus” that would also serve as the introduction to Léopold Sedar Senghor's Anthology of New and Malagasy Poetry (1948), but also about Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

19

CHAPTER I

Changing Moors: Oroonoko and the Revenge Tradition

Oroonoko may not need an introduction. As Srinivas Aravamundan stated in 1999, critical attention for the novella has “bordered on the obsessional.”1 In turn,

Aravamundan’s Tropicopolitans has made it difficult to use Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko as a point of origin without first operating a certain level of self‐criticism. Beginning a study with what some have argued to be the first modern English—and possibly

American2—novel can never be innocent. Often it is symptomatic of a tendency to read meaning backwards, from contemporary viewpoints and positions into old texts, without sufficient contextualization. Though Aravamundan somewhat mocks the excesses of “Oroonokoism,” he also praises the political potential of post‐colonial readings of Oroonoko, which he dubs “tropicalization,” “a tropological revision of discourses of colonial domination (something that can happen immediately and directly as well as retroactively and indirectly)..., a contestation of European rule by tropicopolitans, inhabitants of the torrid zones that were the objects of Europe’s colonial ambition” (5‐6). Oroonoko is an example of “virtualization,” a kind of tropicalization by which “colonialist representations… acquire malleability because

1 Srinivas Aravamundan Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688­1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 30. 2 See William Spengemann, “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 38 (1983‐1984): 384‐414.

20 of a certain loss of detail, a process that enables readier identification and manipulation by readers... . Virtualizations work as retroactive focalizations of postcolonial “becoming‐other” (17). Oroonoko’s importance, then, has mostly been constructed retroactively, as the novel was found to concentrate themes and treatments especially convenient to contemporary analyses of modernity. Because it is a modern text that touches on issues crucial to contemporary thought, Oroonoko has been retroactively imbued with cultural relevance, and been made the origin point of “a “line of flight” from colonialist representation to postcolonial revision”

(17). The themes of slavery and slave revolt hold a crucial position in this line of flight.

Yet slave revolt in Oroonoko is portrayed sympathetically, to the extent that it is presented as an extension of individual exceptionalism. Oroonoko’s revolt is righteous only because his enslavement is deemed unfair: unlike his African brethren, he is no “natural slave,” but indeed a natural aristocrat. This aspect of

Oroonoko is generally read in the light of Behn’s support for the house of Stuart, as a celebration of the increasingly obsolete notion of monarchy by divine right and its latest incarnation, absolutism3. The Stuarts had lived in exile in France during

Cromwell’s rule and brought back French fashion, but also, some, suspected, King

Louis XIV’s taste for absolutism and his militant Catholicism. James, the Duke of

York, brother of King Charles II and his announced successor, made little mystery of his religious allegiance. But , a beacon of , would not abide by a Catholic King. The battle between Stuart opponents and supporters raged in

21 English letters as much as it did on the political stage.

Behn was a notorious royalist, who acted for a time as a spy for King Charles

II. Yet her text does not fall neatly into ideological boxes. Behn’s politics are not directly evident in her description of the Englishmen of Surinam.4 Behn’s noble and honest African prince is systematically lied to and betrayed by a collection of despicable Englishmen5 on both sides of the English political divide. The novelized version of William Byam—in real life the royalist governor of Surinam until it was ceded to the in 1667, demoted by Behn to a position as deputy governor—is the embodiment of cruelty and deviousness, while Harry Martin, a notorious Republican (here wrongly presented as a partisan of Oliver Cromwell) is one of the rare dignified English characters in the book. The reservations about slavery voiced in the novella are hardly the expression of royalist dogma. The

Stuarts were instrumental in turning English colonial endeavors from an adventurer’s game to a government‐backed venture: in 1660 Charles II chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to to begin trading in slaves for

England’s West Indian and American colonies. By 1672, the company was renamed the and given a national monopoly on the trade of African slaves. Tidy readings of Behn’s politics in Oroonoko are complicated by the text’s

3 See Anita Pacheco, ‘Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, Studies in 34 (1994), 496. 4 Mary Ann O’Donnell ‘The Documentary Record, “ in Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. 5 It is worth noting that the most admirable British character, Trefry, is Cornish, a very significant regional provenance, for the political struggles of late 17th century England. Cornwall remained a royalist region during the Civil War: “to the Parliamentarian army invading it in 1644, Cornwall was a weird and hostile place, full of unfriendly locals who didn't even speak English;” Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 357.

22 connections to factual history.

Oroonoko’s personal narrative format has long been a major problem for readers attempting to separate the true, the false, and the embellishments in between. From its first publication to this day, the question of its factual authenticity has been at the forefront of discussions. Readers’ uneasiness with the book’s nature is clear to this day: scholars still study the details of the book against averred historical facts about Behn’s life and her potential stay in Surinam.6 Oroonoko is generally called a novel or a novella, perhaps because it is simpler to treat it as fiction than to untangle the implications of the text being a somewhat novelized factual story. Oroonoko borrows from the genre of the secret history typical of post‐

Civil War political writings, but not reputed for its factual accuracy. Secret histories

“tell, from an outsider position, an ‘insider’s’ story of lineage disruption in the political realm.”7 Narrators of such texts present themselves as chroniclers, using their particular vantage point to narratively reorganize the chaos they witness.

Much of the fascination with Behn’s text resides in this tension between fact and fiction. Oroonoko is similarly drawn between English domestic politics and English colonial reality, two related spheres where widely different moral, social and economic rules apply.

Oroonoko takes stock of the new economic order born of the rise of the

English trading class, a primary force behind opposition to the Stuarts. This evaluation comes through the sympathetic portrayal of a black prince whose

6 See Joanna Lipking, “Confusing Matters: Searching the Backgrounds of Oroonoko” in Aphra Behn Studies, Janet Todd, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 259‐284. 7 Laura Doyle, Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640­1940

23 survival hinges on destroying the said order—and therefore threatening the economic interests of England. That Oroonoko fails in his endeavor may simply be the reflection of hypothetic factual events witnessed by Behn in Surinam. It may also be a symptom of the paradoxical ways in which Oroonoko engages important economic, political and moral questions of its time, whose revisions occupy critics to this day. Of the many themes addressed in the novella, the connected issues of race, colonialism and Atlantic slavery are of the utmost interest to me. I see in Behn’s novella an articulation between older and modern Western European approaches to these issues, the symptom of changing economic, social and political realities, but also the harbinger of cultural representations of changing mores. Or rather, changing Moors: with Oroonoko, we get the first in a line of European‐conceived

African protagonists that would profoundly influence the way Western societies at large saw and understood African and African diasporic people. In order to find the roots of this new literary figure, it is important to focus on the text’s formal characteristics.

Parallel (yet not necessarily along related ideological lines) to political discussions regarding French influence over the courts, the issue of French influence over British arts raged during the Restoration. The theoretical battles of the age saw playwrights and critics wrestling with the strong influence of French neo‐classicism and respect for the English dramatic tradition. The conundrum of English dramatic theory is evident in Dryden’s opinion that “the laws of the pseudo‐classicists were held to be measurably good, but Shakespeare without those laws had been

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 100.

24 undeniably great.”8 French influence was embodied in the trend of heroic plays, which eventually mixed with the English tradition represented in the many old plays revived at the reopening of the theatres. Oroonoko uses the conventions of the heroic genre. Oroonoko and Imoinda’s love story drives the plot; Oroonoko is an accomplished and impressive warrior and hunter, virtue personified. His separation from, and later reunion with, Imoinda are also typical developments of heroic romance. Oroonoko’s very helplessness is also characteristic of Restoration tragic heroes. In the tongue‐in‐cheek words of Anne Righter, “Restoration tragic heroes, faced with the spectacle of virtue in distress, tend to take the heavens to task for temporary mismanagement of the administration.”9

French drama was all the rage, but newly reopened theaters of the

Restoration era also relied on guaranteed, English tradition ‘crowd‐pleasers’ for commercial success.10 Then as before, blood and gore were popular, and tragedies quickly found their way back onto British stages.11 Restoration literati took sides in debates over the role of their art and the shape it should take, under the double shadow of French and English literary tradition. The strict rules of

French tragedy found echo and opposition among English authors and their plays.

Dryden and his contemporaries defined literature’s worth in terms of effects; their goal was to arouse emotion, but such as must be informed by a commitment to religious morals. Thus Dryden could declare that “the punishment of Vice, and

8 Ashley H. Thorndike, Tragedy (New York; Cooper Square, 1908), 249. 9 Ann Righter, “Heroic Tragedy,” in Restoration Theatre, John Russel Brown and Bernard Harris eds. (New York: Capricorn Books, 1967), 144. 10 Robert Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 199.

25 reward of Virtue, are the most adequate ends of Tragedy because most conducing to good Example of Life” (Hume 156). Even the goriest, most sensational plots had to be balanced out with the punishment of evil, often in the form of revenge. Poetic justice, in the words of Hume, “haunts late 17th century tragedy” (204).

Poetic justice lurks in Oroonoko too, though it only comes in the most remote and unsatisfactory way. Revenge is ever present in the text, yet Oroonoko, easily the character most justified in avenging himself, fails to do so time and again. He invokes it on a regular basis; the earliest when he promises to “revenge… with the certain death of him that first enters” any incursion in Imoinda’s bedroom by his grandfather’s guards.12 But the guards recede. Oroonoko’s announced revenge does not take place, a pattern that will repeat itself all along the story. Indeed, what revenge happens in Oroonoko is mostly performed by the hero’s successive opponents. Oroonoko’s grandfather sells Imoinda into slavery as revenge for her intercourse with his grandson. In Surinam, Governor Byam retaliates against

Oroonoko’s failed rebellion by having him flogged, and eventually takes revenge for the death of Imoinda by torturing Oroonoko to death. Revenge belongs squarely to the of the tale.

What are we to make of this? What were Behn’s contemporaries, readers and spectators versed in the English tradition of literary revenge, to make of this African prince’s utter inability to perform the most basic of dramatic tasks? Reading

Oroonoko in the light of the English tradition of revenge drama in turn yields insight

11 See also Thorndike, 249. 12 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or; the Royal Slave. In Oroonoko and other Stories. Ed. Maureen Duffy (: Methuen, 1986), 49.

26 into the ways in which the novella engages the themes of race and slavery. Oroonoko sits at the crossroads of several “lines of flight”: an early—if not the original— incarnation of the , the novella’s protagonist is also one of the earliest revolted African slaves of literature. As such, it introduces a characterization whose signature pattern can still be perceived in contemporary literature. Call it virtualization: however unsuccessful in his undertaking, Oroonoko is the first in a line of black avengers, protagonists specific to the literatures of Western countries engaged in the Atlantic slave trade. The black avenger is the literary expression through which England attempts to come to terms with the implications of widespread, systematic transatlantic slavery and its economics parallel with the rise of liberal individualism. Oroonoko is born under the sign of revenge, as a royal figure, an enslaved African, and as a literary character. Oroonoko’s connection to tragedy at large and revenge tragedy in particular is a crucial term in this text.

Revenge is an important, though underappreciated aspect of the novella, and a crucial element of the novella’s “lines of flight.”

A history of revenge

Crises make great stage material. Since its first steps in Ancient Greece, tragedy has mostly been concerned with portraying societies pushed to the brink, moments when a community’s social and moral values are challenged, generally from within.

On the stage these challenges often take the form of personal feuds degenerating into acts of violence. Tragedy stylizes genuine, age‐old anxiety about acts of violence

27 and their potential for “universal onslaught of reciprocal violence.”13 When violence spreads throughout society, it can only be channeled by an act of unanimous violence, by which a community agrees to end generalized chaos by focusing it onto targets chosen for sacrifice for their capacity to “submit to violence without provoking a reprisal” (86). Before scapegoats were used to ritually serve the same purpose, these victims were , misfits and outsiders to the community whose very lack of relation to the original strife and lack of connection to the community as a whole guaranteed the end of hostilities. Reciprocal violence occurs in a community bereft of social barriers, where an act of violence starts a chain reaction of retaliatory acts of violence: the scapegoat then must be someone whose death no one will want to avenge.

Tragedy stages ‘sacrificial crises,’ when society’s rules threaten to give in to the impending flow of retaliatory violence. Such crises are typical of—if not exclusive to—pre‐legal societies. Organized religions provide the first prohibitions on revenge, which they also present as a strictly divine prerogative. Judicial systems deal with private revenge differently: they neutralize private justice by taking a monopoly over righteous revenge. Personal revenge becomes a punishable offense, as retaliatory punishment belongs to the legal system alone. The logic of revenge is not so much abandoned as forcefully transcended:

Instead of following the example of religion and attempting to forestall acts of revenge, to mitigate or sabotage its effects or to redirect them to secondary objects, our judicial system rationalizes revenge and succeeds in limiting and isolating its effects in accordance with social demands… . In the same way that sacrificial victims must in principle meet the approval of

13 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hokins University Press, 1977), 77.

28 the divinity before being offered as a sacrifice, the judicial system appeals to a theology as a guarantee of justice.” (Girard 22‐24)

Girard points to a crucial paradox: justice as modern societies have come to know it is the result of a long, gradual rationalization of revenge, by which the judicial system arrogates a monopoly over retaliation to acts of violence. The way justice functions is virtually the same as revenge: it is reactive, punitive, and based on a notion of fit, by which an original act of violence is balanced by a response considered adequate enough to it that it will deter personal revenge. By shifting the responsibility of retaliation onto an institution, organized justice deflects the opprobrium weighing on the shoulders of the avenger in societies that expressly ban revenge. Transferring this responsibility to judicial authority puts the threat of generalized violence at a distance by denying individuals the possibility to deliver justice themselves.

That threat comes back with a vengeance in instances when the justice system fails, or social order is so unjust as to force individuals or groups of individuals to act outside of its rules. Nevertheless, the portrayal of such actions in tragedy revenge drama betrays a fundamental fear not so much of violence as of equivalence. When social order is challenged, hierarchies lose their weight, and previous reservations tied to social station disappear. In revenge tragedy, “the loss of [differences] gives rise to violence and chaos” (Girard 51). Like the social order from which it stems, organized justice depends on inequality. If all men are the same, no authority can arrogate a monopoly of retaliation for itself. No one can stop the cycle of violence. For justice to be established, order must be restored after

29 revolution, an order by necessity hierarchical, unequal, in order for justice to hold sway. Simone Weil voiced a similar opinion when she wrote “The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium… . The search for equilibrium is bad because it is imaginary. Revenge. Even if in fact we kill or torture our enemy it is, in a sense, imaginary.”14

Yet however imaginary, the search for equilibrium is often similar to the search for justice. And if Girard sees in tragedy an inherently conservative genre bent on the preservation of order, Jonathan Dollimore argues that English revenge drama uses the portrayal of crises to challenge, rather than bolster, social conventions and hierarchy. Indeed, he argues that revenge plays paved the way for the wave of discontent that carried Cromwell’s party to power.15 Yet beyond the religious veneer of the genre, deeply skeptical opinions were being voiced that criticized Christian precepts at large. This movement testifies to a much more radical reconsideration of providence and religious morals: “as revengers, far from being the instruments of divine providence, they subversively arrogate its retributive function” (38). This reflects on revenge drama’s engagement with social upheaval: if revolution is a threat to the old order, a promise of chaos and violence unleashed, revenge retains its status as the only recourse of those who cannot obtain retribution through proper legal channels. Revenge plots regularly address this double bind: revenge dangles the threat of total chaos over society, but the social and moral inequities at work in organized justice constantly keep revenge in

14 Simone Weil, “Void and Compensation,” An Anthology, Siân Miles ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 197. 15 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare

30 play. As shown by Dollimore in his discussion of Marston’s plays, “revenge action is… a strategy of survival resorted to by the alienated and dispossessed” (29). Faced with utter injustice, loss of social status and opprobrium, Jacobean revengers vow to exact retaliation after the “stoic strategy proved unsuccessful as a way of coping”

(34). Revenge becomes a means for the victim of an act of physical or social violence to “resist disintegration through a purposeful—albeit violent—reengagement with the society which has displaced him” (34). Revenge may be a harbinger of neverending chaos, but for the revenger it can also be a necessary step to reintegration in society. Jacobean revenge tragedy thus connects stage revenge to radically new conceptions of the self, in counterpoint to Christian stoicism and providentialism. What Girard and Dollimore’s analyses reveal is the intrinsic ambiguity of tragedy; the order it longs for implies justice, a justice often denied by social order. In turn, the threat to order in tragedy is often justified by the characters’s sense of justice. In Jacobean tragedy, one can see how tragedy’s alleged intrinsic conservatism is nevertheless compatible with radical politics.

These issues became especially pressing during and following the English

Revolution and execution of Charles I. From 1642 to 1660, theater was banned by

Parliament. The Puritan party in charge in London at the time were also engaged in the recently started First English Civil War and in open rebellion against King

Charles I. Faced with the grimness of events, who but the most sinful would think of performance? Theater was banned for taking away from the seriousness of civil war.

The relevance of theatre to these grim events may also have played a role: Jacobean

and His Contemporaries. 3rd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

31 revenge plays displayed influence from the most grievous kind of radicalism: skepticism for religious and political authorities. Theater rang with the theatrics of radical dissenters more than with the rigid righteousness of Puritans. Jacobean revenge tragedy expresses “anti‐humanism,” the rise of a “conception of subjectivity legitimately identified in terms of a materialist perspective rather than one of essentialist humanism” (249). Jacobean tragedy challenges the fundamental religious and philosophical beliefs of its time, to suggest the very modern notion that humans are not only alone with no God to police them, no providence to rule their fate, and that their living conditions rather than inherent moral values dictate their behavior. Revengers are “decentered malcontents,” complex and contradictory characters contrasting deeply with the straight heroes of Christian humanism.

Revenge plays show their protagonists as they realize that morals are socially constructed, that social order is arbitrary, and that they play a role in its support or its potential destruction.

And who better to point at the flaws of the system than those who are kept on its outskirts, the women, children, slaves and foreigners; traditional sacrifice fodder precisely for their ambiguous, both inside and outside position in society?

They make for obvious characters for tragedy as their social station guarantees them a unique vantage point in any given crisis. The treatment of black characters in this tradition is of special interest to us.

Black with a vengeance

By the seventeenth century, were already a small but eminently visible

32 section of the British population.16 However limited, the black population in England in general and London in particular had a profound influence on English notions about black people. First observed with the curiosity dedicated to exotic novelty, black people soon came to embody a threat to a budding notion of Englishness. In

1596 Queen Elizabeth I produced an Edict Arranging for the Expulsion from England of Negroes and Blackamoors followed in 1601 by a proclamation in which she granted the merchant Casper van Senden the right to transport “Negars and blackamoores” living in England to sell them in and . These decisions were symptoms of “a discontinuous but persistent scripting of [the black] as an already formed illicit pathology marked for the outside of English cultural and political life” (Habib 119). Blacks were an anomaly that became increasingly embarrassing and threatening as England became more involved in the slave trade.

As black people became a more common sight in the city, they became more common on the city’s stages as well. Outsiders in society, they remained outsiders on the stage: black villains were the of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. In a genre where foreign, generally Catholic surroundings already warranted depictions of unfettered viciousness and brutality, black skin provided yet a second level of distance between the audience and the characters it was supposed to dislike.

Famed black villains such as Aaron in Titus Andronicus or Eleazar in Lust’s Dominion

(1601) are strangers in foreign lands; Aaron the Moor, lover of the Queen of the

Goths, deported to Rome, Eleazar the Moor forced to live in Spain. The same is true of a more sympathetic character such as Othello, portrayed as an alien in an alien

16 See Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500­1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Burlington

33 land, albeit a feared and respected one. Black villains typically present their hideous actions as revenge, and always pay for them with their lives, expiring with no trace of regret for their deeds. Their deaths mark a return, if not to normal, at least to order, as the final verses of Titus Andronicus make clear:

See justice done on Aaron, that damn'd Moor, By whom our heavy haps had their beginning: Then, afterwards, to order well the state, That like events may ne'er it ruinate. (V, iii, 204‐207) Outsiders within society whose death bothers no one, the black villains of English revenge tragedy embody to perfection the human scapegoats of early societies described by Girard. The sacrifice of outcasts puts an end to the cycle of revenge and gives society an opportunity to recover from crisis.

Close to a century after Elizabeth I’s edict, the Atlantic slave trade was central to English economy and politics. Supporters and opponents of the Stuarts alike made money in the slave trade and in American colonies resting on slave labor. Yet the freedom‐wielding rhetoric of the Whig party17 was fueled both literally18 and figuratively by slavery, as their slogan‐‐“No Popery, No Slavery”‐‐attests. For the

Whig Party the possibility of a Catholic king accessing the throne of England spelled political and religious tyranny. But the “slavery” would also be economic: an absolutist Catholic king would deny his subjects their property rights, which Whigs

VT: Ashgate, 2007. 17 The party was created by the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1681 to oppose the potential accession of James, Duke of York, to the throne. James was a known Catholic and close ally to Louis XIV and many feared that his reign would spell disaster for English Protestants. James became King in 1685. The long political battle between James II’s supporters and their opponents eventually lead to the in 1688, James’s ouster and his replacement by the “Protestant Defender,” Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange. 18 The Earl of Shaftesbury was one of the Lords Protector of the American colony of Carolina. He had shares in a in , in the Royal African Company and in a , the Rose. See

34 deemed the keystone to a liberal society.19

Slavery in Whig rhetoric exclusively defines the threat faced by English

Protestants under Catholic tyranny. England’s slaves in the colonies do not register in Whig political discourse. This paradox has roots at the very heart of the economic and political situation of England at the end of the 17th century. Anthony Ashley

Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, a Whig stalwart and one of the foremost proponents of free trade, was also one of the Lords Proprietor of the Province of Carolina. In the

1670s he designed with his secretary the colony’s Fundamental

Constitutions, which, among other things, infamously regulated slavery in the territory. By the late 1680s, Locke had become an important pamphleteering voice for the Whig party. In his discussion of civil society in Two Treatises on Government

(1689), Locke declares “But there is another sort of servants, which by a peculiar name we call slaves, who being captives taken in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters”

(VII, 85). Locke’s justification of slavery through war was hardly original, as it had informed slavery since Antiquity. The novelty resided in the absence of any other justification for the practice (such as debt, for example, which was a common reason for ), and perhaps more subtly in the inclusion of a decidedly moral factor in tying slavery to “just war.” Power alone no longer suffices: depriving a man of his freedom is only acceptable as retaliation for an unjustified attempt at

John Spurr, “Shaftesbury and the Seventeenth Century,” Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621­1683 (London: Ashgate, 2011),1‐25. 19 See Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 200‐205; James Farr, “So vile and miserable an estate…”: the problem of slavery in John Locke’s political thought” Political Theory 14.2, 1986, 263‐289; Seymour

35 oppression on this man’s part.

The silences of John Locke, the Royal African Company shareholder, about

Atlantic slavery in his Treatises suggest a certain discomfort at the discrepancies between his averred moral values and the reality of their application. Atlantic slavery is not the oppression on which Locke means to elaborate, but slavery provides the strong vocabulary he needs to make a powerful point. Absolutist monarchy keeps Englishmen in a state of unfair, perpetual bondage: “he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power does thereby put himself into a state of war with him…; for nobody can desire to have me in his absolute power unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom ‐ i.e. make me a slave” [II, 3, §17]. Locke justifies in no uncertain terms violent revolt against slavery:

[F]orce, or a declared design of force upon the person of another, where there is no common superior on earth to appeal to for relief, is the state of war; and it is the want of such an appeal gives a man the right of war even against an aggressor, though he be in society and a fellow subject… .Want of a common judge with authority puts all men in a state of Nature; force without right upon a man's person makes a state of war both where there is, and is not, a common judge. [II, 3, §19] In avoiding a clear stance on Atlantic slavery, Locke lets his arguments justify slave rebellion not simply at home, but also in the colonies.

For this reason, Locke’s analysis of slavery has long puzzled critics and scholars trying to reconcile Locke’s apparent abhorrence for slavery with his well‐ known involvement in drafting slavery regulations for the American colonies. For

Farr, Locke simply ignored a situation he knew very well, his text being solely meant

Hersch, “On James Farr’s ‘So vile and Miserable and estate…,’” Political Theory 16.3, 1988, 502‐503.

36 to speak to English political circumstances.20 The slavery of which he speaks is the political oppression weighing over Englishmen under the Stuart dynasty. Atlantic slavery is not a part of the equation he proposes. Locke had to develop an abstract theory of slavery, because he knew very well that an in‐depth look into the realities of Atlantic slavery would reveal the paradoxical nature of his position. Precisely because Locke did not seem to harbor racial prejudice, he knew there was no moral justification for Atlantic slavery. This pragmatism is intimately bound to what Locke,

Shatfesbury and their colonist contemporaries thought the demands of American colonization to be, i.e. the necessity to import slave labor. The Fundamental

Constitutions of Carolina also call for the creation of a class, leetmen, bound to the land much like feudal serfs. America was a state of exception, where what the progressive politics both Shaftesbury and Locke advocated for England had no place. The new continent—and much of Africa, it was believed, if disingenuously— was in a State of Nature where only natural rights applied, whereas England was a

Civil Society ruled by law.

And yet, Locke considers revolt against slavery a moral obligation. The untenability of Locke’s double stance may have been best explained by C.B.

Macpherson, who judges that Locke, though a proponent of “possessive individualism,” “refused to reduce all social relations to market relations and all morality to market morality.”21 For Macpherson, the weakness of Locke’s political philosophy follows his attempt to fuse natural law and market morality, and “his

20 James Farr, “Locke, Natural Law and New World Slavery.” Political Theory 36.4 (2008): 495‐522. 21 C. B. Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 269.

37 inability to surmount an inconsistency inherent to market society. A market society generates class differentiation in effective rights and rationality, yet requires for its justification a postulate of equal rights and rationality” (269). Macpherson’s analysis reveals how the ambiguous evaluation for slavery expressed in Locke’s writings intersected with English tragedy. Tragedy’s traditional concern with—and, according to Girard, its perennial fear of—equality is echoed in this postulate of equal rights. In both cases, equality is justifiable but represents a deadly threat to the system. Atlantic slavery is the unsung engine of Locke’s market society. It also provides the foundation of inequality on which Locke can build his theory of civil society, and as such it is perpetually a crisis in the making. Locke’s political philosophy is a telling foray into the thinking that made it possible for Atlantic slavery to coexist with the freedom rhetoric of Enlightenment.

Where Locke avoided addressing the crisis underlying his paradoxical position, Oroonoko taps into English revenge drama tradition to provide a literary treatment of this situation, related to Locke’s political philosophy but also in counterpoint to it. Reading Behn’s Oroonoko in the light of her earlier revenge play

Abdelazer, or; the Moor’s Revenge—which also featured an African protagonist— offers new insight into reflection on and representation of Atlantic slavery in modern English culture. The patterns introduced in Oroonoko survive to this day in the literary figure I want to isolate here, the black avenger.

Tragedies stage moments of crisis brought about by violence, and portray the way these crises are overcome, or how they destroy social systems. With the black avenger, we see modern Western culture expressing the same kind of anxiety over

38 the potential for moral and civilizational collapse contained in the practice of

Atlantic slavery. With increasing levels of trade came increasingly elaborate justifications for racial slavery, but the utter immorality and injustice of it all could never be completely erased. Injustice holds the potential of a righting of wrongs, a blood feud of potentially gigantic proportions. The threat of widespread, African vengeance hangs over modern European culture, and the revenge drama tradition provided ready terms with which to treat the issue.

Atlantic slavery soon became different from traditional slavery, in scope, in practice, and in spirit. Africans were kidnapped in wars started strictly for that purpose. Their status as social outcasts was communicated to their children who had little chance to escape it. If the economic benefits of the trade were rather obvious, what of the moral guilt, what of the threat of widespread retaliation?

English writers pondered these questions more or less directly, in the same time as modern notions of race and nationhood were gaining sway. In these circumstances, I posit that revenge tragedy provided the frame for a symbolic sacrifice of the kind

Girard describes for primitive societies. With the black avenger, a literary scapegoat is created that both reveals moral unease and evacuates it. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is central to this movement: he is the product of the evolution from revenge tragedy to novel, from black revenger to black avenger.

From black revenger to black avenger

Oroonoko is generally presented as an early variation on, and perhaps an inspiration for, the “noble savage” later popularized by Rousseau. He is as often

39 presented as a British take on heroic romance, a genre popular in France at the end of the seventeenth century.22 Commenting on the sources and inspiration for Aphra

Behn’s 1688 novel, Derek Hughes declares, “it is well known that Behn’s Oroonoko evokes and subverts the convention of French heroic romance.”23 Indeed, it is well known that Restoration authors such as Nathaniel Lee and Aphra Behn borrowed heavily from the French writer La Calprenède for their plays. Yet, for being, in

Hughes’s words, “much plundered by Restoration dramatists” (xviii), La Calprenède and French romance at large were not Restoration drama’s only sources of inspiration. After years of closing under Puritan rule, the theatre of the Restoration period first looked into past British drama for inspiration. A.H. Thorndike advances that the Restoration trend of French‐style heroic drama was short‐lived, while

English dramatists soon fell back on the long national tradition of “tragedy of blood.”

So did Behn with ; or, the Moor’s Revenge, her one and only tragedy, released in 1676. The play is a rewriting of the 1600 revenge play Lust’s Dominion.

Reading Oroonoko in the light of Abdelazer shows how Behn’s characterization of the African prince is informed by a tradition of black representation in English theatre and by her previous effort in that tradition. Oroonoko is the result of a gradual evolution between the black avengers of Elizabethan drama and the black avengers of modern literature, prefigured in Behn’s Abdelazer. Adapting her villain from Thomas Dekker’s Eleazar, Behn created a more developed individual character, just as she set the foundations for black representation in modern

22 See Joanna Lipking, op. cit. 23 Derek Hughes, “Introduction,” Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery from the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xviii.

40 Western literature.

Jacqueline Pearson declares Abdelazer “an unusual play—Behn’s only tragedy—and it is hard to see what attracted her, usually so critical of stereotypes of race and gender, to its source Lusts Dominion.”24 Behn may well have been attracted by the connected themes of race and revenge, and a hunch that however caricatural the original play, these themes could nevertheless be used to expose such topics meaningfully. Abdelazer can be read as Behn’s practice run in developing the themes she would treat in more depth in Oroonoko. Scrutinizing Behn’s treatment of the black protagonist in Abdelazer reveals Oroonoko as both a variation and a departure from the black protagonists of revenge drama.

Aphra Behn derived her Abdelazer, or the Moor’s Revenge (1676), from Lusts

Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen. That play was first published anonymously in

1657. Its authorship was long attributed to Christopher Marlowe, but critics now believe it was originally written by Thomas Dekker in 1600. Behn’s adaptation testifies to the taste for the blood drama of past generations expressed in the 1670s.

Variations on the old villain tragedy were all the rage as playwrights and newly reconstituted theatre companies were looking for easy ways to please their audience.25 Behn’s Abdelazer displays all the characteristics of the typical villain tragedy, with “the arch‐villain… ruthlessly devoted to crime…, the accomplice assiduous in revolting baseness” (Thorndike 201).

The main character in the play is its namesake, Abdelazer the Moor. He has

24 Jacqueline Pearson, “Slave Princes and Lady : Gender and Ethnic Difference in the Work of Aphra Behn,” in Aphra Behn Studies, Janet Todd ed., op. cit., 226. 25 See Hume, op.cit.

41 lived at the court of the Spanish King Philip since the latter defeated and killed

Abdelazer’s father Abdela, King of Fez, years before. Abdelazer has proven himself in

Spain’s wars, and has been somewhat accepted by the : “royally born, [he] serv’d well this King, and Country” (II, ii, 56). He is married to the noblewoman

Florella, sister of Alonzo, and is a member of the King’s court. He has also converted to Christianity (I, ii, 43). Yet Abdelazer harbors the secret ambition of avenging his father and ruining Spain. He has been having an affair with the Queen, seemingly to that effect. King Philip dies in the first act, poisoned by Queen Isabella. His son

Ferdinand replaces him on the throne. Ferdinand’s brother, Prince Philip, comes back from the war in Portugal only to find his father dead. In the presence of the whole court, he accuses his mother of cuckolding his father with Abdelazer. Cardinal

Mendozo, the kingdom’s spiritual leader, deprives Abdelazer of his titles and banishes him from the court. Abdelazer laments his banishment, though mostly because it will get in the way of his planned revenge: “But the worst wound is this, ‐

I leave my wrongs, dishonours, and my discontents, all unreveng’d” (I, ii, 44). His wife Florella vows to ask King Ferdinand to intercede in her husband’s favor and

“revenge [his] Infamy.”

King Ferdinand happens to be in love with Florella, and hopes to trade

Abdelazer’s pardon for her favors. Abdelazer is well aware of the king’s interest:

He loves her, and she swears to me she’s chaste; ‘Tis well, if true; ‐ well too, if it be false: I care not, ‘tis Revenge – That I must sacrifice my love and pleasure to. (I, ii, 45)

In the following scenes, Abdelazer and the queen mother devise a series of schemes that successfully rid them of Florella and King Ferdinand, and for a time discredit

42 both Prince Philip and Mendozo by—wrongfully—portraying the prince as born of a rape committed by Mendozo on the queen. But Abdelazer’s ambition is the death of him: although he could become king as the queen’s husband, he rejects her, assassinates her, and attempts to seduce Princess Leonora, who is promised to

Abdelazer’s brother‐in‐law Alonzo. Abdelazer’s downfall comes through Osmin, one of his Moor servants. Osmin unexpectedly declares himself “weary now of being a

Tyrants Slave,” and offers to help Leonora. He frees Alonzo and prince Philip, only to die at the hand of Abdelazer in act V, shortly before his former master in turn falls at the point of Philip and Alonzo's swords. Philip becomes king of Spain and the play ends.

Behn’s plot closely follows that of Lust’s Dominion, with a few notable alterations. Behn mostly did away with some of the original play's inconsistencies: in Lust’s Dominion, Prince Philip and his sister showed rather dubious ethics in accepting the help of Zarack the Moor guard (the model for Osmin), only for Philip to kill him seconds later. Just as puzzling was Philip’s magnanimity: he pardoned his

“lascivious” queen mother as well as the Cardinal, although both betrayed him.

Eleazar was a calculating playing off of the main characters’ lust. In

Behn’s play “the emphasis is shifted from lust to revenge”26 (Barthelemy 112). And indeed, in Behn’s version, we see a sort of poetic justice at play: all evil characters are condemned to pay for their sins. Queen Isabella, the arch‐traitor, is betrayed and killed by her lover Abdelazer. Osmin, at one time Abdelazer’s faithful minion, redeems himself in dying while protecting Philip. Behn’s ‘good’ characters remain

26 Anthony G. Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: the Representation of Blacks in English Drama

43 morally unstained. Prince Philip, though brash and fiery, no longer relishes in the condemnable behavior of his Lust’s Dominion namesake. His counter‐revenge, true to classic villain play form, remains hurried and underdeveloped, but it appears morally justified as a fitting punishment for Abdelazer’s ignominies. Abdelazer does not linger on the moral quandaries of exacting revenge, another staple of villain tragedies.27 Once Abdelazer is punished, balance is seemingly restored, and Prince

Philip, the “good” avenger, never has to pay for having committed a murder.

Abdelazer is a villain not so much for seeking revenge, as for delivering a wildly disproportionate one. For the death his father and loss of his kingdom, fit would demand Abdelazer only take revenge on the murderer of his father and regain the kingdom of Fez. But Abdelazer vows to “set all Spain on fire” (I, i, 39) and attempts to achieve this goal through increasingly immoral schemes, wreaking havoc on any and all standing in his way. Ultimately, Abdelazer’s revenge is jeopardized by his moral shortcomings: with the Spanish crown at hand, he ruins his chances out of lust for Leonora. Abdelazer’s rashness is the death of him; but this rashness is all his own, rather than a purported racial trait. Not that the play sidesteps the issue of prejudice: Abdelazer mentions early in the play how Spaniards see him as “A Moor! A Devil! A Slave of Barbary!” (I, i). Yet Abdelazer’s motive for revenge is the classic motive of theatrical revenge: he means to avenge his father’s death and regain his throne. In this Abdelazer is not so different from Philip. Further yet, as noted by Derek Hughes, Abdelazer’s “ruling qualities… unite him with [the

from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 112. 27 By contrast to earlier revenge dramas of which Hamlet is the most shining example, where those quandaries are central to the plot.

44 Spaniards]” (Hughes, Versions, xxii). Behn uses Abdelazer’s blackness as a defamiliarizing tool to comment on the fact that he acts on the exact same hypermasculine, patriarchal impulses as the Spaniards around him.28

Hughes contrast Behn’s treatment of Abdelazer with Lust’s Dominion, which he considers “dominated by explicit contempt for the black African,” (Hughes,

Versions, xxi). Yet even in the original play Eleazar’s behavior is virtually indistinguishable from Spanish characters’ antics. Lust’s Dominion shows little moral difference between the villains, Eleazar and his Moor guards, and the “good” characters, prince Philip, Hortenzo and the Cardinal. The whole world is painted black, Spaniards included. Describing two friars he bribes to do his bidding, Eleazar declares that “sin shines clear, When her black face Religions masque doth wear” (II, ii). Further on, Baltazar, one of the Moor guards, calls a friar “that black villain.”

Keeping in mind the traditional equation of blackness to lack of religion, this is an especially strong indictment. Thorndike accidentally points towards an oft‐noted explanation for the presence of black protagonists in Elizabethan and Restoration villain tragedy when he declares that “all or nearly all of the active characters [of villain tragedy] are black with sin” (200‐201). Eleazar’s black skin happens to match the blackness of his soul. Though Lust’s Dominion uses and abuses this metaphor, it does not quite raise it to the level of an essential rule. In a significant scene, Eleazar thus claims:

Black faces may have hearts as white as snow And 'tis a generall rule in morall rowls, The whitest faces have the blackest souls. (V, vi)

28 Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 64.

45 Eleazar is not alone indicted in this play. Evil is distributed widely among the surviving characters. As noted by Barthelemy, “Isabella’s… woes in part arise from the moral failings of lustful Spaniards who, behaving like the Moor, help to create an environment conducive for him ‘to carry black destruction to the world’ (II, i, 3)”

(105). Black skin may be treated as a sign of evil, but black skin on the Elizabethan stage is also a matter of make up, and as such it is not confined to African characters.

In the final act, Prince Philip and Hortenzo (Eleazar’s brother‐in‐law), in order to approach Eleazar discretely, put on blackface. They exert their rather cowardly revenge: Prince Philip stabs to death a chained and unarmed Eleazar. In the last lines of the play, Philip, now king, banishes all Moors from Spain. Philip banishes the

Moors while he still is in blackface, and hence undistinguishable from other stage

Moors.

Barthelemy judges that “in the dramatic world of Lust’s Dominion[…] blackness and role‐playing define the spiritually deficient state of the Moors” (107).

Moors are presented as perpetual actors, deceptive by nature: “to know Eleazar as actor makes him unacceptable to the community because the actor is a dissembler and is, therefore, untrustworthy” (109). But this theatrical mise en abyme is rather problematic, and Barthelemy recognizes that it points “to an interesting paradox…

[where] blackness reveals itself as a conventional trope” (110). As Jesús López‐

Peláez Casellas contends, “the play does not condemn Eleazar’s main activity, role‐ playing, at all… ; this villain insinuates himself into preexisting structures of different

46 kinds established within the Spanish court.”29 Abdelazer has used his time in court to study the conventions of Spanish role‐playing, and uses this knowledge to his own benefit. Spaniards themselves have to resort to acting in order to foil

Abdelazer’s plans. The play uses race prejudice but also questions its formation in tying it to theatre, make believe, acting. What are spectators to think when actors tell them that actors cannot be trusted? Resting as it does on recent history,30 Lust’s

Dominion’s treatment of race suggests English anxiety about foreign threats—such as Spain—but perhaps an even deeper fear that the—culturally, religiously—other is able to learn English conventions, assimilate, only to eventually prove to be an

“enemy within.” Reminiscent of Spanish history, Philip’s banishment of all Moors from his kingdom also echoes Queen Elizabeth I of England’s 1596 Edict Arranging for the Expulsion from England of Negroes and Blackamoors and the subsequent

1601 proclamation to transport “Negars and blackamoores” living in England to sell them in Spain and Portugal.31 These proclamations are testimony to England’s increasingly insular national sentiment. Behn’s revision of Lust’s Dominion’s race politics are further proof of this general movement towards cultural insularism.

Behn’s Abdelazer may seem more coherent than Eleazar; he’s also a much more wicked individual. Because Behn’s tragedy does not sustain the kind of inconsistencies Elizabethan villain tragedy thrived on, it turns Abdelazer into a

29 Jesús López‐Peláez Casellas, “The Enemy Within: Otherness in Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion,” SEDERI, yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies 9 (1998), 206. 30 England approached North African kingdoms for alliances against Spain in the late 16th century. Ibid. 31 The extent to which those edicts were followed, or even intended to be followed has been

47 more credible, but also more unredeemable villain. In the process, Behn’s characterization underlines Abdelazer’s religious and cultural otherness in ways that Lust’s Dominion did not: when the cardinal strips Abdelazer of his titles, he calls him an unbeliever, and questions his sense of cultural belonging:

Alonzo. Why should you question his Religion, Sir? He does profess Christianity.

Cardinal. Yes, witness his habit, which he still retains In scorn to ours. – His Principles too are as unalterable. (I, ii, 43)

The cardinal points to “the constructed features of [Abdelazer’s] culture—his religion and dress—rather than to any essential racial character” (Hughes, Theatre

61). Yet, it is not clear how much these notions would have been considered separate by the audience of the time. On stage, clothing designates Abdelazer as the outsider as much as blackface, and similarly visualizes his foreignness. The cardinal’s objections are a pointed reference to heavy religious symbolism, and they also suggest a subtle form of essentialism. For the Cardinal, once a Muslim, always a

Muslim: Abdelazer is only pretending to be a Christian, not very convincingly at that.

His every act must be seen in the light of the ostentatious deviousness, the

“Principles” one has learned to expect from black Muslim characters.

Hughes makes much of the fact that Abdelazer only once regrets his blackness: when rebuffed by Leonora for his ‘Person,’ he declares:

questioned by Miranda Kaufman in “Caspar Van Senden, Sir Thomas Sherley and the 'Blackamoor' project”, Historical Research 81.212 (2008): 366‐371.

48 And curst be Nature, that has dy’d my skin With this ungrateful colour! Cou’d not the Gods Have given me equal Beauty with Alonzo! (V, i, 104)

These lines follow a scene when Alonzo pointedly remarks that he does not judge

Abdelazer for his skin color but solely for his immorality. Hence Hughes judges

Leonora's rejection of Abdelazer to be an isolated moment, rather than a display of generalized racism. Behn’s play differs from Lust’s Dominion in that it shows the villain as “an individual, rather than a racial type” (Hughes, Versions xxii). Yet, in the corresponding scene in Lust’s Dominion, Eleazar rings a slightly different tone:

I, I may curse his praises, rather ban Mine own nativity, why did this colour, Dart in my flesh so far? oh! would my face Were of Hortenzo's fashion, else would your Were as black as mine is. (V,iii)

This version suggests a racial hierarchy different from the one that underlies

Abdelazer’s comment: Eleazar would be content with being the same skin color as his love interest, white or black, a nuance absent from Abdelazer’s lines. The parallel fates of Zarrack and Osmin also reveal a little more of Behn’s treatment of behavior according to skin color. In Lust’s Dominion, Isabella takes advantage of Zarrack’s potential feelings for her and of his ambition32 to trick him into freeing Philip.

Zarrack’s sudden betrayal of his master is driven mainly by greed and ambition.33

Philip rewards Zarack by killing him. He eventually pardons his mother and the Cardinal, even though they both betrayed him on several occasions. This may be proof of Philip’s cultural and/or racial loyalty. Killing all the Moors appears to solve

32 Zarrack says: “swear to advance me;/And by yo'n setting sun, this hand, and this/Shall rid you of a tyrant.” (V, v). 33 Isabella presumes he lusts for her, but nothing he says suggests that she is correct.

49 an immediate problem, and their banishment from the kingdom has all the appearance of a happy ending: the cultural anomaly is erased; those who strayed are back in the fold. Yet Philip delivers the news in blackface, a visual clue that you can banish black‐skinned people, but with black souls are not so easily dealt with. The seemingly straightforward action packs an ambiguous visual punchline.

In Behn’s play, Osmin is Abdelazer’s main servant. He shows dignified behavior early when he interrupts his master as he is about to rape Leonora. Later on Osmin frees Philip, Alonzo and the cardinal from the dungeon where Abdelazer had them thrown. He has no apparent ulterior motive for these actions; as noted by

Barthelemy, “he seems to be an individual motivated by grace” (116). After Osmin’s intervention, Leonora declares “Sure Osmin from the Gods thou cam’st, to hinder my undoing; and if thou dy’st, heaven will almost forgive thy other sins, for this one pious deed!” (V, ii). Leonora’s pity moves Osmin to vow to “live to do your service.”

Her blessing even seems to affect the narrative retroactively, as we find out on that occasion that Osmin was the one who helped Philip and the Cardinal escape three acts previously. Her declaration also seals Osmin’s fate in no uncertain terms, and the religious connotations of her words are not innocent: as a Muslim, Osmin is doomed. However important his help, it will not be enough to save his soul. And

Osmin marches on to his death, driven to heroism by beautiful Leonora’s mere pity.

Osmin is the incarnation of a common black type, the benign, faithful black servant, whose presence in the play “neither negates the type characterization of Abdelazer nor denies it” (Barthelemy 117). Yet Osmin ultimately becomes the most crucial

50 obstacle to Abdelazer’s revenge. He single‐handedly foils his master’s plans, out of a puzzling sense of duty that, on the one hand, suggests that Osmin does not share

Abdelazer’s evil essence, but on the other reveals Osmin’s perplexing attachment to

Spaniards who no doubt despise him as much as they despise his leader. Where

Zarrack was making a strategic choice by switching allegiances, Osmin’s choice is based on honor, a value few of the Spaniards around him seem to share.

In Lust’s Dominion, Eleazar’s Moor guard appeared on several occasions on stage. They were stand‐ins for the larger, threateningly “other” Moor community in both the Spanish and the English kingdom. In Behn’s play, the two black characters are very much two isolated individuals. Behn does away with Lust’s Dominion’s final banishment of all blacks from the kingdom, but in her version of the play, Philip has little reason to banish them. When Osmin mentions the “Guard of Moors,” it is to announce that “they will all dye, when e’re [Osmin] give[s] the word” (V, ii). In effect, when Osmin and Abdelazer die by the end of the play, all Moors have been killed. A profound reversal has been operated. In Lust’s Dominion, Eleazar’s actions have repercussions for the entire Moor community of Spain, which is mentioned and discussed throughout the play; in Abdelazer, this community has been erased from the stage, reduced to two antagonistic characters, both of whom are killed on stage, the best of them by the most evil. Behn does not portray Abdelazer as the representative of his community, because she denies him one. In the process, she erases a crucial aspect of Abdelazer’s resentment regarding the treatment of his community under the Spanish yoke.

This is an almost counter‐intuitive sign of . In the 1670s, “blacks

51 were to be found everywhere, and English interests in the slave trade… were long since established” (Barthelemy 116). Only as a singular individual can Abdelazer contribute to minimize the political and economic circumstances of black presence in , circumstances that might cast his actions in a less morally abject light. Thus Abdelazer’s legitimate claim for redress is undermined from the beginning of the play: why can’t he restrict his vengeance, strike only the man who killed his father and denied him his throne? The answer, along with Abdelazer’s people, lies outside the text: in taking , Philip has annexed the kingdom of

Fez and its people. Fez is no random location: it was one of the prime destinations for the Moriscos, the Muslim population forced out of Spain after the Reconquista in

1492. It was also among Spain’s prime targets when the kingdom began spreading south of the Mediterranean. Abdelazer declares that the conquest of his father’s kingdom by the Spaniards turned him into a slave. While his station at the court clearly belies this comment, it points to the situation of his former compatriots, or at the least to the way they are seen by Spaniards. Abdelazer may be an individual, but through him Spaniards see all the other “slaves of Barbary.” Abdelazer’s personal vengeance cannot completely overwrite the situation of the colonized Moorish community from which he hails.

Abdelazer’s revenge bears the mark of the historical feud between North

African Muslim populations and Spain. Abdelazer’s cultural—if not racial—identity, then, is not so much the Moor’s personal problem as it explains most of the plot. The emphasis on personal aspects of Abdelazer’s vengeance contributes to obfuscate the broader relevance of his actions. This singularization is perhaps one of the most

52 crucial links that tie Abdelazer to Behn’s most famous piece, her 1688 novel

Oroonoko.

A revenge deferred

Oroonoko is a dashing young prince in Coramantien, “a country of blacks” (31). The young warrior falls deeply in love with Imoinda, the daughter of a general who died fighting by his side. Well aware of their love, Oroonoko’s grandfather and ruler of the country claims Imoinda as his concubine. Though torn between his allegiance and his love Oroonoko eventually sneaks into Imoinda’s room at night and the lovers consummate their union. Angered and humiliated, Oroonoko’s grandfather secretly sells Imoinda to European traders bound for the . Heart‐broken and convinced of Imoinda’s death, Oroonoko is later kidnapped by a treacherous

English slaver with whom the royal family had done business before. He is sold in

Surinam to Mr. Trefry, the overseer of a big plantation, and finds himself reunited with Imoinda. They conceive a child there, but Governor Byam’s interest for

Imoinda and the prospect of a life of slavery for their unborn child push Oroonoko to lead a short‐lived and disastrous slave rebellion. Oroonoko’s followers abandon the prince, his pregnant wife and his main follower Tuscan to face the British alone.

They are captured treacherously, as Governor Byam fails to keep his word.

Oroonoko and Imoinda strike a suicide pact, but after having killed Imoinda

Oroonoko is incapable of killing himself. He is caught again, and gruesomely executed by the representatives of colonial authority.

Oroonoko is “a true story” told by Aphra Behn in the first person (25). The

53 parts of the story about Oroonoko’s life before Behn’s arrival in Surinam, she claims to have “receiv’d from the mouth of the chief actor in this history” (27). Use of theatrical terminology is not innocent, coming from an author then well known as a playwright. Behn’s narrator regularly connects the story to drama. Thus, discussing the manner of commerce in Surinam, the narrator mentions wreaths of feathers, which she later donated to the King’s Theatre to be “the dress of ”

(28). The locations of the different scenes presented in Oroonoko are also the stock scenes of revenge plays: “private chambers, a room of state, a tent, a grove, a prison,” the latter here replaced by the whipping post (Hughes, Theatre 56). Behn casts herself as storyteller, but also as audience: in the opening section of Oroonoko, as she describes in a proto‐ethnographic tone observing a young Indian man courting a young Indian woman, the narrator declares that the couple “represented to me an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew sin” (29).

Natives are also in representation, acting out in their lives the narrator’s own notions of virtue and innocence. Behn’s narrator reads them like she could read characters on the stage, as embodiments of ideas of virtue or vice.

Throughout Oroonoko, the narrator makes much of the act of observing, seeing, watching. She plays but a bit part in the events she describes, and appears mostly as a spectator among spectators. Yet she is an educated spectator: she can read people’s faces. More specifically, she reads skin color. In this she both refers to and departs from utterly theatrical conventions of representation and interpretation. Behn’s infamous physical description of Oroonoko can also be read as her playing with theatrical expectations, and describing not so much an African

54 prince as a theatrical African prince, a white actor in blackface: “his face was... a perfect ebony, or polished jett… . His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turn’d lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes” (34). Further, the narrator makes a point of declaring that “ ‘tis a very great error in those who laugh when one says, a Negro can change colour: for I haven seen ‘em as frequently blush, and look pale, and that as visibly as ever I saw in the most beautiful white” (41). Blushing is a telltale sign of honesty, “virtue’s color,” a sign used time and again on stage as proof of the moral superiority of whites over blacks. Blushing proves a person has a sense of shame, and therefore moral awareness. It is a crucial visual clue for a good spectator. The narrator’s comment sets her apart as a discerning observer, capable of choosing observed facts over accepted errors.

To a point, all characters in the novella are decent spectators aware of conventions, except for Oroonoko himself. When he first arrives on the plantation,

Oroonoko is recognized as the aristocrat he is, and fellow slaves bow at his feet.

When Oroonoko “besought them to rise, and receive him as their fellow‐slave; assuring them he was no better,” the enslaved act so distraught at this declaration of equality that they all simultaneously enter a state of “hideous mourning and condoling,” out of which they come only thanks to the concerted efforts of Oroonoko and the English. The slaves organize a feast worthy of Oroonoko’s grandeur.

Oroonoko never acts, nor is expected to act, as their equal. Europeans on the plantation certainly recognize his social station: “he was received more like a governour than a slave,” the narrator tells us, and “endured no more of the slave but

55 the name” (64). He spends his days entertaining the ladies of the plantation, when he is not out in the jungle killing tigers or interceding with natives in favor of the

British. Though we are told that he is given a house and tasks to perform on the plantation like other slaves, he seemingly never has to do anything, and only shares the slaves’ food and company for the second time prior to leading the rebellion.

Much like the princes of French romance, Prince Oroonoko is more used to the witty banter of courtly life and the dangers of heroic battle than to the base, toilsome life of the lowly. Yet in the Americas, where as a black man among others he is marked as a slave, what are the telltale signs of Oroonoko’s social station? Time and again Behn’s narrator suggests that Oroonoko simply exudes greatness, but he stands out among the enslaved for much more tangible reasons: when he first gets off the boat, Oroonoko is still wearing royal garments. Granted, even when he sheds those clothes, Oroonoko’s natural nobility remains unavoidable: “the royal youth appeared in spight of the slave, and people cou’d not help treating him after a different manner, without designing it” (63). Yet further in the text, the narrator once more qualifies Oroonoko’s outward signs of nobility, rather awkwardly so: she reveals having forgotten to mention “that those who are nobly born of that country, are so delicately cut and raised all over the fore‐part of the trunk of their bodies....

Some are only carved with a little flower, or bird, at the sides of the temples, as was

Caesar” (68).

Our narrator/spectator is well aware of theatrical conventions, and in

Oroonoko she recognizes, and points out, the qualities of the romance hero. In theatre these qualities, before they are explained in verse, are hinted at through

56 visual clues: a coat instantly marks a king, a color a hero or a villain. The delayed revelation of Oroonoko’s facial markings complicates the notion of Oroonoko’s natural nobility: people around the plantation, Africans and Europeans alike, could not have ignored the station of a man who literally carries it on his face. Indeed, the narrator mentions that she and her fellow Britons “took [Imoinda] to be of quality” because of the similar scarifications they had noticed on her body. Behn simultaneously entertains the romantic conceit of natural heroism by deferring this revelation, and underlines the theatricality of her novella in off‐handedly offering the information after building Oroonoko’s heroic persona. The facts may belong to the prince, but the story belongs to this narrator. She attributes his virtue, his

“greatness of soul… true honour… absolute generosity” to “the care of a Frenchman of wit and learning” who taught the prince “morals, language and science,” but also to his dealings with English and Spanish gentlemen and his knowing their languages

(32). The African prince’s virtue is the product of European conventions, a Western take on African facts. No wonder, then, that beyond Aphra Behn the narrator, every other European character seems to have more control over Oroonoko’s fate than he ever does himself.

Throughout Oroonoko, the villains themselves expect Oroonoko to resort to revenge. They recognize that their actions against him would justify revenge. When his grandfather tells Oroonoko that he has ordered Imoinda to be executed, the old man also begs the prince not to react too harshly against him and to turn his anger towards battle, as he can be assured “that death, that common revenger of all injuries, would soon even the account between him and a feeble old man” (52).

57 Oroonoko’s grandfather knows the truth of Imoinda’s status, of course. She is not dead, but has been sold into slavery, “the greatest revenge, and the most disgraceful of any” (51). Surmising that Oroonoko would not forgive him the ignominy of this act, he lies to him. Oroonoko’s grandfather knows that the prince respects the social conventions of his country, which he only disobeyed out of love. Indeed, responding to his grandfather, Oroonoko considers that “there was no account of revenge to be adjusted between them,” and even concedes that in loving Imoinda against his grandfather’s royal wishes, “he was the aggressor” (52). The truth, then, would surely turn Oroonoko into an avenger; but he is not privy to it. When he finally learns it, in Surinam, the potential subject of his revenge is thousands of miles across the ocean, and virtually forgotten by an Oroonoko too happy to have recovered his lover.

Oroonoko falls for the English slaver captain’s civilized act: “a man of a finer sort of address and conversation,” he “seemed rather never to have been bred out of a Court” (56). The Captain’s gentlemanly ways make him a court favorite, and he becomes close enough to Oroonoko to invite him to visit his ship with his retinue.

The captain captures all of them and immediately sets sail. On the trip to the

Americas, the captain offers new lies to Oroonoko in order to keep him from starving himself to death. He swears that he regrets kidnapping him and that he will let Oroonoko go free at the next harbor they reach. Yet when Oroonoko asks to be unchained, the captain answers that “the offence had been so great which he had put upon the Prince, that he durst not trust him with liberty while he remain’d in the ship, for fear lest by a valour natural to him, and a revenge that would animate that

58 valour, he might commit some outrage fatal to himself and the king his master, to whom the vessel did belong” (58). Oroonoko swears he will not retaliate. Bound by his word, he even becomes the captain’s tool when he convinces his men that they must remain chained “since ‘twas all the security the Captain (his friend) could have against the revenge… they might possibly justly take” (60). The captain then betrays him again and sells him as soon as they reach Surinam. There is bitter irony in this moment: the captain had originally refused to take Oroonoko’s word because “the difference of their faith occasion’d… distrust” (59). The captain is able to trick

Oroonoko twice precisely because the latter did not believe the captain could renege on his word.

Later on, Byam manages to trick Oroonoko again by letting the trusted

Trefry do his bidding—and breaking Trefry’s promises as soon as Oroonoko surrenders. Oroonoko’s standards of honor are too high for the slaving world. He believes that one’s word is sacred, a notion his foes violate over and over again, without scruples. Oroonoko lives by conventions that are unadapted to the text he inhabits: his foes, in turn, read him like an open book.

It is telling that all the villains in the story come out virtually unscathed, or like Byam, quite literally get away with murder. They control the narrative: their own impending doom, embodied by the Dutch, offers little in ways of poetic justice.

At the end of the novella, we learn in passing that some of the members of the deputy governor’s council, “such notorious villains as Newgate never transported,” were eventually hanged or imprisoned by the Dutch. In the real—or realistic— world, retribution is a matter of swiftness, after which it becomes a matter of

59 commerce. Oroonoko learns these rules gradually throughout the story, but never in a fashion timely enough for him to apply the said rules. Much like the very concept of the “negro,” he is, after all, a European creation. He embodies Western moral values against Western economic and political pragmatism. Oroonoko is a theatrical character lost in a realistic setting.

Characters in Oroonoko are both actors in and spectators of Oroonoko’s story; Behn’s narrator and “all the females of us” are presented as part of an audience used to theatrical conventions and logic. When Oroonoko explains his motive in killing Imoinda to the English ladies, “(however horrid it first appear’d to us all) when we had heard his reasons, we thought it brave and just” (93). Behn the spectator appreciates the soliloquy of Oroonoko, the creation of Behn the writer.

And there is no doubt he is indeed designed for the spectacle of the revenge play, as illustrated by the lengthy explanations he gives of his moral principles:

…the Captain had protested to him upon the word of a Christian, and sworn in the name of a great god; which if he should violate, he would expect eternal torment in the world to come… . (reply’d Oroonoko) Let him know, I swear by my honour; which to violate, would not only render me contemptible and despised by all brave and honest men, and so give my self perpetual pain, but it would be eternally offending and displeasing all mankind… . But punishments hereafter are suffer’d by one’s self; and the world takes no cognizance whether this god would have reveng’d ‘em, or not, ‘tis done so secretly, and deferr’d so long: while the man of no honour suffers every moment the scorn and contempt of the honester world, and dies every day ignominiously in his fame, which is more valuable than life. (59) The prince gives little credit to the Christian idea of divine retribution: it has no value in the material world because the collective cannot witness it. Eternal damnation is nothing to him because it does not involve public shame, the ultimate punishment, and the true measure of revenge. Oroonoko considers his notion of

60 honor as superior to the captain’s pretend Christian morals because it carries its punishment with it: honor is a collective virtue, meaningful only inasmuch as it is shared by the public. Oroonoko’s criticism of Christian morals is an aesthetic judgment: divine retaliation makes for poor spectacle. The audience has to be able to follow the plot in order to understand the motive for revenge, and it has to witness the punishment for it to matter. With this statement, Oroonoko puts himself in the ci play protagonists.

So much is confirmed later when, after his flogging at the hands of Byam,

Oroonoko spends excruciating time weighing whether or not he should take revenge on Byam. Not that he doubts the necessity of retaliation, but the thought of leaving

Imoinda alone makes him falter in “tender hours, a repenting softness, which he called his fits of cowardice” (92). Hesitation on the part of the revenger is one of the classic revenge tragedy’s essential motives isolated by Thorndike (Relations 143).

Oroonoko realizes that his death would leave Imoinda exposed to the threat of rape at the hands of the colonial thugs. Oroonoko ultimately fails to unleash revenge on an adequate target, turning it instead against Imoinda.

This unfulfilled revenge is very much a matter of bad timing: killing Imoinda was a preemptive action to spare her abuse at the hands of his enemies. It also touches Oroonoko so badly that he remains incapable to act for two days, after which he feels that “the deaths of those barbarous enemies were deferred too long”

(95). This expression echoes one Oroonoko used earlier to question the relevance of divine retribution in the material world. Oroonoko finds out that the “man of no honour” might suffer the scorn of an “honester world,” but the “real” world in which

61 Oroonoko finds himself is honorless, and it functions on perpetual postponement. In this society, slaves are not necessarily compatible with honor and honesty, perhaps because rather than being “vanquished nobly in fight” or “won in honourable battle,” the slaves of the Western hemisphere are bought like cattle in order to make a profit. The slaver captain lies to Oroonoko to gain time, so that the prince does not starve himself to death before they cross the Atlantic, before he is sold. Lies buy time, and in the slave system, time is quite literally money.

Revenge, in the slaving world, is a commodity among others. It is one of the several currencies of the “economics of slavery,”34 as Oroonoko finds out during the failed revolt. This is a crucial moment in the novella, if only because it is the closest

Oroonoko ever gets to actual—though indirect—revenge on his foes. He does so by connecting his fate to that of the African slaves, with whom he had very little contact until then. As European wallow in their drink on a Sunday night, Oroonoko delivers a rousing speech to the assembled slaves, described as follows by Aphra

Behn’s suspiciously omniscient narrator:

He told ‘em, [slavery] was not for days, months or year, but for eternity; there was no end to be of their misfortunes… ; but men, villanous, senseless men, such as they, toil’d on all the tedious work till Black Friday: and then, whether they work’d or not, whether they were faulty or meriting, they promiscuously, the innocent with the guilty, suffer’d the infamous whip, the sordid stripes, from their fellow‐slaves, till their blood trickled from all parts of their body; blood, whose every drop ought to be revenged with a life of some of those tyrants that impose it. And why (said he) my dear friends and fellow sufferers, should we be slaves to an unknown people? Have they vanquished us nobly in fight? Have they won us in honourable battle? And are we by the chance of war become their slaves? … no, but we are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of

34 See Houston Baker, , Ideology and African­American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 26‐27.

62 women, fools, and cowards… . (83) Oroonoko’s speech points to themes central to the novella: the novelty of the

Atlantic slave system, the terrible violence it generates and relies on; slavery’s morals, or lack thereof, and the related question of the moral valence of violent retaliation. Add to this a nascent movement towards racial definition: the men and women Oroonoko addresses were originally victims of Oroonoko himself, who sold them to Europeans after winning them, one can only assume, in what he deems to be

“honourable battle.” But deported in America, these former neighbors and enemies, hailing from different and often antagonistic groups are all part of a new homogeneous group, united by their general background and their immediate living circumstances. They are all Africans in a New World run, and run over, by

Europeans. This change appears in the novel’s narrative itself, when it “shifts from an English ‘us’ aligned with Oroonoko to a white ‘us’ aligned against him” (Doyle

199). The claim to whiteness made by Behn’s narrator demands that, in turn, all

Africans be lumped together under the banner of blackness. Whiteness is only possible as an absolute contrast. If Behn’s narrator shifts from an English ‘us’ to a white ‘we,’ Oroonoko becomes black in the act of leading a revolt. In that moment, he pretends that his social station is less important than what he has in common with his fellow slaves: the injustice that brought them all there, which can be summed up in their skin color. Summing it up in these terms is the only way to unite slaves in the same struggle as Oroonoko. But this summary union soon proves inadequate. Social differences never truly disappear either from Oroonoko or the slaves’ minds.

63 Oroonoko finds himself virtually alone. His fellow slaves abandon him as soon as they meet adversity. They prove unworthy of his company. In Oroonoko, except for the prince’s grandfather, individual black characters are all examples of righteousness and heroism, but black people such as they are represented in the slave population of Surinam are something else altogether. They are servile and simple‐minded. Though most of them owe their slave status and deportation to

South America to Oroonoko, they nevertheless worship him like a god: “… he was that Prince who had, at several times, sold most of ‘em to these parts; and from a veneration they pay to great men… they all cast themselves at his feet… and kissing his feet, paid him even divine homage” (64). They are easily convinced to rebel, but they as easily surrender when colonial troops meet them in the jungle. The women and children, “being of fearful cowardly dispositions,” beg their husbands and fathers to “ yield and be pardoned” (86) and leave Oroonoko, Imoinda and Tuscan to fend for themselves.

During the long discussion that follows, in which Byam tries to convince

Oroonoko to surrender, the prince expresses shame at “endeavouring to make those free, who were by nature slaves, poor wretched rogues, fit to be used as Christian tools… In fine… he told Byam, he had rather die, than live upon the same earth with such dogs” (88). The mobile, the ethnic group, the race implied through the individual in Lust’s Dominion, challenged in Abdelazer, is here dismissed altogether.

Oroonoko made the mistake of believing the slaves could be soldiers, but they are lowly by nature. Oroonoko’s heroism is the kind of luxury only aristocrats can afford; the collective is no recourse for the exemplary black prince. They are not

64 only incapable of freedom, they also play a central role in Oroonoko’s demise. The majority of European characters in Oroonoko remain in the shadows; the narrator and her female friends are moral spectators, intrinsically different from bad apples such as Byam. Their difference is underlined at every page in the narrator’s ability to identify those character’s moral flaws, and their individualities save their group.

Africans, who are strictly actors in this play, are in turn damned by Oroonoko’s uniqueness. By contrast they appear as a weak and submissive mass.

Tuscan, a rare example of individuality in this anonymous group, cashes in on his credit by becoming Byam’s minion. Tuscan, “perfectly reconciled with Byam”

(95), is part of the expedition that finds Oroonoko and his dead wife in the forest.

Meeting Oroonoko, he gets stabbed through the arm by the Prince. This is a scene an apt spectator could have been familiar with: in Abdelazer, the Moor stabs his servant Osmin in the arm when the latter interrupts his assault on Leonora. Yet where Osmin was ultimately killed by the same Abdelazer, Tuscan does well to prevent this fate, keeping the knife stuck in his arm and away from his potential killer. Tuscan complicates Oroonoko’s depiction of the slave system. Tuscan is not presented as any less dignified for defecting over to Byam’s side. Contrary to Osmin, whose turn against Abdelazer simply spelled a more dignified death, here Tuscan saves his life by changing sides. Practice negates morals at every turn of the novella: if the spectators know where bravery and right stand, they also know that those virtues are rendered useless by the system in which they are displayed. The princely virtues of honor and dignity mean nothing in the western, slave‐fueled society, except as spectacle; and as spectacle, they become as exemplary as an execution.

65 In her analysis of the role of torture in ’s adaptation of

Oroonoko for the stage, Ayanna Thompson shows what function the staging of

Oroonoko’s final demise serves. She argues that, though the play is overall critical of racially essentialist views, by staging the torture as a spectacle, it reinforces “an implicitly empowered and erased (white) gaze” (73). This is also true of Behn’s novella: while eyes are lovers’ favorite means of communication, they are also the way in which Westerners control the action, and ultimately deliver it to readers. On his first arrival in Surinam, Oroonoko is a novelty, and all the settlers come out to see the new spectacle in town, “not but their eyes were daily entertain’d with the sight of slaves” (63). Tellingly, when they go after the rebellious slaves, the militia’s best defense is “lashing them in the eyes,” depriving them of their most useful weapon (87). The economics of slavery rest on an eminently visual notion of race. Oroonoko is made black and singular through a shrewd distribution of visual signs: his facial features are Europeanized, just as the revelation of his African scarifications is strategically postponed. Oroonoko himself does his share of stern gazing, but gaze in Oroonoko is the property of the narrator, the “eye‐witness.” What you describe is what you own: Governor Byam’s understanding of this rule is only slightly distorted when, through torture, he attempts to physically possess

Oroonoko, to “ ‘mark’ the African prince as his own.”35 Oroonoko rightly understands his flogging as the ultimate mark of shame, an external, visual sign of humiliation. Yet Oroonoko’s owner is unmistakably the narrator, through whose prism Oroonoko’s story and appearance are mediated. Controlling the narrative, she

35 Ayanna Thompson, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge,

66 is in a position to make the kind of extra‐diegetic connections Oroonoko himself denied. We learn that of the “notorious villains” who constitute Byam’s council,

“some of ‘em were afterwards hanged when the Dutch took possession of the place”

(91). She connects their fate to Oroonoko’s when she declares that they “after paid dearly enough for their insolence” (99), making precisely the kind of extra‐narrative connection Oroonoko himself resented. Taking place as it does outside the purview of this story, their ‘punishment’ is moot. The narrator’s feeble attempt at poetic justice is revealing: the sacrifice of the royal scapegoat is the climax of the story.

It may not seem that Oroonoko’s death brings about much of a return to order. We learn that on taking over the colony not long after Oroonoko’s death, the

Dutch executed or imprisoned many of the “notorious villains” that constitute

Governor Byam’s council (91). Behn’s narrator even portrays their fate as a comeuppance; they “paid dearly for their insolence” to the prince, the narrator writes (99). This is poetic justice at its finest: the narrator alone makes a connection between unrelated events, rewrites the death of the British colonists as the expression of divine judgment. Her control over the narrative is reasserted in this moment, just as she uses the same event to seemingly undermine her narrative agency. Indeed, the Dutch invasion is singled out as the reason why it fell to her to tell Oroonoko’s story: “his misfortune was, to fall in an obscure world, that afforded only a female pen to celebrate his fame; though I doubt not but it had lived from others endeavour, if the Dutch, who immediately after his time took that country, had not killed, banished, and dispersed all those that were capable of giving the

2008), 69.

67 world this great man’s life, much better than I have done” (63‐4).

This kind of revenge is only barely removed from divine justice. The Dutch of course neither know nor care about what the councilmen did to Oroonoko, and did not punish them for those actions. Only in the grand scheme of things can this be seen as punishment for previous actions. With her corrective, Behn’s narrator not only suggests that his views on honor are obsolete and do not apply to the world he finds himself in. Oroonoko’s vengeance, much like his enslavement in the first place, is contingent on . The Second Anglo‐Dutch War, conflict during which England lost Surinam, was waged in part over colonial ambitions. She also reveals the mechanics of her narrative. Oroonoko is given a villain’s death, and the poetic justice in the final lines is hurried, a thought coming second to yet another statement upon the act of narrating itself, the true focus of this tale.

As a disclaimer for twenty‐first century readers of Behn, Derek Hughes states that at the time when Behn wrote Oroonoko, “attitudes could be combined in ways that are impossible today. Defenders of black Africans could accept slavery”

(Versions xiv). Yet, even more so, it seems that slavery could only be acceptable to defenders of a black African, a positive, but intrinsically singular character damning the mass of his enslaved fellows through his very exemplarity. In this way, although

Abdelazer and Oroonoko stand at opposite sides of the moral spectrum, the extraordinary African Prince of Behn’s 1688 novel is truly a development of the

1676 stage Moor. For the individual to shine, the mass has to grovel. This is true of

Abdelazer: where in Lust’s Dominion Eleazar’s evil is ultimately but one strand in a petri dish of evil, no one can match Abdelazer’s malevolence. But even the African

68 hero has to be one of a kind, an outsider in his country and a stranger in a strange land. Oroonoko is a unique specimen among Africans, an exemplary type more fit for

European courts, as the author regularly reminds her readers. Yet he does not belong there either, as is also made very clear. The black villain, it seems, cannot belong for his utter evil; the black hero cannot belong because his very existence is a moral challenge to slavery. Throughout the novella, then, his uniqueness is presented as a function of his Western characteristics, but in correlation to the stage: in effect, Behn tells her readers that Oroonoko is a stage avenger lost in reality, perpetually functioning on the wrong conventions. The middle passage renders him virtually irrelevant; once, as a general, his presence made all of the difference, and he “appear’d like some divine power descended to save his country from destruction” (54). The slaves of Surinam see him as a god, yet such morale‐ rousing power as he held in Africa evades him when the rebellious slaves have to fight colonials armed with next to nothing but whips. In Africa, Oroonoko was deus ex machina, providential recourse and theatrical device miraculously saving the day.

In America, his theatrical powers are useless; though a hero, he is imposed a tragic end, a catastrophe with no moral justification.

Considered through the prism of theatrical conventions, the lessons Oroonoko suggests are especially disturbing. The narrator can lament the irrelevance of notions of honor in a world shamelessly driven by material gain, but she does so as a mere spectator. Under her words lurks the notion that all this horror, these

“frightful spectacles of a mangled King,” are quite a popular spectacle, and a sign of the times. The demise of the black hero, and the disappearance with him of the

69 potential for his revenge to trigger a “universal onslaught of reciprocal violence”

(Girard 77) are necessary to sustain the system on which England’s economic success is poised. One would be hard put to find in Oroonoko the flaw that traditionally downs the classic avenger. If Oroonoko flounders, it is mostly because he is misplaced. His flaw is to possess a sense of honor in a world where Africans can only be “the vilest of creeping things” (88). Oroonoko is indeed “the last of his great race” (69). He is the last of the old black avengers of British revenge theatre, characters translating the anxiety of the Western world in its encounter with Africa.

But Oroonoko is also the first new black avenger, the unwitting hero of the first

British novel, a literary creation born of an English author’s recognition of her country’s debt to slavery for its entrance into the modern era. As a new black avenger, he is necessarily a scapegoat, a revered figure destined for sacrifice.

The black heroes of Western literature have a problem of scale: their revenge defines itself at the most intimate level, the family, yet it demands far‐reaching action. For revenge to truly work, in these stories, Atlantic slavery at large needs to be shaken in its foundations. Such action in turn requires the kind of national unity

African slaves were known not to have: coming as they did from widely different and often enemy African nations, speaking different tongues, they had relatively little in common. The idea that all slaves could unite is as much a warning as it is titillation; the black avenger is a bogeyman whose ire readers can fear in the same time as they admire his resolve. The stories all eventually end in a sigh of relief, which helps readers identify more fully with the avenger: his plans to wreak havoc on white civilization having been thwarted, all that remains is for readers to wallow

70 in the moral guilt of seeing such an extraordinary personage unfairly brought so low.

71 Chapter II

The Haitian Revolution, a Tale of Two Avengers

… And ‘twas amazing to imagine where it was he learned so much humanity: or, to give his accomplishments a juster name, where 'twas he got that real greatness of soul, those refined notions of true honor, that absolute generosity, and that softness that was capable of the highest passions of love and gallantry, whose objects were almost continually fighting men, or those mangled or dead, who heard no sounds but those of war and groans. Some part of it we may attribute to the care of a Frenchman of wit and learning, who, finding it turn to very good account to be a sort of royal tutor to this young black, and perceiving him very ready, apt, and quick of apprehension, took a great pleasure to teach him morals, language, and science; and was for it extremely and valued by him. Another reason was, he loved when he came from war, to see all the English gentlemen that traded thither; and did not only learn their language, but that of the Spaniard also, with whom he traded afterwards for slaves. ‐Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or; the History of the Royal Slave.

Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”1 Insisting on the importance of the print medium for modern nation‐building, Anderson effectively portrays the modern nation as a community of readers partaking in the national text. The boundaries of national communities are echoed, developed, spread in print culture, in the news but also in literature: “fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community and anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations” (36). The people that form the national audience are not necessarily literate; news also circulates by word of mouth, from the page to the ear, and illiterates are invited into the national community by “missionaries of nationalism.” The revolutions of the early nineteenth

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983; 1991), 6.

72 century, “shaped by millions of printed words into a ‘concept’ on the printed page” resulted in “a ‘model’ of ‘the’ independent national state…, a complex composite of

French and American elements” (80‐81). Anderson goes on to cite the creole revolutions in as the earliest to develop modern notions of “nation‐ ness.”

Although he devotes a chapter to these “Creole Pioneers” of modern nation‐ building, Anderson only has a few lines for the Haitian Revolution—and then only to explain why the fear of slave revolt was so central to independence movements led by South American planters. Indeed, his theory finds its limits in the Haitian

Revolution, which belies Anderson’s tendency to generalize from a situation specific to Spanish‐American colonies.2 This is not to say that print culture did not play an important part in the Haitian Revolution. As proven by the surviving polemic texts published on the island throughout the Revolution, print communication was extremely important on the island, but we should keep in mind that the accessible textual archive shows the revolutionaries communicating with Western friends and enemies on and outside the island. Communications with the formerly enslaved section of the revolutionary audience will remain for the most part out of our reach, although scholars have directed their efforts towards representing the agency of non‐literate revolutionaries. The textual archive of the Haitian revolution lies in the shadow of Western culture, in constant conversation with its literary and

2 See Doris L. Garraway, “‘Légitime Défense’: Universalism and Nationalism in the Discourse of the Haitian Revolution,” in Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, Doris L. Garraway ed. (Charlottesville: University of Press, 2008), 65; see also Elizabeth M. Dillon, “The Secret History of the Early American Novel: Leonora Sansay and Revolution in Saint Domingue,” Novel: a Forum on Fiction 40.1/2 (2006): 77‐105.

73 historiographic conventions. This is hardly unique to Haiti, and this insight is certainly not new; yet I emphasize it here because it is central not only to ways in which the revolution was reported on, echoed and portrayed around the world, but also to the way its principal actors defined it as ‘the’ model of a black nation, to paraphrase Anderson.

The Haitian model belies some of Anderson’s generous generalizations on nationalism. He notably argues that “nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations...; dreams of racism actually have their origins in ideologies of class” (149). Anderson has been taken to task for this definitive assertion: Robert Miles thus advances that

an assessment of the interrelation between racism and nationalism is better achieved by means of historical analysis rather than by ahistorical, abstract determination… the ideologies of racism ad nationalism can be interdependent and overlapping, the idea of ‘race’ serving simultaneously as a criterion of inclusion/exclusion so that the boundary of the claimed ‘nation’ is also equally a boundary of ‘race’.”3

In his discussion on the relations of racism and nationalism, Etienne Balibar similarly defines racism not as “an ‘expression’ of nationalism, but … a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to achieve its project.”4 These insights are especially useful to analyze the situation in Haiti. Even before the beginning of the Haitian revolution, race and class were so tightly intertwined in the social fabric of the French colony of Saint Domingue as to be inseparable. The slave system

3 Robert Miles, “Recent Marxist Theories of Nationalism and the Issue of Racism,” British Journal of Sociology 38.1 (1987), 41. 4 Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 54.

74 created a hierarchy complicated—though never jeopardized—by the fact that free and enslaved populations always mixed. Indeed, as noted by John Garrigus, in the early eighteenth century “European men, African women and their children in Saint

Domingue formed creole families and their descendants were accepted as French colonists, to the degree that they were successful as planters and slave owners;”5 these mixed children, who formed the mulatto class, gained a certain social recognition only to the extent that their behavior did not threaten the hierarchy on which this colonial society was based.

Although early notions of race played an important part in the social organization of early eighteenth century Saint Domingue, racial prejudice was not uniform throughout the island; thus until the 1760s, in the more rural areas of the island, “officials distinguished ‘colonists’ from ‘free ’ by their social, rather than physical, characteristics” (50). It also evolved with time: the infamous Code

Noir, a collection of laws and precepts meant to regulate the treatment of slaves in

French colonies published in 1685 thus “defined slavery as a legal, not a racial, condition” (41). Things changed in the mid‐eighteenth century, influenced in no small part by a racial anxiety intertwined with rising notions of Frenchness.

As demonstrated by Sue Peabody, the last years of the Ancien Régime saw a flurry of legal decisions concerning the status of slaves on metropolitan soil. French authorities inaugurated a “new classification system that they hoped would regulate the boundaries between France and its colonies: the policing of race.”6 The evolution

5 John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint­Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 22. 6 Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien

75 of racial classifications and race laws was intrinsically connected to the development of the Freedom Principle, “the notion that ‘there are no slaves in

France’,” which in turn led to two distinct but related responses, “on one hand, a commitment to an ideology of absolute social equality and, on the other, a system of justification for why some classes of individuals are entitled to more privileges than others” (8). Planters were concerned with the possibility that on being brought in

France, their enslaved servants would gain freedom, and administrators worried about the threat of embodied by black presence in France. As a result of those joint influences, a series of laws were passed throught the eighteenth century that culminated with the creation of the Police des Noirs in 1777, in a decree whose language “prescrib[ed] actions based on skin color alone, rather than slave status” (106). The use of the broad term noir opposed skin color to Frenchness, a fundamental separation which soon found echoes in colonial law.

In the same time period, legislation was produced in the colonies to rigidly define socio‐racial classes. As John Garrigus notes, until the 1760s in Saint

Domingue, “family and social class overrode or at least counterbalanced racial identities in the frontier regions that still made up most of Saint‐Domingue’s territory. In the 1760s as in the 1720s, aspiring planters married free women of color with property or social connections” (80‐81). Beginning in the late 1760s and riding on the “new focus on French whiteness” in continental France, administrators from the metropole introduced increasingly strict racial laws meant to separate locals into supposedly hermetic racial categories (159). That the reality of Saint

Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 137.

76 Domingue society made these separations difficult to enforce did not undermine the cultural impact of the new, legally ordained racial classification. Garrigus evokes the nationalistic nature of these changes: “the new line colonists drew between ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ was more about creating a unified French colonial community than maintaining slave discipline” (169‐170). He also ties these developments to the first revolutionary stirrings among the wealthy gens de couleur class of the Southern region, beginning with the writings of Julien Raimond, and first culminating in

Vincent Ogé’s rebellion.

Garrigus and Peabody show how racism and nationalism mingled in French and colonial legal texts and contributed to creating the circumstances in which the

Haitian Revolution occurred. The racialization of French and colonial legislation developed parallel to increasingly racist notions expressed in, and influenced by, the literature that helped form Saint‐Domingue’s racialized audience in the first place.

Novel versions of the black avenger trope were developed in the scientific and philosophical circles that inspired this racialization, and the trope in turn became central to conceptualizations of the Haitian revolution written as it took place, and in its earliest historiography. These works of representation were as varied as the parties involved, but they had in common their tendency to center around black avenger figures. Although I use the generic term “black avenger,” it will soon become clear that different actors had very different motives in using such figures, as well as different understandings of what they stood for. In fact, we will see how eighteenth‐century French literature opened the way—somewhat unwittingly—for positive avenging figures closer in their mercilessness to the black villains of old

77 than to their more immediate forebear Oroonoko. Following the genealogy of this polymorphous trope into the texts of the Haitian revolution will help explain its resilience, and show how it contributed to perpetuate forms of racism inherited from colonial rule into independent Haiti.

Black avengers in the eighteenth century

This Frenchman was banished out of his own country, for some heretical notions he held: and tho he was a man of very little religion, he had admirable morals, and a brave soul. ‐Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or; the History of the Royal Slave.

In the eighteenth century, the theme of slaves taking revenge over their masters became increasingly common in French and English literature, each influencing the development of the theme in the other. Oroonoko was translated and adapted into an edulcorated French version in 1745 by Antoine de Laplace, with a crucial change form the original plot: at the end of the story, the erstwhile absent governor appears miraculously to save Oroonoko and his family, and sends them back to live happily ever after in Africa.7 Jean‐François de Saint‐Lambert was similarly influenced by

Oroonoko when, in his Zimeo (1769), he told the tale of an African prince leading a maroon revolt in (Hoffmann 86). In the second half of the century, the trope of impending slave revenge against planters’ abuses became a literary fixture on both sides of the English channel, influencing the terms in which each country defined its relations to the Atlantic slave trade and West Indian colonies.8

7 See Léon‐François Hoffmann, Le nègre romantique (Paris: Payot, 1973), 59‐62. 8 See Hoffmann, 74‐77. mentions Raynal as one “whose labours seem to have come at the right season for the promotion of the cause” in his History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Vol. I (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme,

78 In England, Thomas Chatterton treated the topic of slave revenge in his

African Eclogues (1770). The first eclogue, “Heccar and Gaira,” portrays two African warriors after they failed to recover their families captured by European slavers.

The two men, contemplating the future of their loved ones, vow endless revenge on the slavers; “I’ll strew the beaches with the mighty dead/And tinge the lily of their features red” (l.91‐92), declares Gaira, soon echoed by Heccar in his resolve.

Chatterton’s poem was not published until 1784, and is therefore unlikely to have influenced many until then. The theme of slave revenge was nevertheless prominent in and John Bicknell’s “The Dying Negro” (1773). Inspired by a story reported in the news, the poem presents an African slave about to commit suicide.

Baptized in London, the slave was about to get married when his former master forced him onto a ship bound for the . Day and Bicknell’s poem reflected the interest in the plight of slaves brought about by the famous Somerset v. Stewart case decided the previous year.

Charles Stewart, a customs officer from Massachussetts came to London with his slave Somerset. When Somerset refused to return to Boston and a life of bondage, Stewart had him forcibly taken onto a ship. Somerset’s English friends alerted the authorities on his behalf, and sued for his freedom. Lord Chief Justice

Mansfield decided Somerset should go free, a verdict widely interpreted by worried

Caribbean planters and hopeful slaves alike as meaning that all slaves would immediately gain freedom on reaching English soil. Day and Bicknell imagine the slave’s monologue as he is about to kill himself. The poets portray him calling to the

1808), 87.

79 heavens from the bottom of the ship where he is chained, reminiscing about his love affair, until his tone turns angrier in the last verses: “Thanks, righteous God!—

Revenge shall yet be mine;/Your flashing lightning gave the dreadful sign.” Though set on suicide, he imagines a day when:

Then, while with horror sick'ning Nature groans, And earth and heav'n the monstrous race disowns,— Then the stern genius of my native land, With delegated vengeance in his hand, Shall raging cross the troubled , and pour The plagues of Hell on yon devoted shore ... For Afric triumphs!—his avenging rage No tears can soften, and no blood assuage .... Flyswift ye years!—Arise thou glorious morn! Thou great avenger of thy race be born! 9(23‐24)

The news story on which Day and Bicknell elaborated their poem seemed to suggest that Mansfield’s decision had changed little for slaves, including those who did make it to England. Yet it is an opportunity for Day and Bicknell to point to the moral divide between England and its colonies. Between the first and the second edition of the poem, news of the Boston tea party had reached England: “[W]hat has America to boast?’ the authors ask in the dedication added to the second edition. “What are the graces or the virtues which distinguish its inhabitants?… For them the Negro is dragged from his cottage, and his plantane shade… .Yet, such is the inconsistency of mankind! these are the men whose clamours for liberty and independence are heard across the !” (vii‐viii). Day and Bicknell criticize American colonists’ resorting to the language of freedom while keeping men in bondage, an argument that would gain increasing traction in England as American independence came near. The poets declare “it is in Britain alone, that laws are equally favourable to

80 liberty and humanity; [that] it is in Britain the sacred rights of nature have received their most awful ratification” (viii). Somewhat paradoxically, the death of this anonymous slave on the Thames becomes evidence of England’s superior morals.

Slavery is dismissed as an American practice, foreign to British character.

In 1770 French clergyman, historian and political commentator Guillaume‐

Thomas Raynal released his mammoth study of European colonization, Histoire des

Deux Indes, an international best‐seller that had tremendous influence over Western culture at large. Raynal’s name was on the book cover, but a small army of writers contributed to his increasingly lengthy and regularly republished text, accounting for its sometimes puzzling variety of tone and opinion. From the first edition,

Raynal’s treatise on colonization contained an attack on slavery whose radical overtones suggested the moderate Jesuit abbot was not the author.10 In this section, a list of pro‐slavery arguments are refuted one after the other in radical terms: to the argument that slaves “were criminals condemned in their country to slavery,” the text thus opposes that such punishment was necessarily wielded by a despot, and that “the subject of a despotic prince is the same as the slave in a state repugnant to nature,” thus reversing Lockean terminology to bring it to bear on actual slavery.11 Denis Diderot expanded the section in the second edition (1774), notably with this famous paragraph strongly reminiscent of Thomas Day:

9 [Thomas Day, John Bicknell], The Dying Negro, A Poem. Third ed. (London, 1775), 23‐24. 10 The section on slavery was originally written by Jean‐Joseph Pechméja. Following a dispute with Raynal he did not participate in later editions of the book, but his contribution was virtually left unchanged in the second edition, with additions such as Diderot’s borrowing from Mercier. On the topic, see Yves Bénot, “Diderot, Pechméja, Raynal et l’anticolonialisme,” Europe 405‐406 (1963): 137‐ 153; Gianluigi Goggi, “Diderot‐Raynal, l’esclavage et les lumières écossaises,” in L’esclavage et la traite sous le regard des Lumières, Jean Mondot ed., Lumières 3 (2004): 53‐93. 11 Abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in

81 Where is this great man to be found, whom nature, perhaps, owes to the honour of the human species? Where is this new Spartacus, who will not find a Crassus? Then will the black code be no more; and the white code will be a dreadful one, if the conqueror only regards the right of reprisals. (466)

This edition was the first to be translated into English and published in London,

Edinburgh and Dublin in 1776. The last French edition of the text (1780) featured an even longer discussion of the wrongs of slavery, though the section on the black

Spartacus had disappeared. Diderot now borrowed a passage from a best‐selling fantasy novel by Louis‐Sébastien Mercier entitled L’An 2440: un rêve s’il en fût jamais

(1770). The novel’s Parisian protagonist, following an earnest conversation about political freedom with an “old Englishman,” falls asleep only to wake up in the year

2440. In his stroll through future Paris, the protagonist happens upon the “the

Avenger of the New World,” leader of an uprising in which slaves across the

Americas “at the same instant… poured forth the blood of all their tyrants; French,

Spanish, English, Dutch, and Portuguese, all became a prey to the sword, to fire, and poison.”12 The guide goes on to explain in expectedly Lockean tones that “the natives have reassumed their unalienable rights, as they were those of nature”

(171). The two texts evolved together: indeed, where Diderot borrowed freely from

Mercier, a second edition of Mercier’s novel published in 1786 in turn referred to “a

Spartacus on the banks of ,”13 a clear tribute to Raynal’s text.

the East and West Indies. J. J. Justamond trans. 2nd ed. Volume III ( London: T. Cadell, 1776), 169. 12 Mercier, Louis Sébastien. Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred. Trans. W. Hooper, M.D. Vol 1. London, MDCCLXXII. [1772]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. CIC Penn State University. 23 June 2011 . 13 See Laure Marcellesi, “Louis‐Sébastien Mercier: Prophet, Abolitionist, Colonialist,” Studies in

82 In “The Wrongs of Africa” (1787), Liverpudlian abolitionist William Roscoe threatened Britain with divine punishment for its involvement in the slave trade:

“Forget not, Britain, higher still than thee/Sits the great Judge of Nations, who can weigh/The wrong and can repay.”14 The second part of his poem described a failed mutiny on a slave ship led by Cymbello, the obligatory enslaved African prince, who also commits suicide on his dead lover’s body. In “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788),

William Cowper leaves it to the elements, “the voice with which [God] speaks,” to avenge the wrongs of slavery. Cowper’s abstracted evocation of retribution for slavery is typical of the genre. The slaves of abolitionist poetry tend to call to the heavens for the accomplishment of their revenge, and read in thunderstorms, lightning and hurricanes signs of impending divine justice. Abolitionist writers were reluctant to present acts of violence by slaves, especially collective ones, as such displays of brutality were deemed unlikely to bring support to their cause. The possibility of slave violence hangs over their texts but remains for the most part unnamed, and imagined rather than performed. Vengeance as portrayed in these texts is always strictly an individual matter, and an individual action. Even when they lament the institution of slavery at large, slaves call for revenge for their or their immediate family’s sufferings. Readers can sympathize with a given slave’s plight without necessarily having to disagree with the system at large.

Thus, though sympathetic to the plight of slaves, English abolitionist poetry also more or less overtly opposes a collective, violent resolution to the problem.

Eighteenth­Century Culture 40 (2011), 253. 14 William Roscoe, “The Wrongs of Africa” (Part the First), The Poetical Works of William Roscoe (Ward and Lock: London, 1857), 45.

83 When violent slave action is actually evoked, though generally condoned, if not admired, it is rarely shown to be successful. In “The Wrongs of Africa,” the mutiny fails, and Roscoe praises the dead for finding true freedom:

Peace to your shades, ye favour'd train, who fell Amidst the generous struggle! o'er whose limbs The friendly hand of Death, has interpos'd His fated curtain; that, nor human force, Nor human malice, nor the deep regret Of disappointed avarice, nor the pang Of keen remorse, that gnaws the murderer's peace, And blasts his future joys, can e'er remove.... ——Yours is the palm of conquest;‐‐‐you have found A shelter from the hovering storm, that waits Your less successful fellows; who lament, And vainly wish to share your happier lot. (17‐18)15

Though time and again suggested as slaves’ only resort, revenge was presented as an understandable, but ultimately condemnable fit of passion. As such it contrasted with such acceptable, rational solutions as gradual abolition. Africans, according to

Raynal, were “a particular species of men,” physiologically disposed to surrender to passion, “and this is the reason why they are more effeminate, more indolent, more weak, and unhappily more fit for slavery” (119‐120). But the urge for revenge, while another undeniable sign of African weakness, was also a testimony to the sorry state of life in which slaves were kept. Growing as heathens, they had learned no moral opposition to revenge, but the morally reprehensible conditions in which they were kept by Europeans did nothing to teach them morals either. In the view of most

British abolitionists, slaves necessarily acted irrationally because slavery gave them no chance at reasonable action. A footnote in former slave trade sailor turned

15 The second part of this excerpt bears uncanny resemblance to William Wordsworth’s 1802 Ode to Toussaint Louverture. This correlation certainly deserves further study.

84 abolitionist Edward Rushton’s West Indian Eclogues (1787) thus argues “the desire of revenge is an impetuous, ruling passion, in the mind of these African slaves.”16 It follows with a quote from Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester, a prelate known for his abolitionist activism within the Church of England: “Being heathens not only in their hearts, but in their lives, and knowing no distinction between vice and virtue, they give themselves up freely to the grossest immoralities, without being even conscious they are doing wrong” (32). Revenge made for titillating reading, but few went as far as fully condoning such uncivilized behavior.

Abolitionists did not only write poetry, of course. In their struggle to better the living conditions of slaves—few considered complete a credible goal—abolitionists privileged arguments they felt might actually sway people in power most likely to have an influence on the slave system. To that effect, authors such as Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson or Granville Sharp developed an argumentative form which Philip Gould dubs commercial jeremiad,

“the gradual process of secularization of Protestant discourses about human sin,

Christian morality and divine judgment in antislavery writing.”17 The abolitionist commercial jeremiad follows the classic Puritan jeremiad three‐part form: citing a promise, a moral compact made at the communal level; lamenting the present declension from this promise and warning against terrible consequences; and prophesying the eventual fulfillment of that promise. Echoes of this genre can be heard in the promises of elemental doom incessantly reiterated in abolitionist

16 [Edward Rushton], The West Indian Eclogues (London, 1787), 31. 17 Philip Gould, Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Anti­Slavery in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2003), 13‐14.

85 poetry. Perhaps the most singular contribution to the commercial jeremiad is the

1787 abolitionist pamphlet Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Cugoano’s text follows the jeremiadic structure, but in his appeal to England’s morality he proves much more radical than his fellow abolitionists.

In his use of religious rhetoric, Cugoano sounds more like a Dissenter than a

Puritan: “[W]hen thieves and robbers get the upper side of the world,” drastic change must take place: the world has to be “turn'd upside down.”18 The phrase carries political undertones inherited from the most radical movements of the

English Revolution, the Levellers and Diggers, Dissenter groups whose religion‐ inspired egalitarian agenda threatened for a moment to transform Oliver

Cromwell's bourgeois takeover into a popular revolution. The radical preacher

Henry Denne thus explained his political stance when he declared “I may peradventure to many seem guilty of that crime which was laid against the Apostle to turn the world upside down, and to set that in the bottom which others make the top of the building, and to set that upon the roof which others lay for a foundation.”19 By channeling English revolutionary rhetoric, Cugoano connects

God's will and drastic, violent political action. The threat he indirectly expresses against British society, were it not to abolish slavery, is righteous retaliation from the slaves themselves. In what Paget Henry calls Cugoano's “providential

18 Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, Vincent Carretta ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 19. 19 Quoted in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. (1972. London: Penguin Books, 1991), 13

86 historicism,” slave revolts are but the will of God translated into human action.20 In this context, one can better understand the scope of Cugoano's arguments: he borrows the familiar vocabulary of literature and the more controversial rhetoric of the English Revolution as much to express the coming storm in palatable terms, as to encourage true Christians to join a movement that sees in egalitarianism compliance to God's law. It may not be so surprising then that, although Cugoano’s book saw a second edition in 1791, it seems neither editions was reviewed in

English newspapers and magazines. Though Vincent Carretta finds it unlikely, it may well be that “its message may simply have been too radical for the reviewers to want to circulate” (xxi).

The influence of the commercial jeremiad on Mercier’s text is readily apparent; his avenger of the New World

came like the storm which extends itself over some criminal city that the thunder is ready to destroy; he was the exterminating angel, to whom God resigned his sword of justice; he has shown, by this example, that sooner or later, cruelty will be punished… . (Mercier 172)

Yet contrasted with the painstaking detail with which Mercier describes the political system and social organization of France in the year 2440, his continent‐wide slave revolution appears somewhat tame, an abstraction in a list of concrete examples.

All that Mercier’s narrator sees of the aftermath of this event is a commemorative statue. The consequences of the revolution are both enormous and invisible: the only apparent sign of the profound changes it wrought—the end of slavery throughout the Americas, and the massacre of all European populations in those

20 See Paget Henry, “Between Hume and Cugoano: Race, Ethnicity and Philosophical Entrapment.”

87 parts—is this very statue. The black hero has been turned into a divinity, and his political agency conflated with the expression of divine providence.21 Mercier, self‐ professed “prophet” of the French revolution, is unable to imagine what form of social organization and government this American nation might take (Marcellesi

252). To be sure, his text presents the slaves’ revenge as a political act with global consequences, and appears to assert that if slavery is a moral wrong, the slave uprisings may just be morally justified. This argument, developed in more detail by

Raynal, applies the slavery‐inflected terminology of Locke’s argument against absolutist monarchy back to actual slavery. Yet, considering in either Raynal or

Mercier’s case that this argument amounts to support for slave revolt would be inaccurate.

However keen their insight about the flaws of the slave system and sincere their disgust for the practice of slavery, Mercier and Raynal write for the benefit of a

French society understood as strictly white. As noted by Laure Marcellesi, successive editions of his novel see a “shift of focus from the moral issue of slavery to concern for the welfare of Europeans” (255‐256). Mercier saw the Haitian

Revolution as a confirmation of his fears. Raynal eventually lamented and openly criticized the anti‐slavery sections of his book, editorial choices for which he blamed

Diderot. He published in 1785 an Essai sur l’administration de Saint Domingue, in which he took a much more conservative stance on colonial affairs and slavery,

Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18.2 (2004), 140. 21 See Catherine A. Reinhardt, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 67‐70.

88 likely influenced by his friend, the Saint Domingue planter Pierre Victor Malouet.22

Raynal “saw himself as an exponent of France’s true colonial interests,” and

Diderot’s flights of did not reflect Raynal’s desires so much as his fears.23 What would happen in the colonies if his recommendations for gradual emancipation and improving the treatment of slaves were not followed? The threat of slave revolt worked hand in hand with the economic argument for emancipation: if measures were not taken to ameliorate the condition of slaves, European powers would lend themselves to mass retaliation, and to economic catastrophe in the New World.

Literary as they were, these speculations were derived from factual evidence.

Slave revolts were a common occurrence on slave ships and in the West Indies. A passage of the Histoire refers in telling terms to the maroon communities of Jamaica and Surinam with which colonial authorities had to pass treaties: “Some white people already massacred, have expiated a part of our crimes; already have two colonies of fugitive negroes been established, to whom treaties and power give a perfect security from your attempts” (466). In calling the maroon communities of

Surinam and Jamaica colonies, Raynal posits them as potential starting grounds for a future black nation. A successful, widespread slave revolt could therefore spell the end of the West Indian and North American colonies and of there.

Both Mercier and Raynal present Atlantic slavery in strictly racial terms. In

Mercier’s liberated America, “the natives (les naturels) have reassumed their unalienable rights.” It appears likely that under “natives” Mercier conflates Native

22 See Anthony Pagden, “The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of nationalism in Diderot and Herder,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Colonial Displacements, Gyan Prakash ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995): 129‐152.

89 Americans, American‐born slaves of African descent and African‐born slaves. They are tellingly defined by what they are not, i.e. members of European colonial nations; as “natural men,” they are to be contrasted with the social (contract) men, the Europeans. This new, “natural” nation is born in a pool of blood, and immediately melts into the grandiose, uncivilized anonymity of natural rights. If

Raynal admires their struggle, it is from patronizing heights of racial superiority.

Raynal knows little of African societies, but he knows this: “it is a fact, well authenticated, that throughout the whole extent of the coast the government is arbitrary. Whether the despotic sovereign ascends the throne by right of birth, or by election, the people have no other law but his will” (123). African nations, Raynal continues, “live in total ignorance of the art so revered among us, under the name of politics” (124). Yet this lack of political sense will not soften the blow; the coming uprising may not be conceived as a political act by the slaves, but it will have worldwide political consequences. Led by an extraordinary leader, a “black

Spartacus,” as befits this other species of men, the slaves will not stop at overthrowing the slave system; they will turn the Atlantic world upside down, and replace the Black Code24 with a white equivalent. This vision notes the unfairness of slavery by dangling the possibility that such treatment could one day be applied indiscriminately to the culprit race. Yet as it underlines the moral guilt of Western societies, the vision of pitiless doom displayed in this reversal also shifts the moral burden on the enslaved. Revenge rather than justice, terrible equivalence rather than fairness should be expected from the coming black nation.

23 Blackburn, The overthrow of colonial slavery, 1776­1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 170.

90 By comparison, though he uses similar rhetorical devices in his warning to a primarily English audience, Cugoano gives a more informed and ultimately credible depiction of the storm to come. In his time in the Americas, Cugoano likely saw first hand the maroon communities Raynal had barely written about. In , where

Cugoano landed after the Middle Passage, six to seven hundred slaves took up arms and fought the British between 1767 and 1771. In St Vincent, Caribs25 waged a raiding war against European settlements in the late 1760s and early 1770s, eventually striking a peace treaty by which they were given land in the Northern and Western region of the island. On arriving in the Americas, the young Cugoano was bought by Alexander Campbell, a rich planter owning land in Grenada, St

Vincent, and later Tobago.26 In the time period between 1770 and 1772, when

Campbell and Cugoano eventually sailed for England, two slave uprisings shook

Tobago, while St Vincent was engaged in the First Carib War. Slave revolution may have seemed a remote prospect for some in Europe, but Cugoano knew how threateningly real it was for West Indian planters, and hopeful for the people they kept in bondage. Though little of this knowledge transpires straight‐forwardly in his text, his many references to his “brethren and countrymen by complexion” suggest

24 The infamous legislation of slavery in the French colonies inaugurated by Louis XIV in 1685. 25 St Vincent and were in the seventeenth century left to the Caribs by the French and the English on the condition that the natives would give up all claim to other Caribbean islands. The arrival of shipwrecked and escaped black slaves on the island in 1675 was at the origin of the Black Carib community. French and English planters eventually did settle in small numbers on the island, to the growing anger of the local population. Grenada was formally ceded to Great Britain a first time in 1762 in the Treaty of Paris. French influence did not wane, though, as many French planters remained on the island. The French also supported Carib action against British rule, and took over the island once more in 1779. The island was ceded back to England in the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. Frédon’s rebellion in 1795 was again actively supported by French Republican troops and local planters. 26 See Mark Quintanilla, “The World of Alexander Campbell: An Eighteenth Century Grenadian Planter,” Albion 35.2 (Summer 2003): 229‐256.

91 that notions of a community—if not a nation—of complexion, inherited from

European racial pseudo‐science, was on the verge of becoming a weapon for the enslaved. In 1788 his book was translated into French by the Société des Amis des

Noirs. Boasting a membership that reads like an early roll call of heroes of the

French Revolution,27 the Société would play an important role in debates over race and citizenship in the early years of the French Republic. Though they judged

Cugoano’s writing somewhat patronizingly,28 it is likely the Société members still had his words in mind when the early developments of the Haitian Revolution made themselves felt.

Raynal and Mercier’s vision of a black nation born of revenge spread around the Western world, and with it the notion that a nation born of slavery would develop along the lines drawn by Raynal. Slave revolts had preceded the treatise; those that followed it were often described in print in the terms used by Raynal. The passages critical of slavery in his book were regularly featured in newspapers addressing the issue of the Atlantic slave trade, but the black Spartacus paragraph in particular became increasingly referenced in connection with slave uprisings, real29 or imagined.30 Such events, Raynal had noted in a by now familiar elemental simile,

“were signs of the impending storm.” In 1789, Société des Amis des Noirs member

Abbé Grégoire offered his own bold variation on the theme in his Mémoire en faveur

27 Members included La Fayette, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Brissot, Abbé Grégoire, Saint‐Jean de Crèvecoeur, to cite but a few. 28 See Antoine Diannyère’s introduction in the French translation, Ottobah Cugoano, Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des nègres, [trans. Antoine Diannyère] (Paris, 1788) or the entry on Cugoano in H. Grégoire, Enquiry concerning the intellectual and moral faculties, and literature of Negroes, trans. D. B. Warden (, 1810). 29 As in this article describing a recent slave uprising in the island of Dominica, “Charlestown, Tuesday March 14,” American Recorder and Charlestown Advertiser, 14 March 1786.

92 des gens de couleur ou sang­mêlés de Saint Domingue (1789), a piece written to support the bid for full citizenship put forth by Saint Domingue gens de couleur

Vincent Ogé and Julien Raimond to the Assemblée Nationale:

A secret fire smolders in all of Europe, and forebodes a coming revolution, that Potentates could and should make calm and soft. Yes, the cry of liberty resounds in both Worlds, and there is only need of an Othello, a Padrejean,31 to awaken in the souls of Negroes the sentiment of their inalienable rights. Seeing then that the mixed bloods cannot protect them against their despots, they may turn their irons against all, a sudden explosion will drop their chains; and who amongst us will dare condemn them, if he imagined himself in their place?32 Grégoire’s take on Raynal’s motif was certainly informed by the knowledge and experience of Julien Raimond, who provided the evidence of the abuse gens de couleur had to suffer in Saint Domingue cited by Grégoire throughout the pamphlet.

Cugoano’s fiery rhetoric may also have had an influence on Grégoire’s.33 Although

Grégoire’s disquisitions on the coming slave insurrection went much further than

Raimond would have liked, his point was seemingly only to bolster Raimond’s claim

(Garrigus 241‐242). Further in the pamphlet, he indeed argues that granting citizenship to gens de couleur would insure their service in preventing a slave insurrection (Grégoire 38). Here we see how powerful Raynal’s motif would grow to become as events escalated in Saint Domingue. We can also see that the literary roots of the black avenger trope remained crucial, even in a pamphlet with political ramifications. Grégoire’s somewhat odd equation of the fictional Moor of Venice to

30 See “To the Printer of the Public Advertiser,” 22 April, 1782. 31 Leader of an ill‐fated slave revolt in 1679 Saint Domingue. 32 M. Grégoire, Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur ou sang­mêlés de Saint Domingue, et des autres Isles françoises de l’Amérique, adressé à l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris: Belin, 1789), 34. 33 Grégoire read Cugoano, to whom he devotes a section of his De la littérature des nègres (1808). It is likely that he read Diannyère’s translation when it was first published in 1788.

93 the real‐life leader of an unsuccessful West Indian slave revolt seems telling. They are equal in the unfulfilled promise of successful black military leadership; they both represent that potential, but because it remains unfulfilled, they are considered brothers in a theatrical tradition of black avengers. Perpetuating this tradition by way of Raynal constituted an exorcism of sorts that allowed for a preemptive framing of slave revolt, were it to ever succeed. Prophesied by a French author in a

French publication, surely the coming revolution could be controlled the same way.

Within this literature‐inflected frame, the coming black nation could take on the same characteristics as a stage production, teasing the audience with this most uncommon, most terrifying of theatrical thrills: a successful theatrical villain. The coming black nation would enact the feverish dreams expressed by generations of vindictive stage Moors; following their imprecations, revolted slaves would take back what was stolen from them, and go even further. Raynal’s passage, much like

Mercier’s, did little imagining beyond the abstract notion of a New World controlled by blacks. One should imagine that that abstract prospect was terrifying enough.

Like their predecessors, Raynal and Mercier’s black avengers find their basis in historical fact. The force of their vision is all in this potentiality, in the nagging suggestion that, contrary to all their predecessors, their black avengers might pull it off, and execute all of their threats. Their originality lies in the fact that their creations purport to have relevance for, and influence on, history. Stepping in where the unsophisticated, uncivilized African could not deliver, the French authors imagined a black nation from the outside, for white outsiders.

This genealogy is crucial to understanding not simply the ways in which

94 the Western world reacted to the Haitian Revolution, but also the manner in which the event was portrayed. However vague their descriptions, however unlike actual events in Saint Domingue they eventually proved, they nevertheless became the frame of reference against which later portrayals of the Haitian Revolution were built. Nineteenth‐century revolutions, Anderson argues, were turned through text into repeatable concepts. The Haitian revolution may have been the only modern revolution whose Western textual framing preceded even its earliest throes, in the sense that Raynal’s text was presented as relevant to understanding the Haitian revolution, from its inception to its aftermath. Michel‐Rolph Trouillot writes that for its Western contemporaries, the Haitian revolution was unthinkable, and his phrase has since become a somewhat misleading shortcut to describe the state of mind of

Westerners on the eve of the Haitian revolution. Yet Trouillot does not deny that the prospect of massive slave revolt was very much on Western minds, supporters or opponents of slavery alike. What the Western world had not expected was the political agency and military savvy displayed by the different revolutionary factions, as these were reasonable characteristics more befitting a white, enlightened nation: the Haitian Revolution “constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a conceptual frame of reference. They were

‘unthinkable’ facts in the framework of Western thought.”34 The West may have had no frame of reference for what actually happened in Saint Domingue, but the black avenger trope had long provided a conceptual frame for Westerners to imagine a slave revolt in accordance to their ideas about Africans. When the revolution did

34 Michel‐Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon

95 come, this was the principal frame of reference, however vague, irrelevant and misguided. It proved indispensable to the cultural occultation of the revolution, a phenomenon paradoxically carried out in many of the documents produced by the revolution itself.

The man of Raynal’s prophecy

April 1st, 1796 was a day of celebration in Cap Français, the capital of the war‐torn

French West Indian colony of Saint Domingue. General Etienne Laveaux, the acting

Governor‐General of the island, looked upon General Toussaint Louverture, one of the foremost leaders of the slave revolt, as he was about to officially declare him his

Lieutenant‐Governor. The two men were as close as circumstances could make them, hailing as they did from widely different worlds: the second son of an old aristocratic family, Laveaux entered into a military career in the royal French army in the early 1770s. That same decade, Toussaint Bréda, then named after the plantation where he was born enslaved, became a free man of color. During the

French revolution, Laveaux cast his lot on the revolutionary side and rose quickly through the ranks. A captain until 1791, he was a lieutenant‐colonel a year later.35

After his emancipation, Toussaint worked for wages on the Bréda plantation and for a time even managed his own small coffee plantation.

In 1790, inspired by the early stages of the French revolution which he had

Press, 1995), 82. 35 See Bernard Gainot, “Le général Laveaux, gouverneur de Saint‐Domingue, député néo‐jacobin,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 278 (1989): 433‐454.

96 witnessed firsthand in Paris, wealthy planter Vincent Ogé led an ill‐fated uprising against local authorities to gain political representation for his socio‐racial class, gens de couleur.36 Ogé’s revolt was crushed by metropolitan troops and local white militias, setting off a wave of terror that convinced gens de couleur of the necessity of armed revolt for their survival. As both sides were arming, and often arming slaves to fight in their stead, the latter rose unexpectedly for their own emancipation. Toussaint joined the slave revolt a few weeks after its mythical beginning in the vaudou ceremony at Bois Caïman in August 1791 and quickly became one of the foremost leaders of the insurrection. Laveaux first arrived on the island in September 1792, at the head of 200 dragoons sent to support Republican

Commissioners Léger‐Félicité Sonthonax, Etienne Polverel and Jean‐Antoine

Ailhaud in enforcing the newly voted civil equality between whites and gens de couleur. By then, the island was in a state of civil war, soon compounded by the

British invasion of 1793.

Local white planters who saw in English rule the only way to save their hold on the island against gens de couleur interests and preserve slavery had been begging Prime Minister Pitt for such an intervention.37 Many gens de couleur planters eager to retain their riches also supported the invasion, at least until it became clear that the British had no intention to grant them more political power than they had possessed in the Ancien Régime. As the British quickly occupied the island’s ports, given away by local elites, Spanish troops from the neighboring

36 Free, mixed‐race people. 37 See C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed., revised (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 132.

97 colony of Santo Domingo also joined the fight against French Republican authorities.

Spain encouraged former slaves from the French side of the island to fight in their army, guaranteeing them emancipation and pay. Toussaint was among the leaders of the slave uprising to join Spanish forces.

Unable to deal with his many enemies within and outside the colony,

Commissioner Sonthonax decided unilaterally to abolish slavery on the island in

August 1793. Sonthonax named Laveaux Governor General of the island to replace the former governor who was hostile to his policies. As the head of Republican troops on the island, Laveaux fought Toussaint when he was still working with the

Spaniards. Laveaux corresponded with Louverture and succeeded in convincing him to join the French side. They finally met face to face in August 1794, both now officers of the same army. The two men showed each other respect and admiration, and developed a close relationship that proved central to later political events on the island.38 Sonthonax’s emancipation proclamation drew the ire of many amongst the gens de couleur who saw in the abolition of slavery a threat against the welfare of their , and in his zeal to execute the decree, Laveaux lost support among the gens de couleur faction.39 Sonthonax and representatives of the French

Republic after him, bent on conserving the island for France, compromised with the demands of the different local factions in order to ward off the English threat, as well as real or imagined conspiracies for white‐ or black‐led independence. As much

38 A few years Laveaux’s senior, Toussaint affectionately referred to him as his father (mon père). 39 “Sous l’autorité première à Saint‐Domingue, j’ai soutenu la loi du 4 Avril; alors les hommes de couleur m’aimaient, me chérissaient et beaucoup de Blancs me détestaient. J’ai, depuis, fait exécuter le decret du 16 Pluviose: cela m’a valu la haine de beaucoup d’hommes des deux parties; mais aussi les Noirs m’ont dédommagé de ces injustices.” See Gainot, op. cit., 441.

98 as they fought the hostile influences of white planters, the English and the Spanish,

Republican authorities also attempted to play the different revolutionary leaders against each other. The Haitian Revolution is better understood as a multiplicity of related conflicts defined along political, social, economic and racial lines and shifting as the of war, politics and diplomacy weighed on individual and collective goals.

One such conflict, the “Affair of 30 Ventose” (20 March 1796), saw Governor

Laveaux, Ordinator Henri Perroud and others captured, beaten and thrown in jail by a group of officers from Le Cap led by gens de couleur General Jean‐Louis Villatte. In the chaos that ensued, Laveaux and his companions owed their lives to the intervention of Toussaint Louverture, who rode into town with his troops, freeing the Governor and vouching for his authority. The episode marked a turning point in the balance of power on the island. In subsequent communications on the episode,

Laveaux, Perroud and Louverture deceptively portrayed Villatte’s action as a bid to install mulatto power by striking at white Republican representatives, and ultimately undermine the freedom of black laborers. The reality, as often, was much more complex: most of Villatte’s troops were dark‐skinned nouveaux libres, and the gens de couleur officers accused to be behind Villatte’s coup, Rigaud foremost among them, never attempted to support his action. Portraying the Affair of 30 Ventose as a mulatto coup attempt would nevertheless prove crucial in Louverture’s own bid to power: when Sonthonax returned to the island a few weeks later, he immediately exiled Villatte and soon ostracized mulatto general and leader of the South region

André Rigaud.

99 The effort to break Rigaud’s domination on the South and, more generally, the real and imagined mulatto power on the island opened the way for Louverture.

Within a few months of delivering the speech that made Louverture Lieutenant‐

Governor, Laveaux was elected representative for Saint‐Domingue to the Cinq Cents

(the Directoire’s National Assembly) and sailed back to France, where he became

Louverture’s voice in metropolitan French politics until Consul Bonaparte forced him to retire.40 Louverture subsequently pushed away a series of representatives sent from France whose ambitions did not match his: Sonthonax, who had also been elected representative but appeared in no hurry to leave the island, was forcibly shipped back to France under armed escort. His replacement, General Hédouville, tried to play Rigaud against Louverture and had to flee the island a few months after his arrival, returning to France to warn the Directoire against what he judged to be

Louverture’s bid for independence. The last representative of French authority,

Commissioner Philippe‐Rose Roume was quickly won over by Louverture’s charisma, and supported him when he turned all his force against Rigaud and his supporters in the 1799 War of the Knives. Louverture defeated them, leaving to

Dessalines the job of massacring the survivors. When Roume opposed Toussaint’s plan to occupy Spanish Santo Domingo, he was bullied by Louverture’s nephew

Moyse, jailed, and eventually exiled from the island in 1801. Louverture was the sole master of the island to which he would give its first Constitution that same year.

Though it recognized the sovereignty of France, the document drew the ire of First

Consul Bonaparte, who that same year sent General Leclerc at the head of

40 See Gainot, ibid.

100 an expedition with a mission to subdue Louverture and reestablish slavery.

In the timeline of the revolution’s inner strife, Laveaux’s April 1st 1796 speech was judged crucial to Louverture’s power very early: according to Louis

Dubroca, an early French chronicler of the Haitian revolution hostile to Louverture, it made Toussaint Louverture the “arbiter of the fate of the colony.”41 Pamphile de

Lacroix, a white Saint Domingue planter who served as officer in the English army during the occupation, later wrote that this declaration had been “the coup de grace that killed the authority of the metropole in Saint Domingue. One can date to this day the end of the credit granted to whites and the birth of power among blacks.”42

Literature on the Haitian Revolution has long emphasized the speech for a passage in which Laveaux declared Louverture “that Negro, that Spartacus foretold by

Raynal, whose destiny is to avenge the wrongs committed on his race.”43 Much has been written on this connection along the years, yet Raynal’s text is rarely presented outside of its immediate French cultural frame. It was nevertheless part of a more general French movement toward racial and national definition, as well as a trend worth considering at the Atlantic scale, if one is to assess fully the implications of

Laveaux’s speech act.

Framing Toussaint Louverture

Srinivas Aravamundan analyzes the Raynal‐Louverture connection as a proof of the

41 Louis Dubroca, The Life of Toussaint Louverture, Chief of the French Rebels in St Domingo. Translated form the French (London: H.D. Symonds, 1802), 17. 42 Pamphile de Lacroix, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la revolution de Saint­Domingue, vol.I (Paris: Pillet Aîné, 1819), 309. My translation. 43 Ibid.

101 latter’s agency in his own representation, “an armed tropicopolitan response to

French rule, but resoundingly stated in vocabulary that the colonial power can understand, admire, and regret” (Aravamundan 303). It is unclear whether

Louverture actually read Raynal and recognized himself in the black Spartacus, although in his first official declaration, published on the day Sonthonax abolished slavery on the island, he declared: “Brothers and friends. I am Toussaint Louverture; my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance for my race.”44 In any case, for Aravamundan the truth of the case is moot:

Haitian historiography would have needed to invent an equivalent incident. This primal scene of anticolonial reading or metaliteracy generates the nation as ethnos. The catechism’s call to violence works through identificatory catachresis. Toussaint recognizes himself as a royal slave—as did a fictional Oroonoko or a historical Equiano. A quasi‐monarchical agent much like Rousseau’s legislator, the royal slave ushers in a future utopia through an act of will. (303)

The history of the claim that Louverture avidly read Raynal is nevertheless illuminating. Laurent Dubois dates it to the Louverture biography published by

Thomas Gragnon‐Lacoste in 1877 (Dubois 172). The French author based his book on the personal papers and testimony of Louverture’s son Isaac. There is no reason to doubt his information; yet the notion that Louverture had read Raynal circulated long before this biography was published, in terms that should give us pause. This is not to say that Louverture or the free and enslaved population of color of Saint‐

Domingue could not have known about Raynal’s text, first or second‐hand. Gragnon

Lacoste advances that “European negrophiles smuggled [Raynal’s book] into

44 See Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (New Haven: Belknap Press, 2005), 176.

102 America.”45 L’Héroïne Américaine, a play based on Raynal’s text, was performed in Le

Cap in 1787.46 The text of the play did not survive, and critics have been left to speculate exactly what material the author borrowed from Raynal. The play may have made Raynal’s ideas available to illiterate and non‐white populations in pre‐ revolutionary Saint Domingue. However, even such sophisticated efforts as Camier and Dubois participate in what Marlene Daut dubs the “literacy narrative” of the

Haitian Revolution, in which reading Raynal and more generally Enlightenment literature about slavery led the revolutionaries to action.47 Although it is clear that

Aravamundan and other critics do not mean to subsume the Haitian revolution to

French thought, their arguments nevertheless connect them to a tradition of interpretation in which Louverture’s alleged reading of Raynal indebts the general to the French philosopher.

Daut warns that “[i]nstead of being looked at as fact, the literacy narrative should rather be understood as simply one of the many models that people used to organize the fact of this event in order to make it more “bearable” and even “useful” to them” (48). She exposes another narrative frame for the Haitian Revolution, which developed concurrently with it: the “mulatto vengeance narrative.” Its similarity with the black vengeance plot should come as no surprise, as both are products of racial pseudo‐science. Daut notes that

45 [Thomas Prosper] Gragnon‐Lacoste, Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Durand et Pedone‐Lauriel, 1877), 19. My translation. 46 See Jean Fouchard, Le Théâtre à Saint­Domingue (Port‐au‐Prince: Imprimerie de l’Etat, 1955), 251. For discussions of theatre in Saint Domingue, see Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Bernard Camier, Laurent Dubois, “Voltaire et Zaïre, ou le théâtre des Lumières dans l’aire atlantique française,” Revue d’histoire moderne contemporaine 54.4, (2007), 40‐41. 47 Marlène Leydy Daut, Science of Desire: Race and Representations of the Haitian Revolution in the

103 the narrative of mulatto vengeance depends first upon the narrative of black savagery both in travel‐writing and in fiction .... Mulatto vengeance depends upon black savagery precisely because this narrative suggests that people of mixed‐race will never be able to rid themselves of the “original stain” of blackness no matter how near to whiteness they approach. (16)

Daut’s “mulatto vengeance narrative” explains the Haitian Revolution as the parricidal revenge of mixed race children; her examples show the early development of characters that would yield the tragic mulatto, in plots that put front and center the plight of people who can neither be fully white nor black. In truth,

Vincent Ogé’s failed uprising bears so much resemblance with the Oroonoko plot that one could wonder why this similarity has never been discussed before (not even by Daut). Incensed at the injustice dealt his socio‐racial class in the colonial order and disappointed by the relative inaction of revolutionary France, Ogé returned to Saint Domingue and led a failed revolt against the colonial order. After his capture, he was broken on the wheel and dismembered in public in Le Cap in

February 1791. Ogé’s tragic end soon became fodder for anti‐slavery activists in

France and beyond.48 But Ogé had refused to involve slaves in a citizenship struggle he fought for gens de couleur alone, and his effort came about at a time when racial definitions were quickly congealing. Later gens de couleur leaders such as André

Rigaud would show less reticence at allying with slaves, but Ogé wanted nothing to do with them, and this rift between gens de couleur and slaves was used efficiently and early by white planters.

Atlantic World, 1790­1865. Dissertation. University of Notre Dame, 2008. 48 See Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti­Jacobinism to Anti­Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

104 Thus white planters never ceased claiming that black slaves themselves scorned mulattoes. In November 1789, an anonymous text published in Le Moniteur entitled “Réclamation des nègres libres, colons américains” advanced that “the negro comes from a pure blood; the mulatto instead comes from mixed blood; he is composed of black and white, a bastard species. From this truth, it is as evident that the negro is above the mulatto as pure is above mixed gold.”49 This text was most likely produced by white planters in an effort to discredit Ogé and Raimond’s efforts in Paris.50 Grégoire ridiculed the notion in his Mémoire to which in turn an anonymous “inhabitant of the colonies’ responded, asserting that

this color prejudice, it has to be said, is not even white men’s alone. The is scorned by the enslaved quarteroon. Lower than him by law, but closer to his master by skin color, he feels superior to him .... Thus a kind of pride increasing as hue recedes, tends to invigorate this prejudice that is the hidden spring in the colonial machine. It can be softened, but not annihilated; time, with its blunt file, can destroy its most vulgar aspects, but if the spring is cut, the entire machine will noisily come down.51

In that light, mixed‐race people are exclusively characterized by their difference from “pure” black and “pure” whites, as Daut shows, and alternatively criticized for their proximity to either hermetic group. Ogé shares a tragic fate with Toussaint

Louverture; but in a world of representation increasingly keen on tracing uncrossable racial lines, Ogé lacked the ‘racial purity’ necessary to see his story mythified as that of a black avenger. By the time Saint Domingue gens de couleur

49 “Réclamation des nègres libres, colons américains” Le Moniteur, 27 November 1789. My translation. 50 See A[rmand] Brette, “Les gens de couleur libres et leurs deputes en 1789,” la Révolution Française: Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 29 (1895), 397‐398. 51 [P. U. C. P. D. D. L. M. ], Observations d'un habitant des colonies sur le "Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur..." adressé à l'Assemblée nationale par M. Grégoire, 22. Gallica.fr. 12 May 2012.

105 rallied en masse behind the French Republic, even accepting—however reticently— complete emancipation, there was a new candidate for the position of official black avenger.

Indeed, exploring the documentary trail of Laveaux’s characterization of

Toussaint as “the man of Raynal’s prophecy” exposes the cultural and political stakes at hand in this act, and reveals it as a deliberate, calculated rhetorical that played an important role in the war of words surrounding the complex local politics in which all the actors were involved. The text of Laveaux’s speech is regularly quoted, yet it seems that no copy of it has survived, although it may have been printed and distributed. In his own report to the French Conseil des Cinq‐

Cents published on April 20 (1 Floreal) 1797, Laveaux makes no mention of having delivered a speech on the occasion. It appears that the earliest instance of a text comparing Louverture to Raynal’s black Spartacus in relation to 30 Ventose was most likely Ordonnateur Henry Perroud’s 10 Germinal year IV (March 30, 1796) letter to the plenipotentiary minister and the French consul in the United States, in which Perroud declares somewhat cryptically “on this occasion, as a well prepared carnage was about to take place, the valorous Toussaint Louverture demonstrated such character, such prudence and activity, that one is forced to recognize in him this great Man, announced by a sublime political author, to be born one day for the happiness of his Brethren and the salvation of his country.”52 Doubts that the “great

Man” and “sublime political author” are the Black Spartacus and Raynal should be

N >. My translation. 52 [H. Perroud], L’Ordonnateur de Saint Domingue aux ministre plénipotentiaire et consuls de la République auprès des Etats­Unis d’Amérique. 12 May 2012.

106 cleared by Perroud’s 26 Germinal year IV (April 15, 1796) report to the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, in which he elaborates in similar fashion:

The most pernicious seduction was used to deceive the credulity of some Africans in the garrison; they were primed for murder, being told that chains were being unloaded from ships to return them to slavery! Frightened by this, these men rise, weapons in hand, they run, threaten, forcibly enter the Republic’s stores, open the dressers, break barrels of flour and salted meat, take over our positions, aim their weapons at the Governor, myself and the other whites, and would have given the signal of death, if the valorous Toussaint Louverture, this African genius designated by a great Philosopher as the savior of his country, had not rushed over, saber in hand, to repress these ferocious satellites, unworthy of the name of soldiers.53

In a third letter written the same month and designed to reassure “the merchants and captains of the continent of America, and the Danish islands,” Laveaux and

Perroud describe their abuse at the hands of “a horde of factious people and intriguers,” only to praise “the true Republicans, the African cultivators” who saved him and other Republican representatives, led by “Toussaint Louverture, this man, without his [sic] equal.”54 It is likely that Laveaux and Perroud reserved references to Raynal for a revolutionary French audience they knew to be familiar with, and generally admirative of, Raynal’s text. The way Perroud evokes Raynal without naming him reveals the gesture as a discreet nod to people in the know; no need to name an author every decent revolutionary read cover to cover.

Negative reactions to Perroud’s connection of Louverture to Raynal further expose its cultural and political implications. Perroud’s comparison was echoed and

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k58043162.r=.langEN, f.6. 53 Henry Perroud, Précis des derniers troubles qui ont eu lieu dans la partie du Nord de Saint Domingue, adressé au Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies. (Cap‐Français: P. Roux), 15. My translation. The memoir reached France on the same ship in which Vilatte was exiled. See Gainot, op. cit. Beaubrun Ardouin argues that Perroud’s text was backdated and actually written shortly before the ship

107 circulated in the war of letters occasioned by the Affair of 30 Ventose on both sides of the Atlantic. It is picked up in the letter to the Directoire written by Pierre‐

François Barbault‐Royer to denounce the actions of Sonthonax, Laveaux and

Perroud. A former Jacobin and gens de couleur, Barbault‐Royer shared much of the politics of the men he opposed; yet he also meant to defend his socio‐racial class as well the economic interests of planters, white or colored, against the threat represented by Sonthonax and other “white levellers.” He counts among those the island’s poor whites, whom he portrays as manipulators taking advantage of the gullible blacks. Where Sonthonax and his supporters portrayed an alliance of black laborers with white revolutionaries against white planters and mulattoes, Barbault‐

Royer presents Saint Domingue’s poor whites as Sonthonax’s foot soldiers, responsible for tricking gullible blacks into fighting gens de couleur. He further writes that in “his proclamations distributed around the island and transported beyond the continent, Laveaux calls Toussaint Louverture the man predicted by abbot Raynal.”55 Among these, Barbault‐Royer likely counted Perroud’s publication, which he deems to be “the Memoir the most criminal against gens de couleur” (40).

French author François‐Frédéric Cotterel soon after published several texts to challenge the legality of Laveaux and Sonthonax’s election as representatives for

Saint Domingue and also attack their handling of affairs in the colony.56 In one he

departed Saint Domingue 54 “Authentic Communication,” Greenleaf’s New York Journal, 20 May 1796. 55 Colonel Barbault‐Royer, Du gouvernement de Saint­Domingue, de Laveaux, Vilatte, des agents du Directoire (Paris: Debray, An V (1797)), 49. 56 Santhonax et Laveaux repoussés par leurs commettants, ou prevue des nullités de la deputation de Saint Domingue pour l’an IV. (Paris: Marchands de Nouveautés [1797]); Le Gouvernement de Saint­ Domingue peint par lui même, ou mémoire de l'Ordonnateur Henry Perroud, sur l'événement du 30 ventôse au Cap, contre le Général Vilatte et les hommes de couleur, avec quelques réflexions

108 sets out to debunk the myth of the Affair of 30 Ventose as a gens de couleur coup attempt, which he argues was created by Laveaux, Perroud and taken up by

Louverture in “their relentlessness in hunting down men of color” (Esquisse, viii). In his other publication, a paragraph‐by‐paragraph, acerbic riposte to Perroud’s memoir, Cotterel addresses his antagonist’s use of Raynal:

when the illustrious Raynal predicted a savior for Africa, he was far from believing that you would prevail on him to advocate a brigand who, after being degraded by a long time in slavery in America, supposedly became its scourge, by way of assassination, devastation and arson, to which he has incessantly resorted while fighting against the homeland of Breda, his former master, until the time when as recompense for his important services, Governor Laveaux put him at the head of Republican troops and associated him to his government (Le Gouvernement 131). 57 Laveaux and Perroud’s intent in using a passage known by whites for its dreary foreboding could appear somewhat puzzling, as nineteenth century Haitian historian Beaubrun Ardouin once noted.58 Raynal promised merciless race vengeance and utter doom for white planters in the New World, which ill matched the events at hand, and offered little positive prospect for whites, among whom

Laveaux. The particulars of this transatlantic print quarrel suggest a deliberate effort on the part of Laveaux and his party in using the Raynal reference. It is unclear that Laveaux actually used the comparison in his speech as we have come to believe, but the scene has taken on a life of its own, for rather obvious reasons.

French governmental propaganda needed such a point of origin in order to try and

préliminaires à leur mémoire justificatif (Rochefort: Jousserant, [1797]), and Esquisse historique des principaux évènements arrives à Saint­Domingue depuis l’incendie du Cap jusqu’à l’expulsion de Sonthonax; leurs causes, leurs effets. Situation actuelle de cette colonie, et moyens d’y rétablir la tranquillité. (Paris: Gelé, an VI (1798)). 57 My translation. 58 See Beaubrun Ardouin, Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti. Vol. III (Paris’ Dezobry et Magdeleine, 1853),

109 claim Louverture as theirs, in description if not in deed. This strategy confers an agency onto Laveaux’s speech that in effect was probably absent: indeed, Laveaux himself explains in his report that he “could only succeed in strengthening the trust afforded me by the blacks by adjoining myself a man of a different color.”59

The immediate reactions to his declaration show that it superimposes

Raynal’s black avenger as it was seen by sympathetic European radicals—i.e. an avenging angel with whose radical righteousness they aligned, if only theoretically—with a local situation much too complex to match the original image’s absolute division between white planters and black slaves. Quoting Raynal, Laveaux presents himself and encourages like‐minded people to see themselves too as savvy readers and spectators, capable of recognizing in Toussaint Louverture’s the performance of the role popularized by Raynal. His speech is a performative act, a kind of secular, Enlightenment dubbing by which the representative of the French

Republic designates in Toussaint Louverture the fulfillment of a well‐known prophecy of the Republican canon. Laveaux introduces in the official language of the

Republic the idea that blacks and whites have more in common together than with the mulattoes. Simplifying the complex socio‐racial reality of St Domingue’s politics makes it possible to draw a clear line between friends and enemies, one in which

Laveaux can mobilize Raynal’s threatening prophecy to serve French revolutionary goals. He reclaims a kind of cultural agency over political events which had in effect escaped his control. In this regard, Cotterel’s rebuke is telling: he denies that

147‐8. 59 Etienne Laveaux, Compte­Rendu par le general Laveaux à ses concitoyens, à l’opinion publique et autorités constituées. (Paris: Bureau central d’abonnementaux journaux [1797]), 90.

110 Louverture is worthy of comparison to the writings of such forefather of the

Revolution as Raynal. Louverture does not fit the part as it was interpreted by

Cotterel. The importance of the comparison is here revealed in its utter literariness: reproduced and circulated as it was around the Atlantic world, it became the center of a discussion over the revolution in general and Toussaint in particular as Western productions, in all the theatrical sense of the word.

British avengers

Laveaux’s words of praise circulated in newspapers around Europe and North

America, and writers commented on the validity of the comparison. Was Louverture the right candidate for Raynal’s role? Were these the birth pangs of the announced black nation of the New World, the one that would create its own white code? Before finding itself in Haitian historiography, the story of Toussaint’s partiality to Raynal’s text developed there, in the writings of the enlightened, slaveholding world. A few years after the 30 Ventose quarrel, as Napoleon had sent his brother‐in‐law General

Leclerc at the head of an expedition aiming at destroying Louverture’s dominion over the island and reestablishing slavery, Dubroca thus declared Louverture “the most zealous partisan and advocate of Raynal’s book, which he had persuaded himself pointed out his destiny” (Dubroca, 68, fn4). He shows Toussaint finding his vocation in the writings of a leading light of French Enlightenment. Raynal’s book makes Toussaint, and in the process makes it possible for other writers to claim

Toussaint as a European creation. The black avenger trope and its reception varied

111 depending on audience and circumstances: thus the third English translation of

Mercier’s novel tellingly departs in one important detail from previous renditions of the black avenger passage: “It was the figure of an AMERICAN raised upon a pedestal; his head was bare, his eyes expressed a haughty courage, his attitude was noble and commanding . . . . He has dissolved the chains of his countrymen.

Unnumbered slaves, oppressed under the most odious slavery, seemed only to wait his signal to become so many heroes.”60 Formerly depicted as black, the avenger is now simply American. This altered translation, published in 1797 at the height of

England’s involvement in Saint Domingue, provides a striking illustration of the ways in which British anxiety regarding slave emancipation literally translated into the erasure of the slaves’ political agency, even in fiction.

As Toussaint Louverture gained a certain amount of recognition in England in the late , a story began circulating according to which his legendary wits and wisdom were in no small part owed to his good master’s will. The Annual

Register for the year 1798 explains that “while young, he was sent by his master, merchant of St Domingo, into France, to learn the language and acquire other accomplishments, which might render him useful in business.”61 A different tale, this one published after Louverture’s capture by Leclerc and his deportation to France, advanced that “it has been said, we believe upon good authority, that [Louverture] could neither write nor read… . His principal counsellors were two white persons, a priest and a military office; and of their abilities the fairest testimony is the conduct

60 Louis‐Sébastien Mercier, Astræa’s return; or, the halcyon days of France in the year 2440: a dream. Harriot Augusta Freeman trans. (London, 1797), 193. 61 “The History of Europe, Chapter XV,” Annual Register for the year 1798 (1800), 249; a similar piece

112 of their pupil.”62 The timing of these stories and comments is telling: most—though not all—appear only after Louverture was captured and sent to die in a French dungeon. They are written at a time when his fate is all but guaranteed to follow the tragic, unsuccessful outcome of the black avengers of fiction. As Toussaint sat in chains in the fort de Joux, his magnanimity was often contrasted with the extreme violence of the conflict. It was proof of his extraordinary character, which set him apart from his savage, bloodthirsty people, and closer to European values.

The link between Louverture and Western literature became even more transparent after Louverture’s death. In 1805, a review of Marcus Rainsford’s An

Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti‐‐which I explore in detail further— declares without citing sources that “Toussaint was fond of theatrical declamation, and especially of Saurin’s Spartacus.” The reviewer continued

As some poets copy their characters from nature, so some natures copy their characters from the poet. The feeling and loftiness manifested on all occasions by Toussaint seem to place him in that category. It appears, however, that one Pascal… and an Italian ecclesiastic named Marini were among the literary coadjutors of Toussaint, and drew up his proclamations and constitutions of government. The Moses is oftener of essential importance than the Joshua of a revolution; because he is less replaceable… .63

The implications of tying Toussaint Louverture to American avenger figures born of

European minds could not be clearer: modeled after a Western European literary creation, Toussaint can be portrayed as the puppet of three European éminences grises, made responsible for all his official pronouncements. Toussaint’s notoriously

was published in the Caledonian Mercury, 1 April 1802. 62 “British and Foreign History; Chapter XI,” New Annual Register for the Year 1802(1803), 372. 63 Review of An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti by Marcus Rainsford. Annual Review and History of Literature IV (1805), 225‐226.

113 prolific correspondence is attributed to European handlers, and his stature as the leader of revolted slaves subsumed to European clairvoyance.64 Oroonoko also had a French tutor, the necessary teacher of civilized ways by which the black avenger appeals to his readers’ cultural sensibilities. Marveling at the prince’s “humanity,”

“real greatness of soul,” “absolute generosity” and “softness… capable of the highest passions of love and gallantry,” Behn’s narrator immediately accounts for the surprising subtlety of the African prince’s behavior:

Some part of it we may attribute to the care of a Frenchman of wit and learning, who, finding it turn to very good account to be a sort of royal tutor to this young black, and perceiving him very ready, apt, and quick of apprehension, took a great pleasure to teach him morals, language, and science; and was for it extremely beloved and valued by him. (32)

In both news stories, Louverture’s political savvy is presented in terms of debt;

Louverture is an impressive head of state, but he can only express these skills intelligibly thanks to European social capital. Like Oroonoko, he is a product of

Western literary culture, and therefore worthy of interest at least, and most surely of patronization.

Great Britain had a political stake in portraying Louverture positively following the withdrawal of its troops from the island in 1798 and its secret agreement with the island’s Governor. British accounts regarding Toussaint written

64 See also: “Yet the mediation bridging Toussaint’s speech acts and the polished French texts that represent him to us of course leaves open the possibility that his secretaries were responsible for some of the content as well as the form of his formal communications. This is precisely the claim made by Jules Michelet’s young wife, Athenaïs Mialaret, whose father allegedly had served as Toussaint’s secretary during the Revolution[…].[I]t indicates the vulnerability of Toussaint’s verbal legacy to appropriation. It furthermore suggests that Romantic writers may have seen Toussaint as a Romantic character written by history, speaking lines that they would like to have articulated for him.” Deborah Jenson, Beyond the : Politics, Sex and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 66‐67.

114 between 1798 and 1802 made him into a benevolent monarch‐like figure. Many noted Toussaint’s royal African extraction.65 These claims participated in taking

Toussaint out of the realm of politics and into that of Western, and more specifically

British, literature. William Earle Jr.’s 1800 best‐selling novel Three­Fingered Jack, based on real‐life maroon Jamaican slave Jack Mansong, was then the most recent incarnation of the black avenger in England.66 Mansong is also of royal African stock, the son of parents treacherously captured in Africa, sold to slave traders and deported to Jamaica. His father Makro dies on the middle passage, whipped to death for rebellious behavior, but not before enjoining his wife to teach their unborn son

“how to hate the European race” (90). Jack’s mother Amri raises him to become “the avenger of Makro’s wrongs…, the saviour of our country! the abolisher of the slave trade” (95). These words obviously evoke Raynal’s; given as an expression of

African defiance, they nevertheless reveal a work of Western intertextual appropriation.

Mansong is the son of Oroonoko as much as he is his Makro’s. So much is emphasized throughout the novel: grown to become as extraordinary as announced,

Jack attempts to rouse the slaves into revolt with a speech utterly reminiscent of

Oroonoko’s (109‐110). Like his predecessor, Jack is ultimately unsuccessful: the

65 Toussaint’s son Isaac claimed that Toussaint’s father “was a prince . . . the son of an Arada king” and that other Arada slaves on the plantation “recognized him as their prince” (Dubois, Avengers , 171). James says that Toussaint’s father was “the son of a petty chieftain in Africa” (ibid., 19). Historian Ralph Korngold, in his Citizen Toussaint (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), argued that Toussaint’s father was really Pierre Baptiste, the Haitian slave usually credited with educating Toussaint and considered his godfather. See Jacques de Cauna, Toussaint Louverture et l’indépendance d’Haïti: témoignages pour un bicentenaire (Paris: Karthala, 2004), 259‐263. 66 William Earle, Obi; or, the History of Three­Fingered Jack , ed. Srinivas Aravamudan (Toronto: Broadview, 2005). The epistolary novel was subsequently adapted for the stage.

115 “affrighted negroes” flee at first sight of British soldiers, at which point Jack decides to “seek the woods alone,” loathing the slaves “more than [his] enemies, under whose whip [they] would rather die than by one exertion shake off the thing [they] hate”(111). Collective slave revolt, ever the fear of British proprietors in the West

Indies, is evacuated early. A failed revolutionary, Jack turns lone highwayman and dies a , hunted down and eventually killed by the same maroon Quashee who in an earlier encounter deprived him of two fingers.

As Aravamundan notes, “the story of Jack’s individual heroism and failure is founded on the suppression of a more complex story, of collective rebellion by many participants whose identities remain unknown” (14). This suppression is achieved in part through idealization; Jack is constantly shown as unique among blacks for his physical might, intelligence, and royal extraction, all of which make him an honorary

European. More specifically, he is presented as a potential Briton: Earle indeed declares that Jack, “had he shone in a higher sphere, would have proved as bright a luminary as ever graced the Roman annals, or ever boldly asserted the rights of a

Briton”(68). The passage echoes a London Gazette article of December 1798, which boldly—if early—proclaimed the independence of Saint Domingue and, providing the obligatory paraphrase of Raynal, stated that “[Toussaint Louverture] is a negro born to vindicate the claims of this species and to show that the character of men is independent of exterior colour. . . . Every Liberal Briton will feel proud that this country brought about the happy revolution.”67 As soon as England withdrew from the island, British news began representing Louverture not only as a virtual British

67 Qtd in James, 227.

116 ally, but also as an honorary Briton, in the literary tradition of the heroic slave.

That the advent of independent Haiti did little to diminish the equation of

Louverture to the black avenger is perhaps a testimony to the efficacy of the literary pattern. It also reveals the position occupied by the Haitian Revolution in the

English rush to national definition exacerbated by the French Revolution. Where the

French found in Saint Domingue a test of the fledgling nation‐state’s self‐definition in terms of race and moral principles, England somewhat paradoxically used the conflict to set itself apart from France on the same topics. In 1805, former West

India Regiment officer Marcus Rainsford published An Historical Account of the

Black Empire of Hayti, one of the earliest European studies of the Haitian Revolution.

Studying Rainsford’s book, published merely a year after the declaration of independence, will explain how the black avenger figure split again into tragic hero and grotesque villain.

The Haitian national epic

There is not, for example, a single negro represented with any of the features peculiar to the race. Every one has the high skull, and nose, and thin lips, and general expression of the European; so that the negroes of Mr Rainsford’s pencil, are exactly whites with their faces blackened. ‐Edinburgh Review 15 (April 1806), 64.

Rainsford’s Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti is a peculiar text, part history, part personal narrative, part news roundup, interspersed with graphic illustrations, among which one of the most ubiquitous visual portraits of Toussaint

117 Louverture to this day.68 Yet the most peculiar aspect of Rainsford’s book may be the terms in which he expresses his admiration of Louverture and of the Haitian revolution. Rainsford’s history of the revolution floats on the rising of the great man theory of history later proponed by the likes of G. W. F. Hegel or Thomas

Carlyle. Rainsford cannot help but recognize the achievement of Haitians at large, although he does so through praise of the admirable Louverture, the hero that comes to define his nation almost in spite of itself.

Hailing from a Anglo‐Irish family of some renown, engaged in a military career began under the sign of colonial strife, Marcus Rainsford himself bears the marks of Great Britain’s continuing debate over national self‐definition at the end of the eighteenth century.69 That these questions would in turn appear in his writing is no surprise. Rainsford’s unsung writing career stemmed from a new poetic trend introduced in the in the 1780s. In 1782, poet and critic William

Hayley published An Essay on Epic Poetry calling for the revival of epic form in

Britain. Every decent civilization must have an epic. But England, in that regard, had a serious problem: “By some strange fate, which rul'd each Poet's tongue,/

[England's] dearest Worthies yet remain unsung.”70 The solution was an epic

68 For a more detailed analysis of the portrait, see Grégory Pierrot, “ ‘Our Hero’: Toussaint Louverture in British Representations,” Criticism 50.4 (2008): 581‐607. 69 Rainsford’s first military assignment was as ensign in Lord Rawdon’s Volunteers of Ireland in the American War of Independence in 1775. His great grandfather was Mayor of Dublin, and the brewery his family owned still sits on Rainsford Street. In 1759, the Rainsford family leased the premises for 999 years to a certain Arthur Guinness. Rainsford’s fellow Irish officers from the Volunteers met a variety of fates connected to the development of the and its national debates: his brother‐in‐law became a war hero; Colonel Depard was executed for participating in the Irish uprising of 1798. For more details, see Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot eds. Forthcoming. 70 William Hayley, Essay on Epic Poetry: in five Epistles to the Revd. Mr. Mason (London: J. Dodsley, 1782), Epistle V, l.286‐287.

118 grounded in British history and devoted to British virtue:

To sing, with equal fire, of nobler themes, To gild Historic Truth with Fancy’s beams! To Patriot Chiefs unsung thy Lyre devote, And swell to Liberty the lofty note! (373‐376)

Hayley challenged the next great English poet to produce a poem worthy of the

English nation, a celebration of “Patriot Chiefs unsung.” Rainsford's 1791 poem The

Revolution, or; Britain Delivered picked up Hayley’s gauntlet. With this poem,

Rainsford made clear his intention to produce a new, hybrid form, an epic that could also stand as a history, praise supported by incontrovertible evidence:

By the subsequent view, it will appear that the Author does not mean a simple panegyric on the Revolution, a work of imagination only. He wishes to aim at something higher; the connection of History and Poetry; and, though obliged, from the recent date of the facts, (which do not admit such embellishment), to exclude from the former every aid of the marvellous, (a license allowable with a remote period), he is persuaded that the interesting nature of the subject itself will sufficiently compensate for this defect... . Hence it may considered, perhaps, as a work sui generis, that aims, like the Epic Poem, at celebrating a great event, but, from the nature of its subject, is more strictly confined to truth itself for its resources, it applies less to the imagination than to the head and heart.71 Rainsford painstakingly introduced into his poem modes of documentation borrowed from historical writing. Almost every page is laden with footnotes providing short biographical sketches for major historical figures or explanations of historical events. The Revolution is an odd object that reads like an annotated edition of itself. Mixing poetry and historical writing may not have been unprecedented, but it was necessary to give the revolution its due.

Rainsford’s poem did not do well in 1791, nor did it in 1800, when it was

71 [Marcus Rainsford], The Revolution, or; Britain Delivered. A Poem in Ten Cantos. 2d ed. (London: R.B. Scott, 1800), 5‐6.

119 republished only to be ridiculed by critics in the foremost English literary journals.

The criteria of judgment revealed in these reviews are useful to analyze Rainsford’s subsequent evolution as a writer. While critics recognized Rainsford’s ability to make historical material entertaining, they also felt that poetry was ill fitted to his goals and rhyming abilities.72 Poetry took on a secondary role in Rainsford’s literary career, as he happened upon the perfect alternative with historical writing. As an officer in the Third West India Regiment‐‐a unit created for Great Britain’s West

Indian campaign and meant to be manned with black soldiers‐‐Rainsford was involved in England’s attack on Saint Domingue. After British withdrawal from the island, Rainsford was able to observe life on the island under the governorship of

Toussaint Louverture. Stranded on the island after the ship he was traveling on was wrecked in a tempest, Rainsford passed as an American sailor and lived among the population. He was eventually arrested by the local administration and condemned to death as a spy, and only owed his life to Louverture’s direct intervention.

His earlier attempt at historical epic was instrumental in leading him to try writing history with an epic scope. In the rebellion in Saint Domingue, Rainsford found material for a new national epic, in its own way glorious: a revolution transforming a slave colony into an independent nation. He approached the project with premeditation, publishing two synoptic pamphlets before attempting a complete account of the revolution. An Historical Account of the Black Empire of

72 The Monthly Review commented on the poem’s “remarkably incorrect” rhymes; XXXIV (1801), 96; an even harsher review in The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature XXXI (1801), 473 snapped ““from the errors which continually occur throughout the poem, in the position of accent, we are sometimes inclined to think [the author] is one of his majesty's German, French or, peradventure, Corsican subjects.”

120 Hayti shares with classical epic its encyclopedic reach and martial content. Moving from minute details of daily life among free blacks to the military exploits of their great hero Toussaint Louverture, it incorporates epic convention into the body of historical narrative. More importantly, it continues the project begun in The

Revolution; Or, Britain Delivered, of celebrating law and liberty as the foundation of national virtue—only this time the “Patriot Band” comprises once enslaved insurgents and their “Country’s praise” exalts a new‐born nation, Hayti.

Yet how could an English soldier sing the praise of a country that had just defeated his own army? Rainsford defines Haiti as a nation by comparison and equation to Great Britain. Thus when he discusses Dessalines’s defense of Fort Crête

à Pierrot against Leclerc’s troops, Rainsford declares: “The fortress which they occupied had been regularly built by the English during their possession of this part of the island, and the defence [sic] of it was truly English” (302). Recognizing the achievements of Haiti becomes a matter of respecting Western values:

It has frequently been the fate of striking events, and particularly those which have altered the condition of mankind, to be denied that consideration by their cotemporaries, which they obtain from the veneration of posterity… . It will scarcely be credited in another age, that philosophers heard unmoved, of the ascertainment of a brilliant fact, hitherto unknown, or confined to the vague knowledge of those whose experience is not admitted within the pale of historical truth. It will not be believed, that enlightened Europe calmly witnessed its contrasted brilliancy with actions which, like the opaque view of night, for a sullen hour ‐ obscured the dazzling splendour. (x)

In hindsight, Rainsford’s book can be read as an early example of great man history.

His telling of the revolution rests on the extraordinary characterization of

121 Louverture, the hero necessary for a romantic national narrative. An Historical

Account thus appears to include Haiti in the concert of nations. But this national hero, like Moses, dies without touching the promised land. Rainsford inaugurates in his book a division between political action portrayed as dignified and English in spirit, and revenge, an understandable but ultimately inexcusable and savage behavior. This dichotomy clearly owes something to late 18th century abolitionist poetry. It becomes a vehicle to control the events of the Haitian Revolution. It grants

Louverture the noble legacy of Oroonoko and foists on Dessalines the traditional characteristics of black villainy, the one long tied to Englishness—if only by contrast; the other always the expression of the foreign. Rainsford is nothing but admirative of Dessalines, his book contributes to contrasting Louverture, now the providential, measured, rational—in one word, English—statesman, to Dessalines who in his notorious ferocity, was already paradoxically equated with the French in his mercilessness and brutality.73

Rainsford’s Louverture thus is a consumed head of state, a diplomat, a paragon of rational thought and action: “his government does not appear to have been sullied by the influence of any ruling passion” (250). Toussaint in his wisdom is wary of such passionate course of action as “wasteful vengeance” (245; 250). In

Rainsford’s account, Toussaint is consecrated as a tragic hero, “greater in his fall than his enemies in their assumed power,” “the great, the good, the pious and benevolent Toussaint Louverture” (323‐3244). Now dead, Louverture can be

73 In his 1803 Buonaparte in the West Indies, or; the History of Toussaint Louverture, the African Hero, part I­III (London: J. Hatchard, 1803) James Stephen thus characterizes the French soldiers in Leclerc’s expedition as “savages with white faces” (I, 9) elsewhere exclaiming “O shame to the white

122 recognized fully as an extraordinary head of state at no cost, enter the pantheon of enlightened rule: “his principles, when becoming an actor in the revolution of his country, were as pure and legitimate, as those which actuated the great founders of liberty in any former age or clime” (250). Other events of the revolution as do not befit the precepts of English civilization are presented as the result of surrendering to the passion of revenge. It falls to Dessalines to be the merciless, and this time victorious, black avenger. Rainsford thus describes the “Affair of Acul,” a particularly bloody episode of the war against the French:

In penetrating the black line the French had secured a number of prisoners, and on them they determined to wreak the vengeance of which they were disappointed in the battle… . The black commander, when acquainted with the case although the maxim of the benevolent Toussaint, not to retaliate, had been hitherto followed up, could no longer forbear; he instantly caused a number of gibbets to be formed, selected the officers whom he had taken, and supplying the deficiency with privates, had them tied up in every direction by break of day, in sight of the French camp, who dared not to interfere… . Such was the retaliation produced by this sanguinary measure; a retaliation, the justice of which, however it is lamented, cannot be called in question. (337‐8) Rainsford’s last sentence testifies to the paradoxical stance of his text: Dessalines’s revenge is undeniably just, but it is wild justice. The extraordinariness of

Louverture’s precepts is enhanced in the contrast, and explains the status he reaches in Rainsford’s account. Rainsford’s Louverture is the extraordinary figure

Cotterel refused to see; Dessalines, is unable to refrain from an understandable urge to revenge, and fails the test of extraordinariness. In revenge, he is equal to the

French, where Louverture was able to transcend such base behavior. The national epic demands a hero above the common people: the black avenger of literature can

skins that cover French hearts!” (I, 8).

123 only exist in the absence of historical fact. Dead, Louverture and his actions are canonized—and Anglicized—by contrast with the living Dessalines’. It bears noting that Rainsford’s characterization of Haiti’s first head of state was in part inspired by the terms of Dessalines’s own self‐fashioning. These terms meant to emphasize the rupture with France, and as such always ran the risk of being used against the

Emperor of Haiti.

Acting the villain

Dessalines’s communiqués in the last year of the Revolution and the first years of independence made no excuses for his most violent behavior. Jean‐Jacques

Dessalines took a page of Louverture’s book in choosing to represent himself as an avenger. His recurrent references to the most terrifying aspects of Raynal’s figure show his continuing awareness of the influence of literature over the representation of his actions. Dessalines systematically put vengeance at the heart of his political decisions: in an early declaration presenting his resolve in dealing with “every man who has dishonored human nature, by prostituting himself with enthusiasm to the vile offices of informers and executioners,” Dessalines vows that “nothing shall ever turn our vengeance from those murderers who have delighted to bathe themselves in the blood of the innocent children of Hayti” (Rainsford 352). In document after document, Dessalines made sure to define Haiti as the black nation of Europe’s nightmares. Dessalines’s self‐identification with the avenger of the New World in his official proclamations proves a willfully, self‐aware intertextual gesture, more so

124 than Louverture’s possible self‐recognition in Raynal’s text. Dessalines’s actions at the head of the revolutionary army and as the first head of independent Haiti were in line with the revenge drama villain source of the black avenger tradition. The massacre of the white population remaining on the island ordered by Emperor

Jacques I, and his subsequent affirmation of Haiti as a black nation in the country’s

Constitution of 20 May 1805 thus confirmed the worst of the fears of the slaveholding world, once voiced by Raynal and Mercier alike: they seemingly made clear that there would be no mercy for the former oppressors.

It may not be too bold to say that Dessalines, aided by his secretaries, ordered these acts with just that effect in mind: his June 19, 1804 proclamation following the massacre of the whites reads like a pastiche of Raynal and Mercier’s texts.74 Here, Dessalines evokes Raynal’s famous question to reverse it: “Where is that vile Haitian, so unworthy of his regeneration, who thinks he has not accomplished the decrees of the Eternal, by exterminating these blood‐thirsty tygers?” In the next paragraph, Dessalines makes a clear paraphrase of Mercier, declaring: “Yes, I have saved my country; I have avenged America.” Further yet,

Dessalines riffs on classic motifs of abolitionist literature:

Let that nation come who may be mad and daring enough to attack me. Already at its approach the irritated genius of Hayti, rising out of the bosom of the ocean appears; his menacing aspect throws the

74 Dessalines was reportedly illiterate; it is therefore likely that his proclamation, like other texts signed in his hand, was actually written in collaboration with one or several of his secretaries, among which were Louis Boisrond‐Tonnerre, author of the Act of Independence and of Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti (1804), the first Haitian history of the Haitian Revolution, and Pompée Valentin Vastey, who later became Henry Christophe’s foremost publicist. About these authors, see Marlène L. Daut, “Un‐silencing the Past: Boisrond‐Tonnerre, Vastey, and the Re‐writing of the Haitian Revolution,” South Atlantic Review, 74.1 (2009): 35‐64; Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature (Liverpool, 2008).

125 waves into commotion, excites tempests, and with his mighty hand disperses ships; or dashes them in pieces; to his formidable voice the laws of nature pay obedience; diseases, plagues, famine, conflagration, poison, are his constant attendants. But why calculate on the assistance of the climate and the elements? Have I forgot that I command a people of no common cast, brought up in adversity, whose audacious daring frowns at obstacles and increases by dangers? (qtd in Rainsford 451)

Dessalines echoes the elemental trope so familiar to abolitionist poets only to dismiss it. An army general has no need to call on the heavens; it is the elements that must be compared to his troops, rather than the reverse. Dessalines takes over the characteristics of the avenger as villain, leaving to his predecessor Toussaint

Louverture the role of the tragic, and unsuccessful, hero. Dessalines admits so much when in the same document, he declares:

somewhat unlike him who has preceded me, the Ex‐general Toussaint Louverture, I have been faithful to the promise I made to you, when I took up arms against tyranny, and whilst the last spark of life remains in me I will keep my oath. ‘Never again shall a colonist, or an European, set his foot upon this territory with the title of master or proprietor.’ This resolution shall henceforward form the fundamental basis of our constitution. (ibid.) The black avenger of Western tradition was necessarily unsuccessful; by winning the war, Dessalines had effectively turned Raynal and Mercier’s abstract warning to planters into their walking nightmare, putting aside the tragic avenger in the

Oroonoko vein and reconnecting with the ruthlessness of the black villains of revenge tragedy. He could write with obvious pride “my name has become a horror to all friends of slavery, or despots; and tyrants only pronounce it, cursing the day that gave me birth” (446), and dub himself “avenger and deliverer of his fellow citizens” in the Constitution of 1805.

Taking on the characteristics of the stage villain had some benefits: following

126 victory over the French, who had the strongest army in the Western world,

Dessalines and his troops appeared decidedly fearsome, the reservations of some notwithstanding.75 France under Napoleon never attempted to recover the island; the dictator would later admit that he had been wrong not to leave the administration of the island to Louverture, calling it “the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed.”76 With the circulation of Dessalines’s texts came the circulation of planters’ fear, as well as slave action, real and imagined: uprisings around the Caribbean basin were blamed on Saint Domingue throughout the 1790s, and continued to be well into the nineteenth century. Haitian influence on those uprisings was generally indirect at best; bent on striking economic agreements with

England and the U.S., Louverture had shown his good will by helping thwart a

French Republican plot aiming at starting a slave revolt in Jamaica.77 Later,

Dessalines and his successors, when they overtly supported revolutionary movements in the Americas, kept themselves to those led by creole planters rather than their servants.78 Yet official action or lack thereof only counted for part of the threat the revolution represented to the slaveholding world.

The violence of the French Revolution already had a deep impact on

75 In 1803, Colonel James Chalmers, a former Inspector General of colonial troops, published his Remarks on the Late War in St. Domingo, in which he argued that “the temporary misfortunes sustained by France were occasioned by her impolicy, cruelty, or other causes totally independent of the power of her Black Enemies, whose strength, as stated, is utterly inadequate to render them independent of that Empire, or of any other much less formidable power” (iv). Rainsford takes him to task in his book. 76 See General Gaspard Gourgaud, Talks of Napoleon at St Helena with General Baron Gourgaud, Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer trans. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg &Co., 1904), 112. 77 On this topic, see Philippe R. Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Diplomacy, 1798‐ 1802,” William and Mary Quarterly 66.1 (2009): 87‐124. 78 See Deborah Jenson, “Reading Between the Lines: Dessalines’s Anticolonial Imperialism in Venezuela and ,” Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012): 161‐194.

127 American politics, and Jacobins became a common insult used against Jefferson and his followers; the Haitian Revolution hit much closer, and literally spilled onto

American shores, with Saint Domingue exiles settling in cities all along the Eastern seaboard.Rumors had it that the Jacobins had plans to foster slave rebellion in the

United States. Such rumors came to a head with the slave revolt scare in Charleston,

North Carolina, in 1793.79 In 1795 and 1796, several revolts were thwarted in

Spanish Louisiana that were, rightly or wrongly, similarly blamed on the dangerous example of Saint Domingue.80 Finally, Jacobin and Saint Dominguan influences were very much at the center of debates that followed the aborted 1800 Richmond uprising known as Gabriel’s rebellion.81 The alleged involvement of two Frenchmen in Gabriel’s revolt gave a semblance of concrete evidence that the French were behind an effort very similar to the plan thwarted by Louverture in Jamaica.

Mentioning early rumors of an organized slave uprising to Vice President Thomas

Jefferson, Virginia Governor James Monroe wrote: “The scenes which are acted at St

Domingo must produce an effect on all the people of colour in this and the States south of us, especially our slaves, and it is our duty to be on guard to prevent any mischief resulting from it.”82 As late as 1812, the Aponte conspiracy in Cuba was seen through the prism of the Haitian revolution.83 That planters around the

79 See Robert Alderson, “Charleston’s Rumored Slave Revolt of 1793,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, David P. Geggus ed. (Columbia; University of press, 2001): 93‐110. 80 See Paul Lanchance, “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana, in The Impact: 209‐230. 81 See Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of Press, 1993). 82 Qtd in Simon P. Newman, “American Political Culture and the French and Haitian Revolutions,” in The Impact, 83. 83 See Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

128 Americas trembled at the possibility of another Domingo is undeniable; news of the revolution circulated through print but also by word of mouth coming from the

Saint Domingue slave, free colored and white exiles that spread throughout the

Americas. Dessalines’s proclamations were reproduced freely in Southern newspapers, and it is unlikely that they failed to reach black eyes and ears.

Worse than a successful slave revolution, Haiti offered the entire slaving world the terrifying prospect of a black nation in the New World. Official documents produced by the fledgling nation circulated far and wide and had tremendous cultural and political impact outside of the island. Michael Drexler and Ed White make the argument that “following its dissemination throughout the US in the fall of

1801, Toussaint’s Constitution became the most widely read piece of literature authored by an African American.”84 Toussaint’s successor Dessalines showed a profound awareness of the power of words no doubt shaped by such precedent.

Dessalines’s declarations also circulated around the Americas and were considered, rightly or wrongly, instrumental in starting several slave uprisings, in particular in the United States. Indeed, in article 14 of the 1805 Haitian Constitution, Dessalines defines Haiti in terms that assert it as quintessentially blackness: “All acception (sic) of colour among the children of one and the same family, of whom the chief magistrate is the father, being necessarily to cease, the Haytians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks” [Art.14]. The effort at curing the wounds inflicted by the socio‐racial civil wars that overlapped the revolution and

84 Michael J. Drexler and Ed White, “The Constitution of Toussaint: Another Origin of African American Literature,” Blackwell Companion to African American Literature, Gene Andrew Jarrett ed. (Malden: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2010), 59.

129 the War of Independence is fairly transparent. It was also ultimately unsuccessful, as later developments proved. But in the meantime, here was a bold attempt at defining Haiti beyond the confines of Western thoughts. In this, his text was reminiscent of Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments, in which the author defined his community as “brethren and countrymen by complexion.” That Dessalines and his secretaries might have read Cugoano is not so far‐fetched: Antoine Diannyère’s

French translation could well have found its way to Saint Domingue by way of the anti‐slavery revolutionists that traveled to the island from 1789 on, some of whom like Sonthonax and Laveaux were members of the Société des Amis des Noirs. In any case, Cugoano writes as a “black man,” showing the common experience of slavery as the foundation for a new community.

Yet Cugoano differs from Dessalines in a crucial aspect. Throughout his book,

Cugoano appears reluctant to single himself out. In the words of Paget Henry,

“Cugoano speaks as a racialized African, whose 'We' consists of people who share his 'complexion'” (Henry 141). Henry argues that Cugoano's wariness about the 'I' stems from philosophers of Western subjectivity’s tendency to dismiss African humanity wholesale. Reluctant at speaking too much about his own experience,

Cugoano is aware that he must yet adopt some Western writing conventions for his appeal to have any influence. The effort is evident in the uneasy compromise of the short biographical nota bene included in his book: “since these Thoughts and

Sentiments have been read by some,” Cugoano explains, “I find a general

Approbation has been given, and that the things pointed thereby might be more effectually taken into consideration, I was requested by some friends to add this

130 information concerning myself” (7). Cugoano puts his personal story in the perspective of the enormous scale of the slave trade. His separation from his parents and relatives was heart‐breaking, “yet it is still grievous to think that thousands more have suffered in similar and greater distress” (15). The “thousands” suffering at the hands of slave traders and slave drivers across the world are evoked time and again in Cugoano's book. He systematically reminds his reader of his own position, not as an exemplary individual, but as one of a group of people whose common fate has been decided by the color of their skin. Throughout the book Cugoano defines himself as a “black man,” a term that, for being a‐geographical, underlines the ubiquity of this community in progress.

The lack of personal detail given by Cugoano has no doubt contributed to restrict the attention given to his writings; most of what we know of him comes from his books, and he is virtually absent from official records. Yet it appears that

Cugoano may just have been aiming at precisely this individual retreat, so that his individual story might not possibly blot out the experience of the whole. The ominously poetic last lines of Cugoano’s book were in this regard exemplary: “tho' to some what I have said may appear as the rattling leaves of autumn, that may soon be blown away and whirled in a vortex where few can hear and know, I must yet say, although it is not for me to determine the manner, that the voice of our complaint implies a vengeance... and it ought to sound in your ears as rolling waves around your circum‐ambient shores; and if it is no hearkened unto, it may yet arise with a louder voice, as the rolling thunder…” (110‐111). The image of nature unleashed would have been familiar from contemporary abolitionist poems; the

131 way Cugoano moves from the first person singular to the first person plural illustrates his hopes to see the ‘I’ recede for the ‘We.’ In declaring Haiti black,

Dessalines was borrowing the most powerful effect in Cugoano’s prose, without subscribing to its intent. Dessalines systematically subsumed the nation to his person, and thus conformed to the very structures he pretended to blow up.

In this way, Dessalines’s rhetoric also had a price. However thankful Great

Britain may have been for Haiti’s actions against France, however involved in

Dessalines’s massacre of the whites85 and in the new country’s commerce, Great

Britain did not bother to recognize the independent republic until it finally abolished slavery in 1833. The United States, who had privileged access to Haitian trade, would not grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti until 1861. A country born of slave revolt remained a constant threat to the safety of these countries’ slaveholding colonies, and Dessalines’s person, actions and aggressive rhetoric were used as proof of his hostility to whites in general, even as he traded daily with English and

American merchants and representatives. Being portrayed as a butcher of whites could generate fear, but it only went so far in encouraging commerce. Even the pro‐

English attitude and policies of Henry Christophe, Dessalines’s successor and later head of the North as King Henry I, gained him relatively little more than ridicule in the press. Henry’s English‐inspired sense of pageantry and his attachment to English culture were scornfully analyzed in English media and politics as yet another proof of English excellence, and Haitian inferiority. When it was assessed that Haiti no longer represented a military threat to Western powers, nothing stood in the way of

85 See C.L.R. James on the topic, Black Jacobins, 370‐374.

132 it being culturally downgraded.

Haiti’s international reputation rested in no small part on its ability to strike fear and echo the black avenger trope. Once settled, Haiti left the realm of fiction to enter the realm of international politics. What the Merciers and Raynals had left to their readers’ imagination—i.e. the form a black nation might take—could now be witnessed, assessed, commented on, ridiculed if need be. Once passed the surprise of France’s defeat, Haiti was forced into the increasingly rigid frames provided by racist ideology the world around, thanks in no small part to the cultural frame provided by the black avenger trope. The narrative frame indeed permits the recognition of extraordinary black individuals without challenging racist generalizations. Dessalines’s efforts at appropriating the device did little to challenge its most problematic aspect: the black avenger mythifies the nation as the will of a single man, erasing in the process all other participants, high or low. On declaring himself emperor of Haiti, despite pressure from his foremost officers,

Dessalines refused to create a Haitian nobility, stating “I alone am noble.”86 This unmistakable declaration of uniqueness kept him within the confines of a tradition the revolution had threatened to explode. The dreaded, indescribable black nation looming large in Mercier’s text could immediately be cut to size as its revolutionary, collective potential took second seat to Dessalines’s personal ambition and the coming elitist state apparatus. If the revolution had indeed been unthinkable, the state that followed and the litany of abuses imposed on its own population was well within Western experience. Dessalines’s subversion of the black avenger trope also

86 Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti. Vol. III (Port‐au‐Prince: Courtois, 1848), 178.

133 confirmed its cultural relevance and contributed to circulate it as a valid representational frame for the Haitian revolution. Both Dessalines and his opponents found something in preserving the black avenger figure: a singular image of racial purity, which served both outsider racist and Haitian nationalist purposes, but ultimately blunted both the realities Haiti had stemmed from, and the complex collectivity it stood for.

134 Chapter III

Going to America

Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom still burned in the veins of the slaves, there was in all leadership or attempted leadership but the one motive of revolt and revenge,—typified in the terrible , the Danish blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all the Americas in fear of insurrection.... The disappointment and impatience of the Negroes at the persistence of slavery and voiced itself in two movements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors of the Haytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at insurrection,—in 1800 under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831 again in Virginia under the terrible Nat Turner. In the Free States, on the other hand, a new and curious attempt at self­ development was made. In Philadelphia and New York color­prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro communicants from white churches and the formation of a peculiar socio­religious institution among the Negroes known as the African Church,— an organization still living and controlling in its various branches over a million of men. Walker’s wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the world was changing after the coming of the ­gin.

‐‐W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk.

Recent studies have revealed how important the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath were for the American neighbor: for Ashli White, the Revolution had a tremendous impact in American politics, as the influx of Saint Dominguan refugees into the United States “forced Americans to confront the paradox of being a slaveholding republic… in the 1790s and early , no event more clearly laid bare the contradiction between republican principles and slavery than the Haitian

Revolution.”1 Documents by and about the Haitian revolutionaries floated freely into the United States, carrying with them threats of slave insurrection and all‐out race war. In antebellum American politics, abolitionists and pro‐slavery advocates alike constantly presented the anti‐slavery struggle in and around the United States

1 Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 2.

135 through a Haitian prism. The Haitian Revolution was proof of black worth or evidence of black savagery, a blueprint of what to expect, fear, or hope for in the future. Thwarted slave uprisings on American soil in the early nineteenth century—

Gabriel’s in 1800 Virginia and Vesey’s in 1822 North Carolina—bore the mark, real or imagined, of Haitian influence, and kept the fear of the black nation alive in a country increasingly defined as a white Canaan. In the immediate run‐up to the Civil War, the Haitian revolution created an entire grammar in U.S. American public discourse. At its two opposite poles sat completely positive or negative views of the Revolution, narratives Matt Clavin dubbed “the horrific Haitian Revolution” and “the heroic Haitian Revolution.”2 Clavin’s book suggests something of the many possible semantic combinations between these two poles.

Print culture made the Haitian threat palpable: official documents from Haiti circulated widely in the United States, as did American commentary, support and criticism for the new nation. The late eighteenth century had seen the first stirrings of what Joanna Brooks calls a “black print counterpublic”: John Marrant’s Sermon to the African Lodge (1789), Prince Hall’s Charges to the Lodge (1792‐1797), Absalom

Jones and Richard Allen’s Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the

Late Epidemic in Philadelphia (1794) were among the “first black texts that publicly expressed a corporate consciousness.”3 The constitution of a black counterpublic was posited on collective rather than individual self‐definition:

Rather than reclaiming themselves from objectification through publicizing

2 Matt Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 11‐13. 3 Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic.” William and Mary Quarterly 62.1 (2005), 82.

136 that which had been declared private…, black counterpublics claimed subjectivity by collectively reappropriating that which was subject to appropriation by whites under the regime of legal slavery and the regime of racial subordination that supplanted it. The very notion of blackness as a group condition covering diverse African peoples developed largely in the service of slave‐owning interests; so‐called black people reclaimed this notion and redetermined its political content. Blacks thus entered the public sphere, not with the negative identity of the disinterested individual citizen, but through positive collective incorporation. If the message for individual blacks in the bourgeois public sphere was, “You are public property,” the message of the black public to whites was, “Only we can own who we are.” (Brooks 73) Brooks underlines the importance of networks and closed societies such as churches and Masonic lodges in the constitution of the black counterpublic. Richard

Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church with its services reserved to “our African brethren and the descendents of the African race” or Prince Hall Free Masonry

Lodges were instrumental in developing locales for the community spirit to thrive; they also “used publication… as a means of declaring and securing their autonomy from white regulation” (82). This peculiar relation to print culture is a fundamental aspect of the way in which people of African descent developed a sense of communal self in the New World:

Blacks use collective venues to claim, secure, and enact for themselves the civil rights that whites under the auspices of racial privilege assumed, understood, and enjoyed as the natural provenance of the individual. This dialectical, conversive formulation of black collectivity and white individuality distinguishes the emergence of the black public sphere from liberal republican models founded in private property… . If we understand the early national bourgeois public sphere to be governed by principles of publicity, accessibility, supervision, diffusion, and disinterest, the early black public sphere is constituted in bounded collectivity, self‐reappropriation, incorporation, and positive affiliation. (85) The centrality of the Bible in African American culture cannot be overstated. African

American activists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century couched their

137 arguments in biblical rhetoric, focusing on sections referencing more or less overtly black‐skinned people, but also identifying their plight as enslaved people in the

Americas to that of Biblical Hebrews in Egypt. This correlation, as Wilson Moses shows, could never be simple or clear‐cut: “Black Americans wanted to be the children of Pharaoh as well as children of Israel,” connected to the glory and might of the ancient civilization, but also to Judeo‐Christian culture, values and beliefs.4 In this complex mythology, these oft quoted lines from Psalm 68 (30; 31) play a crucial role: “‘Princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto

God.” The text promises extraordinary leaders and ultimate redemption for the race, providing African American authors with “a teleology predicting the ultimate triumph of the African race over its present adversity” (Moses 57). As shown by

Moses, early nineteenth century visions of black redemption often rested on the expected rise of a black messiah, redeemer of the race. The terms are tightly connected in Judeo‐Christian literature, yet their etymology reveals a certain complexity: the term messiah derives from the Hebrew mashiah, which means the anointed one. It suggests not only a singular role, but a somewhat aristocratic position: “anointing was characteristic Hebrew ritual for inaugurating a personage into a divinely sanctioned official position. In Hebrew society, kings mostly but also prophets and sometimes priests were appointed to office by pouring oil over their heads.”5 As Segal notes further the Greek translation of the term, christos, carries its own connotations, related as it was in ancient Greece with social, but also

4 Wilson J. Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 47. 5 Alan Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge: Harvard

138 competitive station: crowned kings, but also anointed (oiled up) athletes. Yet the messiahs of the Old Testament do not redeem through suffering: Jesus changed all that, but these notions continue to exist in messianism at large and black messianism in particular. Black messiahs sometimes come in the form of “Uncle

Toms,” Christ‐like figures who redeem through suffering.

The messiah is often qualified as redeemer, an equally fraught term: it appears in English translations of the Book of Job, where confident in God’s mercy,

Job declares: “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth” (19:25). The Hebrew term, goel, translates more accurately as blood avenger, the person in charge of redeeming a person or a family after their death. Simon Rawidowicz describes how the term evolved in jewish sacred texts, in correlation to the situation of the Hebrew people:

Surely there is a certain difference and change in emphasis between the messianic ideal of the prophets, their ‘end of the days,’ and its later development as ‘redemption’ in the time of the Second Temple… . For various social and political reasons, the vision of redemption became more national before, narrower and more restricted but also more concrete and bloodier, because redemption, by its very nature, is blood‐drenched. From a purely linguistic point of view…, one can assume that the original meaning of the Hebrew root gimel aleph lamed from which the word for redemption came was associated with blood… . The term goel­hadam, the one who avenges a family death with blood, is also related to this. Redemption, then, is initially linked with blood, the blood of the individual, of the family, and of the tribe. Later, an abstract, spiritual meaning developed from the word or concept goel: geulah, redemption as national liberation, redemption of the people. But ultimately, redemption is bloody, it costs blood; the Hebrew word damim has two meanings, blood and money, and so too redemption (geulah) has two meanings: blood revenge and redemption.6 Rawidowicz’s conclusions on the meaning of redemption for the Jewish people are

University Press, 1986), 64. 6 Simon Rawidowicz, Israel, the Ever­Dying People, and Other Essays. Benjamin C. I. Ravid, ed.

139 relevant to the African diaspora, who in its national self‐fashioning borrows so much from Jewish history. These connections appear clearly in David Walker’s

Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.

David Walker’s Appeal

David Walker, the North Carolina‐born son of a free mother and an enslaved father lived for a time in Charleston and Philadelphia before settling in Boston in the

1820s. Walker is best known for his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

(1829), a four part pamphlet meaning to rebuke ’s racist theories and to propose a political plan for black emancipation in the United States. Wilson

Moses presents Walker’s text as an early example in the American tradition of the black jeremiad. As such, Moses connects it to European and Anglo‐American nationalism and rhetoric: “the purpose of the black jeremiad was not simply to provide a verbal outlet for hostilities; it was a means of demonstrating loyalty— both to the principles of egalitarian liberalism and to the Anglo‐Christian code of values.”7 Little is known of Walker’s early years, but Peter Hinks argues that as a member of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal church, Walker was acquainted early with movements for black liberation, and may even have been involved in the

1822 failed insurrection plot led by .8 Hinks finds echoes of Vesey’s words in Walker’s Appeal, thus bolstering the revolutionary intent of his text where

(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1986), 66. 7 Wilson J. Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982), 38. 8 Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken my afflicted brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 30‐40.

140 Moses downplays it. The jeremiadic tradition most interestingly connects Walker to

Ottobah Cugoano. Cugoano’s influence on Walker’s explosive, religiously‐inflected call to arms is perhaps even clearer than Vesey’s. Walker would have been at least superficially acquainted with Cugoano’s writings: he is mentioned twice in issues of the Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper, for which Walker sometimes wrote and acted as agent in Boston.9 Walker may have met and frequented Vesey, but Cugoano strikes me as a crucial inspiration for both of them.

Cugoano’s Thoughts and Walker’s Appeal have much in common, from religious overtones to calls for collective black consciousness and appeals to moral righteousness on the part of whites. Walker’s appeal is distinct from Cugoano’s

Thoughts in very obvious ways: where Cugoano was an African‐born slave deported to the West Indies before finishing his life in England, Walker is a freeborn African

American who lived all his life between the slave‐holding and free East Coast states.

While he is dedicated to a similarly international notion of black unity as his forebear, he is also focusing on the United States, as the full title of his appeal makes clear: An Appeal to coloured citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America. The injustice against blacks he witnessed in his country of birth is emphasized by the fuzziness of their civil status: some are enslaved, but some like Walker were born free, without nevertheless being considered complete citizens. None other than Thomas Jefferson spent an

9 See Freedom’s Journal 18 May 1827; 21 November 1828. In each case, the short paragraph about Cugoano is copied almost word for word from Abbé Grégoire’s entry on Cugoano in his 1808 De la literature des nègres translated and published in New York by David Bailie Warden in 1810 as An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes. See On the Cultural Achievements of Negroes, “Preface,” Thomas Cassirer and jean‐François Brière (Boston: University of

141 inordinate amount of pages to justify this exception to the golden rule of American politics. In pointing out the contradictions between the living conditions of African

Americans and the alleged national values expressed in the US’s sacred documents,

Walker follows Cugoano’s method of checking Enlightenment ideals against their applications, specifically in the United States. “Afro‐American nationalism, like

European and Anglo‐American nationalism, attempted to link together a particularism and a universalism;” Walker’s text, in the jeremiadic tradition, remains very much a call for America to change its ways, yet in presenting the

African diaspora in the Americas as one people, it let the idea of a black nation— with all the threat such a notion packed in the years following the Haitian revolution—weigh in the balance (Moses, Black Messiahs 32). In the words of David

Howard‐Pitney:

leading black spokespersons’ use of American jeremiadic rhetoric signals their virtually complete acceptance of and incorporation into the national cultural norm of millennial faith in America’s promise. Yet the African American jeremiad also expressed black nationalist faith in the missionary destiny of the African race and was a leading instrument of black social assertion in America.”10 Of America and separate from it: the paradox of black existence in the United States which would become a commonplace of African American thought is already expressed in Walker’s text. Howard‐Pitney further advances that “the dominant black jeremiad tradition conceives of blacks as a within a chosen people. The African American jeremiad tradition, then, characteristically addressed two American chosen peoples—black and white—whose millennial destinies, while

Massachusetts Press, 1996), ix. 10 David Howard‐Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia:

142 distinct, are also inextricably entwined” (13).

In his Appeal, Walker presents his white readers with two choices:

You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery, to enrich you and your children, but God will deliver us from under you. And wo, wo, will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting. Throw away your fears and prejudices then, and enlighten us and treat us like men, and we will like you more than we do now hate you, and tell us now no more about colonization, for America is as much our country, as it is yours.‐‐Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together.11 Immediate abolition, recognition of wrongs and fair treatment is the only sure way to peaceful coexistence. The alternative is a war of liberation fueled by racial hatred, the specter of the Haitian Revolution as portrayed across the slaveholding West. It is significant that Walker suggests that whites “enlightening” the colored population, i.e. educating it, is an important part of the solution. Indeed, Walker also calls for blacks to educate themselves throughout his text, as a necessary step towards racial autonomy and power. If Walker insists that he hopes to gain American citizenship for his brethren, rather than separation, he also makes clear that time for patience is over: if white Americans do not help, black Americans will take their destiny in their own hands, and educate for independence rather than coexistence: “our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and talents amongst ourselves, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves. –‘Every dog must have its day,’ the American’s is coming to an end” (18).

The April 25, 1828 issue of the Freedom’s Journal contains an article describing a meeting in which Walker delivered an address that suggests the

Temple University Press, 2005; 1992), 12. 11 David Walker, An Appeal to coloured citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly, to

143 importance of the topic for the author:

Mr. David Walker also addressed the meeting at some length…—stated largely the disadvantages the people of Colour labour under, by the neglect of literature—and concluded by saying, that the very derision, violence and oppression, with which we as a part of the community are treated by a benevolent and Christian people, ought to stimulate us to the greatest exertion for the acquirement both of literature and of property, for although we may complain of the almost inhospitality with which we are treated; yet if we continue to slumber on and take our ease, our wheel of reformation will progress but slowly.12 Walker’s rhetoric evokes Jefferson’s views on the cyclical nature of human progress, as it would in the Appeal.13 His focus on literacy is thus also typical of the nationalist thinking of his time. Speaking at a meeting of the General Colored Association of

Boston, Walker shows how closely related literacy and community are:

First then, Mr. President, it is necessary to remark here, at once, that the primary object of this institution, is, to unite the colored population, so far, through the United States of America, as may be practicable and expedient… . Now, that we are disunited, is a fact, that no one of common sense will deny; and, that the cause of which, is a powerful auxiliary in keeping us from rising to the scale of reasonable and thinking beings, none but those who delight in our degradation will attempt to contradict. Did I say those who delight in our degradation? Yea, sir, glory in keeping us ignorant and miserable, that we might be the better and the longer slaves. I was credibly informed by a gentleman of unquestionable veracity, that a slaveholder upon finding one of his young slaves with a small spelling book in his hand (not opened) fell upon and beat him almost to death, exclaiming, at the same time, to the child, you will acquire better learning than I or any of my family. 14 The extreme nature of the slaveholding world’s reaction to black literacy confirmed its power for the community in the making. Walker had in mind a literacy much more profound than simply reading: the ability to read words would lead members

those of the United States of America (Boston, 3rd edition, 1830), 79. 12 “Original Communication,” Freedom’s Journal, 25 April 1828, 38. 13 See Bruce R. Dain, A Hideous of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), fn 5, 173. 14 “Address. Delivered before the General Colored Association at Boston, by David Walker,” Freedom’s Journal, 19 December 1828, 295.

144 of the community to the ability to read history at large, and more specifically divine signs in history, For the race, this meant gaining knowledge of the glorious African past and present, and gaining the ability to connect these events in a global, millennial view of the future of the race. Literacy was a mission, as Walker insisted in his Appeal:

Men of colour, who are also of sense, for you particularly is my APPEAL designed. Our more ignorant brethren are not able to penetrate its value. I call upon you therefore to cast your eyes upon the wretchedness of your brethren, and to do your utmost to enlighten them‐‐go to work and enlighten your brethren!‐‐Let the Lord see you doing what you can to rescue them and yourselves from degradation. (33) National redemption comes through access to text, by which Walker means

Scripture, of course, but as history as much as religious text. In Walker’s appeal, readers should be missionaries, spreading the word of black union throughout the land: “It is expected that all coloured men, women and children of every nation, language and tongue under heaven, will try to procure a copy of this Appeal and read it, or get some one to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them” (2). The nationalist mission he outlines in his Appeal is to a great extent educational. Walker insists on the liberating power of literacy and portrays the future black nation as a community of readers.

Readers and agents of change: Walker’s pamphlet is remembered to this day for its brazen call for action against slavery and violent self‐defense. In this regard, its title notwithstanding, Walker’s pamphlet means to reach white as well as black readers. Walker regularly addresses his potential white audience in the second person, as “you Americans” (“I ask you, O! Americans, I ask you, in the name of the

Lord, can you deny these charges?” (16); “I tell you Americans! that unless you

145 speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone!!!!!! For God Almighty will tear up the very face of the earth!!!” (45)), separating in the process his colored audience from the immediate national community. Walker separates his community from slaveholding America, but he does not dream of Africa: “America is more our country, than it is the whites‐‐we have enriched it with our blood and tears” (73).

This incendiary rhetoric was not lost on slaveholders whom Walker designated as

“the Lord’s enemies” (71). His pamphlet gained notoriety around the United States following its discovery in in December 1829. Hysteria about the potential influence of the text among the states’ black population soon took hold. Only seven years earlier, Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy for slave revolt had been thwarted in

Charleston, North Carolina; mere months before, fires had consumed portions of

Augusta and Savannah, Georgia, that were believed to have been set by slaves, and another apparent conspiracy had been discovered in the state in the spring of 1829

(Hinks 119‐120). Weeks later, the pamphlet appeared throughout the Southern states in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, everywhere bolstering fears already stoked by recent instances of slave agitation (Hink 134‐152). In his text,

Walker specifically alludes to the number of people of color in the states of Georgia,

South Carolina and Virginia, and argues that properly equipped, “I would put against every white person on the whole continent of America,” and adds with foresight “the whites know this too, which make them quake and tremble” (71, fn). Until Walker’s untimely death in 1830, his pamphlet was for the slaveholding South the very definition of the threat posed by black literacy and literature. When in August 1831

Nat Turner launched on the rebellion that would leave over fifty white people dead

146 in Southampton Co., Virginia, the link from Walker to Turner, though factually flimsy, appeared an evidence to many in the South and beyond.

Walker roots his call for action in religious and historical exegesis. Wilson

Moses argues that Walker’s Appeal, though rhetorically brash, is more of a call for whites to act rationally than it is a call to arms, and in this sense closer to Cugoano’s earlier effort than to Nat Turner’s bloody revolt two years after the publication of

Walker’s Appeal. Yet if Walker calls for measure time and again in his text, he also makes clear his belief that armed struggle is a God‐ordained mission:

The man who would not fight under our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in the glorious and heavenly cause of freedom and of God‐‐to be delivered from the most wretched, abject and servile slavery, that ever a people was afflicted with since the foundation of the world, to the present day‐‐ought to be kept with all of his children or family, in slavery, or in chains, to be butchered by his cruel enemies. (15)

Cugoano repeatedly refers to military icons of the black past. Historical examples provide him with the impetus for national union, centered on the figure of the national redeemer. The fate of “that mighty son of Africa, HANNIBAL, one of the greatest generals of antiquity, who defeated and cut off so many thousands of the white Romans or murderers,” thus becomes proof of the necessity of black union:

“had Carthage been well united and had given him good support, he would have carried that cruel and barbarous city by storm. But they were dis‐united, as the coloured people are now, in the United States of America, the reason our natural enemies are enabled to keep their feet on our throats” (23). Haiti of course plays an important role in the history of black resistance Walker builds in his pamphlet. He refers somewhat cryptically to the Haitian Revolution as yet another warning against racial disunion:

147

O my suffering brethren! remember the divisions and consequent sufferings of Carthage and of Hayti. Read the history particularly of Hayti, and see how they were butchered by the whites, and do you take warning. The person whom God shall give you, give him your support and let him go his length, and behold in him the salvation of your God. God will indeed, deliver you through him from your deplorable and wretched condition under the Christians of America. I charge you this day before my God to lay no obstacle in his way, but let him go. (23) What episode of the Revolution Walker is alluding to here is not so clear, though he could be referring generally to divisions among the revolutionaries. The passage’s biblical inflections suggest a Moses‐like figure that we can surmise is Toussaint,

God‐ordained national redeemer. Recognizing such a figure is a matter of literacy, biblical and historical. A community of readers also knows how to read history, and for a colored person in the 1820s, it means knowing what to make of Haiti and its tutelary figure, Toussaint Louverture.

Walker, like the black readers of his time and of his journal in particular, was well aware of the many problems faced by Haiti. In 1825 the country unified under

President Boyer had accepted to pay an exorbitant tribute to France in return for diplomatic recognition and the end of the threat of a potential French bid on the island. Great Britain, basking in the moral superiority of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, would not grant the country diplomatic recognition until 1833, and dealt with Haiti through agents. The United States, though trading actively with the

Haitian Republic had not granted it diplomatic recognition either. In fact, it actively blocked its access to the concert of nations, a slight made all the more evident by the comparatively favorable relation it entertained with the nations born of Creole revolution in South America. The Haitian constitution made possible and even

148 encouraged African American to the country, a notion entertained by a portion of the African American community. Encouraged by Reverend Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the abolitionist Benjamin and later by African Colonization Society agent Loring Dewey, thus moved to Haiti in the 1820s, with dire results.15

However negative the experience, Haiti retained a unique aura, especially by contrast to the principal alternative option of the time: emigration to Africa.

Inspired by the example of the Afro‐Indian Quaker entrepreneur Paul Cuffe, the

American Colonization Society, a group supported by both Southern planter interests and Northern progressives, financed repatriation of freed slaves to the

Western Coast of Africa. Well aware of the motives behind white support for the endeavor, African American opinion was divided on the topic. The Freedom’s

Journal, though very critical of the ACS, nevertheless supported African emigration, a position Walker clearly did not share, to judge by his damning portrayal of Senator

Henry Clay of , one of the main proponents of the colonization scheme (50‐

57). Clay, the architect of the 1820 Compromise, was among the main proponents of the colonization scheme; Walker ridicules the statesman’s alleged humanitarian intentions and underlines his hypocrisy (51‐56). Only a “traitor to his brethren” would consider leaving for Africa, Walker adds, quoting Reverend S.E.

Cornish, the co‐editor of the Freedom’s Journal (76). By contrast, Haiti is shown as a destination of refuge for black people of the world: “If any of us see fit to go away, go

15 Acting of his own accord in seeking out Haitian President Boyer for support in the emigration scheme, Dewey lost his job at the ACS, who saw this alternative to the Liberian plan as a direct attack against them. See Chris Dixon, African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism, in the

149 to those who have been for many years, and are now our greatest earthly friends and benefactors‐‐the English. If not so, go to our brethren, the Haytians, who, according to their word, are bound to protect and comfort us” (62‐3). Haiti is shown as a second choice to England, though this likely had to do with the island’s overwhelming Catholic majority: earlier in the text, Walker lamented that the country was “plagued with that scourge of nations, the Catholic religion; but I hope and pray God that she may rid herself of it, and adopt in its stead the Protestant faith” (24). Walker reveals here the connection between the correspondence between the mission in literacy delineated earlier and the religiously‐inflected

“missionary destiny of the African race” evoked by Howard‐Pitney. U.S. blacks could teach their Haitian brethren the ways of Protestantism, but they could also learn from Haitian politics.

Indeed, more than as a refuge, it is as an example that Haiti is celebrated in

Walker’s Appeal. Wondering what prevents blacks in the Southern states, but also in the West Indies and in South America where there are “six to eight coloured persons for one white” to take over those countries, Walker concludes that a servile spirit bolstered by the state of ignorance in which whites keep blacks is the main obstacle to their righteous revolt (71‐72). Education, knowledge of history far and near as well as an awareness of domestic and foreign politics are all necessary for the racial and political union Walker advocates.

White abolitionists and their motifs

Nineteenth Century (West Port, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 35‐45.

150 The importance of literacy to the struggle of black Americans was not lost on the white population. White abolitionists in the North were the victims of a brutal campaign of intimidation in the 1830s: speakers were assaulted by pro‐slavery mobs in cities from Boston to , abolitionists newspapers attacked, their presses destroyed, and in some cases abolitionists were assassinated, as in the infamous 1837 murder of Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, . The Midwestern territories of , Illinois and Missouri were the frontline in increasingly violent confrontations between supporters and opponents of slavery. In April and July

1836, a white mob attacked the black section of Cincinnati, killing several people and destroying houses. In July, the mob attacked black residents again, and also descended on the James G. Birney’s abolitionist newspaper The Cincinnati Weekly and Abolitionist, destroying Birney’s printing press and driving him out of town.

Later that year, the spiritual leader of the Universal Unitarian Church, William Ellery

Channing, wrote a letter to Birney that was pubished as a pamphlet and republished in newspapers around the country. Channing was then a recent convert to abolitionism with a national reputation as theologian and minister. As Channing states in his letter, “in regard to the methods adopted by the abolitionists of promoting emancipation, I might find much to censure; but when I regard their firm, fearless assertion of the rights of free discussion, of speech, and the press, I look on them with unmixed respect.”16 In order to defend abolitionist journalists, Channing underlines the odds stacked against a slave revolt: abolitionists themselves favor peaceful resolution; the power of slaveholders makes it almost impossible for

16 William Ellery Channing, Letter of Dr. William E. Channing to James G. Birney (Cincinnati: A. Pugh,

151 abolitionist literature to actually reach slaves; and in the ultimate recourse, the might of the free states would come on the side of the slave states. Yet, addressing the oft‐used excuse of pro‐slavery mobs that abolitionists and their writings

“[stirred] up insurrection at the South,” Channing deflates it in the following terms:

The truth is that any exposition of Slavery, no matter from whom it may come, may chance to favor revolt. It may chance to fall into the hand of a fanatic, who may think himself summoned by Heaven to remove violently this great wrong; or it may happen to reach the hut of some intelligent daring slave, who may think himself called to be the avenger of his race. All things are possible… . The truth is that the great danger to the slaveholder comes from slavery itself, from the silent innovations of time, from political conflicts and convulsions, and not from the writings of strangers. (Channing 7) Channing’s anonymous examples are transparent references to Nat Turner, the

“fanatic” whose actions had terrified the South a mere five years earlier, and

Toussaint Louverture as the “intelligent daring slave.” Try hard as he might, it is unlikely that Channing did not know how counter‐intuitive his examples were.

Turner was notoriously literate and derived his sense of mission from his readings of the Bible. More to the point, we have seen how the expressions “avenger of his race” had come to define Louverture and an intertextual line of black national redeemers, real and imagined, before him. The direct influence of abolitionist publications on violent slave revolts is difficult to establish, and random at best, but

Channing’s own recourse to Raynal’s race avenger motif suggests something of the way in which texts claim such connections, sometimes abusively, but always convincingly. Channing confirms the notion he appears to contradict: slavery alone could bring a slave to revolt, but a Nat Turner or a Toussaint Louverture, extraordinary black leaders of extraordinary black revolts, were indeed influenced

1836), 4.

152 by “exposition[s] of Slavery,” the Bible for the former, and Raynal for the latter. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”17

With this letter, Channing reveals part of the paradoxical relation tying abolitionists, their publications, and the slave population in antebellum U.S. national mythology. Though for a long time, most U.S. abolitionists could and did not support violent action against and therefore vehemently denied a causal relation between their texts and slave revolts, they nevertheless underline such links in portraying slave leaders as necessarily influenced by liberal print culture. At the same time, white authors praising extraordinary black leaders constantly did so in the discovery mode: diamonds in the rough, extraordinary black leaders would be forever forgotten if white authors did not commit their epiphanies to print. The discovery mode is central to the Western archive on the Haitian

Revolution, particularly texts supportive of the revolution. As mentioned in the last chapter, it was introduced by Marcus Rainsford in his Historical Account. Yet

Rainsford was well aware that the new nation of Haiti was already producing its own historical texts: indeed, he procured a history of the revolution written by one of Dessalines’s secretaries to inform his own book. White apologists for Louverture and the Haitian Revolution writing after Rainsford and often from his text, systematically begin their accounts by insisting on the pioneering and necessarily individual character of their work. The mode almost naturally spread from texts strictly about the Haitian Revolution to texts more broadly addressing the issue of

17 Eccl. 1:9.

153 slavery. W.E. Channing’s passing reference to the race avenger theme suggests how familiar it was in American discourse, and how easily it could be invoked in reference to writings by whites more than actions by blacks.

This tendency is further expressed in a 1849 article written for the abolitionist paper The National Era18 by James Handasyd Perkins, a Unitarian minister related by blood to the Channings and Higginsons of Boston.19 Perkins contributed to spread Unitarian thought to Ohio, and was present in Cincinnati when James Birney was driven out of town. Perkins’s experience of slavery was somewhat peculiar for a U.S. citizen: he saw it firsthand in his travels to the West

Indies in the early 1830s, but it appears he never visited the Southern states

(Perkins 43‐46). In his article “Louis le Droit: a Tale of ,” Perkins evokes an anecdote tied to the failed slave revolt of February 1831 in the French colony of

Martinique.20 In July 1830, ultraconservative King Charles X was deposed in a popular uprising and replaced by Louis‐Philippe I, who became France’s first constitutional monarch. News of the political upheaval reached Martinique only to exacerbate the volatile state of racial affairs on the island, shaken for the past decade or so with agitation for political equality from gens de couleur.21 The regime change brought hopes of improvements for gens de couleur but also for the enslaved

18 Organ of American and Foreign Antislavery Society published in DC starting in 1847, and started by Gamaliel Bailey, formerly of Birney’s newspaper in Cincinnati. featured ’s ’s Cabin as a serial. 19 The Transcendentalist author William Henry Channing—nephew of William Ellery Channing—was his cousin, and edited The Memoir and Writings of James Handasyd Perkins (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1851). 2 vols. 20 J.H.P., “Louis le Droit; A Tale of Martinique,” The National Era, 2 August 1849. 21 On this topic, see Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, “The February 1831 Slave Uprising in Martinique and the Policing of White Identity,” French Historical Studies 30.2 (2007): 203‐236, and Dale Tomich, “‘Liberté ou Mort’: Republicanism and Slave Revolt in Martinique, February 1831,” History Workshop

154 population, at a time when the neighboring English islands were close to abolishing slavery.

In February 1831, an organized group of slaves set fire to cane fields in plantations surrounding the island’s main city, Saint‐Pierre. The plan to take over

Saint‐Pierre was foiled by the unexpected visit of the island’s governor and his troops. Aided by the white and free colored militia, the soldiers soon put down the rebellion, although instances of arson continued well into March. Hundreds of slaves were arrested, and ultimately twenty‐some leaders were judged and eventually executed on the main square. Perkins’s story focuses on the extraordinary story of an extraordinary slave, Louis, “surnamed the ‘Straight’,” a slave so righteous as to be admired by all. When his fellow slaves tell him about their plans for rebellion, hoping he would lead them, Louis vows to keep their secret but refuses to participate in a violent rebellion: “Slavery, he told them, could never be effectually cured by murder.” Louis’s uncompromising sense of morals is his downfall: his commitment to non‐violence makes him suspect among slaves, all the more so after the rebellion is foiled. The slaves unsuccessfully attempt to murder him on several occasions. Still Louis refuses to denounce the conspirators, and becomes suspicious in the eyes of whites already rendered paranoid by the scale of the conspiracy. Louis

“convinced himself that it was better for one man to die, than for a whole community to live thus in terror.” He decides to surrender to the authorities and demand to be executed along with the leaders of the conspiracy.

Perkins’s Louis is a classic noble savage, “an African of pure blood; black as

29 (1990): 85‐91.

155 night and like night with a beauty of his own. His features were not those of the

Apollo certainly; but they were those of a man who had sense, feeling, will and conscience.” In the Oroonoko and Louverture mold, his righteousness is not devoid of European influence: “[h]e was uneducated, so far as letters are concerned, but the influence of Madame St Romain had educed from the soul of the slave such virtues and powers as few freemen can give proof of.” Madame St Romain is a benevolent figure, a slaveholder in spite of herself, an Enlightened despot: “she had caught early in life the true spirit of the Revolution of ’89,” we learn; “she held slaves only because she could not free them, or feared by freeing to ruin them.” Such largesse, of course, bears its own fruit: Madame St Romain frees the slaves she judges educated enough to cope with freedom, and would have freed Louis, “had he not asked to remain where he was born—a slave, but at the same time, most truly free.” Louis is not an avenger: he is a , as Perkins makes painfully clear in the last section of his article which describes Louis’s Via Dolorosa from trial to execution where he “[dies] among felons, scarce knowing that he is following the example of

Jesus.”

Yet in self‐sacrifice he becomes a legend, unsung but for Perkins’s article. In the introductory paragraphs of his article, Perkins laments that the many displays of slaves’ fidelity to their former masters during the Haitian revolution have for the most part remained uncelebrated: “the blacks still wait a biographer,” asserts

Perkins. So did the extraordinary character of Toussaint Louverture, according to the puzzling incipit of Perkins’s article:

156 Had the skin of Toussaint L'Ouverture been white, he would have found a ‘Marshall’ long since, able and delighted to portray his acts. Had the struggle for freedom in St Domingo been made by Anglo‐ Saxons, instead of Africans, some ‘Carlyle,’ while he sketched its horrors, would have made immortal its redeeming characteristics, its noble, self‐sacrificing traits. Perkins evokes both the supremacy of the “horrors of Saint Domingo” narrative of the Haitian Revolution in Western accounts and what he sees as sheer lack of adequate praise for the Revolution’s hero. The lack of recognition for Louis’s righteousness is for Perkins proof of the intensity of white prejudice: “we are yet too white for [his memory] on earth.” Yet Perkins’s argument rests on his own ignorance, willful or not, of black authors in the Caribbean and in his own country.

Publications about Haiti abounded in the first half of the nineteenth century; in 1816, the African‐American educator Prince Saunders published in London his

Haytian Papers, a collection of Haitian laws with comments from the author gleaned during his stay on the island. Born in Boston, Saunders was educated at famed

Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing’s school for blacks in Boston. British diplomats wrote about Haiti: the English envoy to Haiti, Sir James Barskett, penned a

History of the Island of St Domingo published in 1818. William Woodis Harvey’s

Sketches of Hayti (1827) focused on Christophe’s reign; James Franklin’s The Present

State of Hayti (1828), devoted half its pages to a history of the revolution before addressing more contemporary events. Charles Mackenzie, Consul General of

England in Haiti, published his Notes on Haiti (1830). These books contained lengthy historical sections about the revolution, most of them centered on the figure of

Toussaint Louverture. In 1842, Harriet Martineau wrote The Hour and the Man, a romanticized historical novel on Toussaint Louverture.

157 In white Atlantic abolitionist mythology, blacks as a group are more easily dealt with if portrayed as illiterate wretches, so as to reinforce the extraordinariness of singular examples. This rhetoric rests on contradictory notions: it means to prove by example that blacks are capable of the most admirable feats, but such examples are of necessity implied to be exceptional: they mean to reveal a potential for greatness in a people generally considered as inferior, rather than suggest that such greatness already exists in spite of slavery. Slavery makes brutes out of men, but these extraordinary examples show that the flame of humanity is not extinguished in them. White abolitionists’ insistence on playing the role of gatekeeper, discoverer of black extraordinariness is another peculiar aspect of their rhetoric. Much in the vein of Rainsford, they constantly rediscover proofs of black worth and expose them on the page. That Perkins’s categorical statement about black writers would come a few years after Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography found tremendous success in the United States is telling. It is clear that Perkins thinks of biographers to great men of history rather than to a former Southern slave escaped North; yet the sentence reveals the narrowness of his view of black literary achievements. The infamous words of abolitionist John A. Collins to Douglass come to mind: “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.”22 The fact of black writing is to

Perkins less useful than the more dramatic, if inaccurate, claim of its absence.

Asserting this absence intensified the sympathetic character of abolitionist writers’ endeavor: black‐skinned people not having produced worthy writers, the task of singing the praise of their race hero falls to their white friends.

22 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Boston: De Wolfe and

158 English and American abolitionists alone could give the event its due, portray it without passion, rationally separate the admirable from the despicable, the horror from the glory. The Haitian motif, omnipresent in nineteenth century abolitionism, is generally treated along those lines. White abolitionists serve as guides into an incredibly complex event, simplifying it for their audience the way only a white writer apparently could. John Relly Beard thus wrote in The Life of Toussaint

L’Ouverture published in England in 1853, when “the efforts which are now made to effect the abolition of slavery in the United Sates of America, seem to render the present moment specially fit for the appearance of a memoir of TOUSSAINT

L'OUVERTURE.”23 John R. Beard was evidently referring to Rainsford’s account when he wrote that “If apology for such a publication were required, it might be found in the fact that no detailed life of TOUISSAINT L'OVERTURE [sic] is accessible to the English reader, for the only memoir of him which exists in our language has long been out of print” (Beard v). An English Unitarian minister, Beard published in a variety of topics from the 1820s onward. He justifies his endeavor not simply for lack of an

English equivalent; his book will fill a greater cultural lack expressed in terms eerily reminiscent of Perkins’s article: “The blacks have no authors; their cause, consequently, has not yet been pleaded. In the authorities we possess on the subject, either French or mulatto interests, for the most part, predominate. Specially predominant are mulatto interests and prejudices, in the recently published Life of

Toussaint L'Ouverture, by SAINT REMY, a mulatto: this writer obviously values his

Fiske Co.., 1892), 269. 23 John R. Beard, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti (London: Ingram, Cooke and Co., 1853), v.

159 caste more than his country or his kind” (vi). According to Beard, mulattoes’ racial interests makes them incapable of looking objectively at Toussaint. This may be why he does not mention the names of Haitian publicists Julien Prévost, Comte de

Limonade, or Pompée Valentin, Baron de Vastey, despite the fact that they led a publicity campaign especially aimed at Great Britain on behalf of “Negro king”

Christophe. The many texts published roughly between The Treaty of Paris in 1814 and the conditional recognition of Haiti by France in 1825 meant to evoke sympathy from the English public, in hopes of warding off the threat of a new French attempt at regaining the island.24

Beard could have forgotten a campaign which for having been followed closely in the English press, was almost forty years old by the time he published his book. But he also dismisses a very recent precedent to his own endeavor. For Beard, the Haitian exile Joseph Saint‐Rémy—a mulatto dignitary fleeing the régime of

Soulouque—is not black enough for his 1850 account to do justice to the “First of the Blacks,” Toussaint Louverture. While it is true that Saint‐Rémy is one of the foremost Haitian historians responsible for what David Nicholls dubs the “mulatto legend” version of Haitian history, his assessment cannot be rejected wholesale as

Beard does here.25 Saint‐Rémy’s Toussaint is no less a hero than Beard’s; but he is considered through the prism of Haitian interior affairs. While eminently respectful of Louverture, Saint‐Rémy nevertheless criticizes the general’s rhetorical effort to turn the War of Knives into a race war against mulattoes. His Toussaint is no saint,

24 See Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: the Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). 25 See David Nicholls, “A Work of Combat: Mulatto Historians and the Haitian Past: 1847‐1867,”

160 but he is no devil either. In the preface to his book, Saint‐Rémy explains how

Alphonse de Lamartine’s 1850 play about the Haitian hero inspired him to write a biography of this “immense figure, who belongs to all races and ages.” He also delivers his own version of the discovery trope: “I may have made mistakes in my appreciations, but what man has never erred? Should you not show some leniency towards the writer who approaches virgin territory, who is the first to compile and gather documents which no other hand has touched, who opens a path no one else has attempted to open?”26

Saint‐Rémy’s portrayal of Toussaint serves a purpose in the context of

Haitian domestic politics; Beard, in turn, was hoping to influence public opinion in the United States at a time when the national debate on slavery was reaching a boiling point. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had made it illegal to assist escaped slaves even in the states of the Union that did not practice slavery. In 1854, the

Kansas‐ Act would lead to an open war between pro‐ and anti‐slavery supporters attempting to gain demographic superiority in the territory and thus secure it as a slaveholding or free state. Haitian histories of the revolution were too nuanced, too specific for a text Beard envisaged as a textual weapon in the looming war. For his purpose, Beard needs a race hero, an absolute black hero to hold up against white supremacy. He says just as much when introducing Toussaint in his account:

The appearance of a hero of negro blood was ardently to be wished, as affording the best proof of negro capability. By what other than a negro

Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16.1 (1974): 15‐38. 26 Joseph Saint‐Rémy, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Moquet, 1850), viii. My translation.

161 hand could it be expected that the blow would be struck which should show to the world that Africans could not only enjoy but gain personal and social freedom? To the more deep­sighted, the progress of events and the inevitable tendencies of society had darkly indicated the coming of a negro liberator. The presentiment found expression in the words of the philosophic Abbé Raynal, who, in some sort, predicted that a vindicator of negro wrongs would ere long arise out of the bosom of the negro race. That prediction had its fulfillment in Toussaint L'Ouverture. (Beard 23)

The line between nineteenth century English‐language treatments of Toussaint and the avenging figure of Raynal could not be stated more clearly. Beard insists on

Louverture’s blackness, and hints at his possibly aristocratic lineage: “We wish emphatically to mark the fact that he was wholly without white blood. Whatever he was, and whatever he did, he achieved all in virtue of qualities which in kind are common to the African race. Though of negro extraction, Toussaint, if we may believe family traditions, was not of common origin. His great grandfather is reported to have been an African king” (Beard 23). Beard also underlines Louverture’s alleged connection to Raynal: having “heard passages recited from Raynal,” he obtained a copy of the book, found in it the famous sections on slavery, and immediately, it seems, “became the vindicator of negro freedom” (30). To the long excerpt of Raynal that follows in Beard’s text is appended this footnote: “Some parts which breathe too much the spirit of revenge have been softened or omitted in the translation” (36 fn). Beard;’s subscription to the black avenger trope is tempered by his dedication to religion, and so is his portrait of Toussaint. Revenge and passion in Beard’s text are the prerogative of the mulatto, whom he describes as proud, mean, physically strong and rash, “ever prepared, if not panting, for revenge” (110). Beard means to counterbalance Saint‐Rémy’s mulatto history with a “black history” written by a

162 white Englishman.

Much like his fellow Unitarian ministers across the Atlantic, Beard was a dedicated abolitionist. There is evidence that the book did find its way to American shores in the 1850s, and one could speculate that members of the New England abolitionist Unitarian community read the book then.27 Ironically, Beard’s book would be republished in the United States in 1863 in an edition expanded to include an English‐language translation of Louverture’s autobiographical sketch as published in Saint‐Rémy’s 1850 Vie de Toussaint Louverture. Two years into the

Civil War, the American publication of Beard’s book carried extra political weight. It also worked as a companion piece to the lecture on Toussaint Louverture which

Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips had then been performing for several years. A closer study of Phillips’s rhetoric also reveals the manner in which the Haitian

Revolution at large, and in particular its titular hero Toussaint Louverture were made relevant to American political discourse.

Wendell Phillips and Louverture

Phillips and Beard are connected through the Anglo‐American abolitionist network:

James Redpath, the Scottish‐American abolitionist, close friend of John Brown and agent of the Haitian government in the United States published Phillips’s lecture in his Pine and Palm in 1861. In 1863, Redpath published an extended edition of

Beard’s biography of Louverture for the United States. In the new preface, Redpath underlines the changes made to Beard’s 1853 text:

27 The book was advertised for sale by Newport, R.I. bookseller W. H. Peek in issues of the Newport

163 With this work the editor has taken the liberty of making a few verbal and other changes in the text of the opening chapters; of erasing the two elaborate guesses as to Toussaint’s Scriptural studies and readings in the Abbé Raynal’s philosophy… . In the historical record of Dr. Beard, no changes have been made. This fact does not imply a uniform concurrence of judgment. For it is but justice to say, that, although "the blacks have no authors," they have found in Dr. Beard not a friend only, but an able and zealous partisan. There have been three versions of Haytian history,‐‐the white, the black, and the yellow: the white representing the pro‐slavery party, the black that of the negroes, and the yellow that of the mulattoes. The abolitionists of England and America have adopted the negro standard,‐‐refusing equally to pay any homage to Pétion, the idol of the mulatto historians, whom they call the Washington of Hayti, or to regard Toussaint as the bête noir [sic] of the revolution, or otherwise than as Hayti's hero, "Great, ill‐requited chief." This brief statement will show that to have undertaken to present the other sides of the events narrated would have required a volume of notes.28 Redpath moved most of the Raynal quote to a footnote, but he kept Beard’s

“elaborate guess” intact. As the white voice that inspired Toussaint, Raynal is the opening bracket in the framing of Toussaint by white authors. Redpath advances that there is a Haitian history for each of the three racial castes, but does not address the paradox that black histories have apparently all been written by white authors. Redpath hints that he does not necessarily agree with Beard’s racialized diagnosis, and as well he should not: as an agent of the Haitian government in the

United States, one could assume that he knew enough of Haitian society to be wary of definitive, categorical divisions. He also makes clear, without judging it, that the particulars of the “mulatto legend” are not adapted to the use American abolitionists want to make of Haitian history.

Wendell Phillips’s oratory is provocative, with hints of sarcasm and humor,

Mercury from July to September 1854. 28 [John R. Beard, Joseph Saint‐Rémy] Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography (Boston:

164 and a testimony to the radicalization of the debate following and the infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision in the v. Sandiford case.29

The majority opinion delivered by Justice Taney not only judged that slaves, being property in slave‐holding states, remained so in free states; it also asserted that while “one of the African race” could be granted freedom in a given state and therefore be considered a Free inhabitant, “no example, we think, can be found of his admission to all the privileges of citizenship in any State of the Union… .”30 The

Constitution itself, Taney declared further, drew a clear “line of distinction between the citizen and the subject; the free and the subjugated races.” The decision made official the notion that black Americans were legally inferior to whites. These events form the backdrop to Phillips’s lecture, which he began delivering in 1860.

In this lecture, his avowed goals are to convince a white audience of the worth of the black race through the example of the Haitian Revolution and of its principal hero, Toussaint Louverture: “I am about to compare and weigh races indeed, I am engaged tonight in what you will think the absurd effort to convince you that the Negro race, instead of being that object of pity or contempt which we usually consider it, is entitled, judged by the facts of history, to a place close by the side of the Saxon.” Phillips is speaking from the vantage point described by Doyle in

Freedom’s Empire, in which the America’s legend of freedom is conflated with the

James Redpath, 1863), v. 29 For a sense of how audiences reacted to his lecture, compare the description of his lecture delivered in in the 1 February 1860 issue of the New York Herald to that of his December 1861 lectures, described in Speeches, Lectures and Letters. 30 60 U.S. Reports (6 March 1857), 418.

165 natural characteristics of the “Anglo‐Saxon race.”31 While he clearly plays with the potential prejudices of his audience to better deflate them, Phillips nevertheless suggests how widespread notions of racial hierarchy were in his time and exposes the importance of heroes to national self‐definition. Recognizing Louverture’s worth is granting that blacks have a spot at the side of the greatest of all races: “I attempt the Quixotic effort to convince you that the Negro blood, instead of standing at the bottom of the list, is entitled, if judged either by its great men or its masses, either by its courage, its purpose, or its endurance, to a place as near ours as any other blood known in history” (Phillips 469).

The role of the extraordinary negro in U.S. abolitionist rhetoric is made obvious here: “Now races love to be judged in two ways—by the great men they produce, and by the average merit of the mass of the race.”32 The worth of a race,

Phillips continues, is measured by three criteria: courage, “the element which says, here and today, “This continent is mine, from the Lakes to the Gulf: let him beware who seeks to divide it!”; “the recognition that force is doubled by purpose; liberty regulated by law is the secret of Saxon progress,” and “persistency, endurance; first a purpose, then death or success” (469). Phillips’s lecture reassesses the Haitian

Revolution along racial lines. Where Perkins meant to offset the “horrors of St

Domingo” with tales of slave fidelity, Phillips’s goal is to judge the events by Anglo‐

Saxon racial criteria, and thus prove that blacks are not found wanting.

Yet like their hero Louverture, they have not been given their due. The facts

31 Wendell Phillips, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Speeches, Lectures and Letters (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1884), 468. This version of the speech was delivered in December 1861. 32 Ibid., 468.

166 of the Haitian Revolution are, all in all, seldom disputed; the issue is what Collins might have called the “philosophy” of it, the legacy, the way in which the written record makes it into public memory. In keeping with the tendency discussed above,

Phillips exaggerates the whiteness of it:

I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards—men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials for his biography are from the lips of his enemies. (476)

Describing the slave uprising, Phillips declares “During this whole struggle, the record is—written, mark you, by the white man—the whole picture from the pencil of the white race—that for one life the negro took the battle, in hot and bloody fight, the white race took, in the cook malignity of revenge, three to answer for it” (475). It is all there, black glory, white shame, all in the “whole picture from the pencil of the white race.” Much like Perkins or Beard before him, although Phillips addresses the theme of vengeance so central to accounts of the Haitian Revolution, he throws it back squarely onto the whites—where Beard also made it a mulatto particularity— with blacks presented as showing utter magnanimity and measure. Louverture and the Haitians behind him did what they had to do when confronted with the unstoppable fury of the slaveholders.

Phillips’s lecture ends on this rousing note:

You think me a fanatic tonight, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion of the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday, then,

167 dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture. (494)

Louverture’s legacy, or lack thereof, is therefore a matter not just of record, but of adequate reading. Indeed racial prejudice had a its role in blinding Phillips’ white

American audience to Louverture’s worth. But paradoxically, in claiming in turn the hostility of the existing record and its inadequateness, Phillips places himself in an overall sympathetic tradition of representation connecting him to Laveaux, and suffering from similarly problematic views infused with deeply racialist notions. In the faintly social Darwinist vision of competition between the races that undergirds

Phillips’s declamation, Louverture is not just Haitian; he is the sole hero of the entire black race. Phillips’s argument is rooted in awareness of the textuality of

Louverture’s legacy, but it makes an argument for a form of transcendence: the truth about Louverture is in the text, if one can transcend one’s prejudices.

The black biographers ignored time and again by Phillips and his predecessors had a somewhat simpler point to make: from the United States, Haiti’s was a complex legacy, but only as a textual one could it be rationally discussed, passed along, perpetuated. Where the aforementioned abolitionists insisted on regularly rediscovering Louverture, black authors tended to emphasize the importance of appropriating the archive. The appropriation of the black avenger trope became a conscious element in this program nowhere more obviously than in

Martin Delany’s serial novel Blake.

Blake, American Avenger On February 4, 1862, Senator introduced the bill by which the

168 United States of America would officially recognize the existence of Haiti and

Liberia. Formerly the American Colonization Society’s project in repatriating freed

African slaves, but also free U.S.‐born blacks, declared independence in

1847, with the tacit, but non‐official, approval of the United States. Great Britain had only recognized Haiti in 1833, the same year it had formally abolished slavery. The

United States government had until 1862 refused to recognize either beacon of black citizenship. Their existence negated the precept enounced in the Dred Scott decision, according to which “the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” In turn, both independent black republics represented viable and enviable alternatives to living in the United States for many among the U.S. black population.

The Lincoln administration’s recognition of Haiti and Liberia sent a message to

Secessionists and black Americans alike suggesting that the war between the states might soon become a liberation war. Yet Haiti’s position in U.S. black culture was complex and often contradictory, as U.S. blacks measured the Haitian Revolution against the country’s present situation and its role in U.S. politics. In the 1820s,

Philadelphian author and activist Prince Saunders had been the main proponent of

African American emigration to the island, and used his ties to Haitian monarch

Henry I to organize inaugural trips from the U.S. to Haiti. In the mid‐1820s thousands of African Americans attempted to settle in the island, but found insurmountable obstacles in language difference, working conditions and climate

(Dixon 33‐47). A similarly disastrous wave of immigration supported by the Haitian government in the mid‐1850s contributed to diminish Haiti’s standing among U.S.

169 blacks. It had already been harmed by the numerous violent regime changes the young nation had seen. An aggressive new campaign to promote U.S. black emigration to Haiti in 1860 became the target of severe criticism from prominent black public voices, among them activist and writer Martin Delany.

As Sumner’s bill was being discussed in Congress, The Weekly Anglo­African serially published Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1861‐1862).

Blake resonated deeply with David Walker’s Appeal, the protagonist following in

Walker’s footsteps “in the Southern and Western sections of this country,” taking to organizing where his forebear had “traveled and observed nearly the whole of those things” (Walker 86 fn). In turn, the idea of an organized black uprising throughout the U.S. South and the West Indies developed in Delany’s novel also had connections with, if not roots in, Haiti; yet the island nation goes almost unmentioned in the novel. Katy Chiles explains the “relative silence on Haiti in the novel” by “the change of focus in Delany’s emigration politics in the late 1850s.”33

Delany’s personal politics undoubtedly influenced his fiction writing, but more than the nation of Haiti, it is the narrative of Haiti that Delany means to engage with in

Blake. It is precisely because Haiti and the very idea of black revolution seemed inseparable in U.S. print culture that Delany so adamantly disconnected them in

Blake. In its incarnation as a cultural object produced at the crossroads of historical fact, racial representation and nationalistic fantasies, Haiti weighed heavy on the notion of black revolution. The strategic avoidance of Haiti in Blake can be seen as a cultural intervention, by which Delany proposes an alternate narrative to the

33 Katy Chiles, “Within and without Raced Nations: Intratextuality, Martin Delany, and Blake; or the

170 Haitian Revolution and a renovated literary model (master plot) for a black nation in the making.

Delany, Blake and black nationalism

The protagonist in the novel, Henry Blake, is a skilled slave on the Franks’ plantation in Natchez, . As Henry is away running errands, the Franks sell his wife

Maggie to friends of theirs for their trip to Cuba. On finding out, Blake leaves the plantation to go after her. In the process, he travels throughout the Southern states, meeting secretly with select slaves in plantations to impart his “plan for a general insurrection of the slaves in every state, and the successful overthrow of slavery!”34

After visiting virtually every slaveholding state in the union, Blake takes Maggie’s family members to freedom in . He eventually makes the trip to Cuba, where he finds Maggie, and manages to buy her freedom. His plan for general insurrection has not changed, but he finds a headquarters in the Caribbean island. Blake, who it turns out was born and raised in Cuba, forms an alliance with a group of black and mulatto co‐conspirators to undertake “war—war upon the whites” (290). The novel as we know it35 ends with a scene heavy with foreboding, as Gofer Gondolier, a member of the small executive committee of the uprising dubbed the Grand Council,

Huts of America.” American Literature 80.2 (2008), 339. 34 Martin R. Delany, Blake; or the Huts of America. Floyd J. Miller, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 39. 35 Floyd Miller published Blake for the first time as a single volume novel in 1970. Miller speculates that Blake’s serial publication in the Weekly Anglo­African ran from November 1861 to May 1862. Miller was unable to locate the first four issues of the Weekly Anglo­African for May 1862 and assumes that the final chapters of the novel were published on those dates (ix).

171 steps out into the streets of Havana, “to spread among the blacks an authentic statement of the outrage: ‘Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!” (313).36

Blake has come to represent Delany’s black nationalist politics in American literary studies. Floyd Miller sees the novel as the “culmination of Delany’s prewar thinking” (xix). It is also an “accumulation” of passages written across close to two decades, with some, Miller speculates, dating as far back as the 1840s. Delany’s political stance fluctuated throughout his career, and his black nationalism covers profoundly different, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, positions. Tommie

Shelby argues that, throughout his career, Delany wavered between two strains of black nationalism: strong, or classical nationalism, that “treats the establishment of an independent black republic or a separate self‐determining community as an intrinsic goal of black liberation struggles,” and weak, or pragmatic nationalism, that

“urges black solidarity and concerted action as a political strategy to lift or resist oppression.”37 Classical nationalism should not necessarily be seen as a full‐fledged program so much as “often merely a defensive and rhetorical posture” (Shelby 668).

Pragmatic nationalism, it turns out, is the option most characteristic of black nationalist tradition in general and Delany in particular. Pragmatism goes a long way to explain the most striking change of mind in Delany’s career: seeing the Civil

War as an opportunity to achieve in the United States “his most cherished values—

36 Reacting to the savage beating of the daughter of Montego‐‐one of the conspirators‐‐by a white American, Gondolier appears at that moment on the verge to enact immediate revenge. It bears noting that in its precipitation, the scene is reminiscent of the previous aborted uprising in , in which slave leaders gathered to discuss an uprising are betrayed by one of their own, who comes running out of their safehouse, shouting “Insurrection! Insurrection! Death to every white!” (106). Montego and Gondolier act in a rush while Blake is not there. Gondolier’s outburst is in many ways as worrisome as it may seem hopeful. 37 Tommie Shelby, “Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism: Martin Delany on the Meaning of Black

172 equality, citizenship, self‐government and ‘manhood’,” Delany abandoned his plan for African emigration and began advocating for black involvement on the side of the Union in 1863 (682). Somewhat contrary to his reputation, Delany knew to adapt his politics to circumstances.

So too did he know to adapt his writings. His novel came on the heels of the

Dred Scott decision, which asserted that the founding document of the United States declared black people subjects in the land of the free. This was hardly a discovery.

The Taney decision drew logical conclusions from a line of legal texts. Thus, the so‐ called “Three‐Fifth Compromise” of 1787 granted slave states the right to count slaves among their population for representational purpose: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”38

Justice Taney’s “free inhabitants” category extended the compromise’s “other persons” status to the free black population of the United States. Importantly, there were also extra‐legal precedents to this notion: according to Jared Gardner, the equation of citizenship with whiteness had long been prepared in American literature. Popular works of the early American canon built the United States as the natural home of an “American race” defined against Europeans, Native Americans and Africans.39 The common notion also transpires in the way David Walker

Political Solidarity.” Political Theory 31.5 (2003), 667. 38 Art. I, § 2, cl. 3. 39 See Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787­1845,

173 systematically opposes his “colored brethren of the United States” to the “white

Christians of America,” whom he also designates simply as “Americans.” Drawing on a widely accepted idea, the Taney decision legally confirmed the United States as a white nation.

Under Walker’s fiery rhetoric still lay the gloomy sense of hope characteristic of the jeremiad: black revolution would only come if white Americans did not come to their senses in accepting blacks as full‐fledged citizens. Some thirty years later,

Delany put his projects squarely under the seal of blackness: as he could not be recognized a U.S. citizen, he dedicated his efforts to black people and the “nation within the nation” they constituted on U.S. soil.40 Gregg Crane thus analyzes Blake as a response in kind to Taney, a “literary intervention in American jurisprudence.”41

For Taney, the United States were a nation where might makes right, and white supremacy could be defined as natural law because whites held power; Cuba,

Delany proposed, would be the geographical base for its black counterpart. Delany flips Taney’s statement onto its head, which Crane finds problematic, as “Delany’s acceptance of majority status as the sine qua non of citizenship rights threatens to swallow his appeal to the moral restraints that a liberal natural rights theory of

American law would impose on the legal exercise of the will of the majority” (Crane

530). Katy Chiles finds similar limits to Delany’s novel. She reads Blake in intratextual relation to the articles and letters that surrounded it in the pages of the

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 40 Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States and Official Report of the Valley Exploring Party, 1852; 1861 (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2004), 181. 41 Gregg D. Crane, “The Lexicon of Rights, Power, and Community in Blake: Martin R. Delany's Dissent

174 Weekly Anglo­African where it was first published. Chiles revives the ideological conversations in which Delany’s text participated to argue that Blake “theorizes the nation‐state form… depicting the antithesis of an indivisible nation” (Chiles 324).

Yet, Chiles contends, in designing an “alternate, radical citizenship,” Delany problematically recycles the ideology of the “racializing nation‐state” (345). Chiles and Crane both consider that Delany’s program borrows too much from the unfair white supremacist rhetoric it purports to oppose.

It would be a mistake to judge Blake as a strict program rather than a fictional exercise with wider political pretensions. The difference may be slight, but it matters. All texts are not equal, and even if Delany certainly hoped to influence minds with his novel, Blake’s plan was, after all, fiction, where Taney’s opinion was law. Delany’s novel was an intervention in jurisprudence, but also more squarely into historical writing, as argued by Andy Doolen:

Thus, rather than adhere to a U.S. national framework, Delany rejects it as a model for representing the African American experience… . In this light, the national framework is a trap, and the novel form enabled Delany to free the black national experience from it… . In Blake, Delany proceeds by way of a key symbolic disjuncture between national and foreign spaces. As I argue, this transnational shift enables Delany’s narration of a black historical experience that does not refer ultimately to white revolutionary ideology.42

Delany is not only writing an alternative history, “black militant near‐future fiction” to borrow Kali Tal’s term; he is even more accurately writing for the national library of a nation to come.43

from Dred Scott.” American Literature, 68.3 (1996), 527. 42 Andy Doolen, “ ‘Be Cautious of the Word ‘Rebel’’: Race, Revolution, and Transnational History in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America,” American Literature 81‐1, 156‐7. 43 See Kali Tal, “That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near Future Fiction,” Social Text 20.2 (2002): 65‐91.

175 In his The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), Delany stated clearly that nationhood was a necessary step for the rights of blacks around the world to be recognized: “The claims of no people, according to established policy and usage, are respected by any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity” (Delany, Condition 181‐182). Yet Tommie

Shelby’s classification of black nationalist thought is helpful here to put things in perspective. The classical nationalism displayed in Blake matches what Shelby calls

“defensive and rhetorical posture;” it is a retort built with rhetorical weapons designed and used in the real world by the pro‐slavery party, and delivered on paper. It also places itself in a tradition of black literary activism that further links

Delany to David Walker: a nation is built on readers, and readers must have textual frames to build their actual nation.

Flipping the script

David Walker invoked in the same breath the prospect of slave revolution and an educational mission:

‐‐for colored people to acquire learning in this country, makes tyrants quake and tremble on their sandy foundation… . Do you suppose one man of good sense and learning would submit himself, his father, mother, wife and children, to be slaves to a wretched man like himself, who, instead of compensating him for his labours, chains, hand‐cuffs and beats him and family almost to death, leaving life enough in them, however, to work for, and call him master? No! no! he would cut his devilish throat from ear to ear, and well do slave‐holders know it. The bare name of educating the coloured people, scares our cruel oppressors almost to death… . The whites shall have enough of the blacks, yet, as true as God sits on his throne in Heaven. (Walker 37)

Walker portrayed black readers as the vanguard of the black nationalist movement.

Reading is also here metaphorical; Walker’s nation of readers read books as well as

176 historical facts, and must be capable of interpreting and drawing conclusions from events around the world. As such, they can and do make use of “white’ writings as well as black.

In a complex and eminently self‐aware movement, Blake does engage with, and indeed to a point reuse, scenarios that originated in white supremacist literature: thus the second part of Blake, which centers on Cuba, confirms in fiction fears expressed by slaveholders in the Americas and beyond. Henry Blake’s plan for black revolution involves recruiting slaves around the Southern states, sailing to

Africa and Cuba and using connections in all those places to organize a movement for the independence of Cuba as a new black republic. As such, the plan itself is a mission to teach American slaves how to read the fears of their race foe. Indeed, the broad possibility of a black revolution in Cuba, if not this specific scenario, was evoked constantly in U.S. American public discourse, perhaps rightly so: during several months in 1812, groups of rebellious slaves attacked and burned plantations to the ground until the capture of the conspiracy’s leader, free black and militia commander José Aponte.44 For years afterwards, rumors of slave rebellions backed by the free black population haunted Cuba. Several alleged conspiracies were thwarted in the following decades, the most famous being the 1844 Escalera conspiracy, in which thousands allegedly led by the mulatto poet Plácido plotted to overthrow white rule in Cuba. It remains unclear to this day how real the plot was, but thousands of blacks, slave and free, suffered in the subsequent nationwide repression (Childs 176‐177). These attempts had a tremendous effect on white

177 Cuban population, but the shock waves also reached U.S. shores.

Starting in the mid‐1840s, Southern interests pushed for the annexation of

Cuba, by purchase or by force. The threat of an independent, black Cuba was often dangled to justify the enterprise. Spain rejected successive monetary offers from

Presidents Polk and Pierce, and between 1849 and 1851 the Cuban

Narciso Lopez, backed by Southern money and men, unsuccessfully attempted to invade the island on several occasions.45 In 1853, the appointment of notorious opponent to slavery Juan de la Pezuela, as Captain General of Cuba only bolstered the fears of planters on Cuban and U.S. shores. Their influence on U.S. politics is clear in the “,” a dispatch to President Pierce in which U.S. diplomats Pierre Soulé, James Buchanan and John Mason present the annexation of the island as a matter of national—and hence, racial—security:

We should, however, be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo, with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our own neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our Union.46 According to this rhetoric, the simple notion of black citizenship was the true

“horror of the white race.” By making this idea the center of Blake, Delany was toying with a scenario often bandied by the plantocracy itself. Aware of its role in pro‐slavery propaganda, Delany nevertheless enjoins his readers to entertain the

44 See Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 45 On this topic, see Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: filibustering and Cuban exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 46 “The Ostend Manifesto.”

178 thought as a counter‐narrative, turning the U.S. national nightmare into a black national myth.

Jeffory Clymer reads Blake as a response to the Ostend Manifesto, in which

Delany “reproduces terminology of the Ostend Manifesto as he shows how white violence breeds black revolution.”47 The Manifesto also reveals how the terminology of white supremacy makes systematic use of black revolution, the

Haitian Revolution in particular. The text suggests that emancipation can only lead to horrors for the white race. Michel‐Rolph Trouillot notes that

to most foreigners [the revolution] was primarily a lucky argument in a larger issue. Thus apologists and detractors alike, abolitionists and avowed racists, liberal intellectuals, economists, and slave owners used the events of Saint‐Domingue to make the case, without regard to Haitian history as such. Haiti mattered to all of them, but only as pretext to talk about something else. (97) The memory of the Haitian Revolution as recorded by foreign writers and historians thus paradoxically contributed to the erasure and trivialization of the event in

Western writings. Trouillot argues that the long and perpetuated silence over the revolution “was ironically reinforced by the significance of the revolution for its contemporaries and for the generation immediately following” (97). The Haitian revolution could not have happened, yet it had. Half a century later, it still provided the only existing lexicon for black revolution, just as this lexicon was crucial in maintaining the “unthinkability” of black revolution. Trouillot’s analysis is useful to explain what is lacking in the somewhat similar opinions voiced by Wendell Phillips

47 Jeffory Clymer, “Martin Delany's Blake and the Transnational Politics of Property.” American Literary History 15.4 (2003), 727. Soulé’s letter itself reproduces older terminology: the alarmist image of the fire next door was made famous by Edmund Burke in his “First Letter on a Peace,” in which Burke called upon the Roman “law of civil vicinity” to promote England’s right to

179 before him. As Phillips bemoaned the partisan character of white and mulatto writings on the Haitian Revolution, he ignored other sources in order to produce an argument meant to fit the U.S. situation rather than accurately portray the state of historical documentation. However well‐meant, his appropriation of the Haitian

Revolution participated in the pattern described here by Trouillot.

Abolitionists and pro‐slavery advocates alike constantly depicted anti‐ slavery struggle in and around the United States through a Haitian prism. The

Haitian Revolution could be proof of black worth or evidence of black savagery, a blueprint of what to expect, fear, or hope for in the war over slavery that would inevitably come. The same trends applied in Cuba: the main piece of evidence used in the trial against José Aponte, a notebook full of subversive drawings he allegedly showed his accomplices in their secret meetings, feature preeminently portraits of

Haitian leaders Louverture, Dessalines, Christophe, and Aponte was rumored to have asked the Haitian government for support in his endeavor (Fischer 42). Some of the slaves involved in the uprising had been soldiers with Jean François, once

Toussaint’s commanding officer in the service of the Spanish crown (Childs 167).

Similar rumors pervaded reports about the 1844 Escalera conspiracy, whose purported leader, mulatto poet Plácido, appears in Blake as Blake’s uncle. The linking of Cuba and Haiti performed in the Ostend Manifesto placed itself in what was already a tradition: when Cuba found itself at “moments of revolutionary change, the image of Haiti would reappear, metaphorically revealing how racial

intervene against the French Revolution (“Second Letter on a Regicide Peace,” The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. IX. R. B. McDowell ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 251).

180 divisions continued to structure Cuban society” (Childs, “Impact” 150). In matters of black revolution, there was no avoiding the long shadow of Haiti.

Haiti’s black aura

During the meeting of the Grand Council, Blake declares that “the like of tonight's gathering, save in a neighboring island years before any of us had an existence, in this region is without a parallel” (Delany, Blake 257). He does not name Haiti, as it is unnecessary. Of the many slave plots and uprisings that occurred in the Americas, the Haitian Revolution was the only one of which a nation was born, after allied slaves and gens de couleur (free colored) managed to fight off the Spanish, English and French armies. For the half‐century that followed, Haiti remained a terrifying symbol of potentiality throughout the slaveholding countries of the American hemisphere.

Yet, while the Haitian Revolution marked spirits around the world, that it had any direct influence on subsequent slave revolts is questionable. Indeed, Haiti’s most direct involvement in international revolution was not on the side of another black American community, but with the South American Creole revolution of Simón

Bolívar. El Libertador started his first two campaigns from President Alexandre

Pétion’s Republic of Haiti, backed by Haitian money and armed with Haitian weapons. Yet, merely a decade later, President Bolívar of Great presented his project for an independent federation of South American countries as a

181 guarantee against “that horrific monster which has devoured the island of Santo

Domingo.”48

The “horrors of St Domingo” version of the Haitian Revolution held sway over mainstream public discourse in the United States. The threat of a black nation as now embodied by the Caribbean island’s struggle for independence was strictly presented as a white defeat, and therefore a step back in civilizational progress.

When Soulé, Buchanan and Mason equate the Haitian Revolution with a catastrophe wrought on the white race, they are referring to the massacre of the French by

General Jean‐Jacques Dessalines in the first months of independence. Beyond this, their letter is an intertextual assault on the founding document of the Haitian nation, the Constitution of 1805. Jean‐Jacques Dessalines, self‐proclaimed “avenger of

America,” had through this text turned Haiti into a slaveholder’s nightmare: the

Constitution forbade whites from owning property in the island, and made all

Haitians—including a few naturalized German and Polish soldiers who had deserted

Napoleon’s army—officially black.49 Haiti had entered into law the race‐wide, black union of white Western literature’s nightmares. As an article in the Constitution, the

48 Simón Bolívar, “Thoughts on the Congress to Be Held in Panama.” El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 170. 49 Articles 12‐14 of the Constitution of 1805 declare: “Art. 12 No white man, of whatsoever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein. Art. 13 The preceding article cannot in the smallest degree affect white women, who have been naturalized Haitians by government, nor does it extend to children already born. Or that may be born of the same women. The Germans and Polanders, naturalized by government, are also comprised in the dispositions of the present article. Art. All acception (sic) of colour among the children of one and the same family, of whom the chief magistrate is the father, being necessarily to cease, the Haytians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.” Cobbett’s Political Register, vol. VIII, no. 8, 24 August 1805, 310. A few hundred Germans and Poles appear to have remained on the island as citizens after independence. On this topic, see Jan Pachonski and Reuel K. Wilson, Poland's Caribbean Tragedy: A

182 declaration of race unity claims a performative function: it enacted a decision into reality, and as such represented as much of a threat to the U.S.A. as the reality of

Haiti itself. Texts travel better than armies. Domestically, this unifying gesture also meant to smooth over the complex dynamics of political strife among the different socio‐ethnic groups on the island. Indeed, the reality on Haiti’s ground was not as rosy and color prejudice, which had played such an important part in the social organization of the island before independence, still carried meaning in the independent nation.

These rifts were perpetuated throughout the Revolution, as alliances within the revolutionary party switched, and continued in other forms. Disputes were born of independence that owed both to the old socio‐racial order and to the inequities brought by the new order. Dessalines remained less than two years in power before being assassinated, and the country was split by his two principal rivals, Henri

Christophe to the North and Alexandre Pétion to the South, roughly on racial lines,

Christophe starting a black kingdom and Pétion a mulatto republic. They wrote their own constitutions, each toning down the radicalism of Dessalines’s declaration and expressing a more conciliatory stance towards European powers.50 Yet Dessalines’s text had already marked Western spirits, and its rhetorical bid for black union was better heard outside of Haitian borders than within.

The long tenure of the Francophile Jean‐Pierre Boyer as president of unified

Haiti (1820‐1843) made little impact against the omnipresence of the “horrors of

Study of Polish Legions in the Haitian War of Independence 1802­1803 (New York: Columbia Press, 1986). 50 On this topic, see Julia Gaffield, “Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National

183 Saint Domingo” narrative in Western opinion. In 1825, under pressure from King

Charles X of France, Boyer accepted to pay a tribute to the former colonizing power in exchange for the recognition of Haiti’s independence. Paying tribute to France sat well with the Southern mulatto branch of the Haitian elite that now controlled the country’s institutions. Not so with the rural, mostly black population who suffered from Boyer’s decision to reestablish the Code Rural, a system of serfdom little removed from slavery that revived socio‐racial antagonisms between the poor, rural black population, and the black and mulatto elite. Fleeing forced labor on the big plantations, many former slaves chose a life of freedom and subsistence farming, effectively becoming maroons. Boyer was ousted by an insurrection led by the foremost members of his own party in 1843. What followed were a few years of utter political instability, during which the gens de couleur elite ran the country by putting black puppet presidents in power in order to placate the black masses. This strategy, known as the politique de doublure (politics of the understudy) “allowed the light‐skinned elites to remain in power, but under cover of blackness.”51

Successive Haitian heads of state, members of the elite or controlled by them, focused on keeping their entourage, the people, and the Spanish side of the island under control, with little success. Haitian force, so feared by slaveholders around the hemisphere, was kept within the bounds of the island, directed inwards.

As Eric Sundquist notes, incessant Haitian attempts at annexing the Spanish side of the island were “sometimes perceived abroad as a campaign to exterminate the white race,” and indeed this vision of things conveniently played into the

Constitutions, 1801–1807,” Journal of Social History 41.1 (2007): 81‐103.

184 narrative framework by then well installed in Western public discourse.52 But in turn the continuing factional strife on the island was used abroad as evidence in condescending judgments of the Revolution, and black people in general. Faustin

Soulouque was originally an “understudy” president when he was chosen by the elite to rule the country in 1848. He turned out to be less malleable than expected.

Soulouque crowned himself emperor of Haiti and rapidly took violent action against the elite, jailing and executing prominent gens de couleur army officers and government officials and replacing them with dark‐skinned Haitians. His secret militia, the zinglins, were chosen exclusively among the rural black population. That

Soulouque’s actions, like all Haitian politics, were more complicated than a simple black/mulatto opposition may need to be noted: there were many mulattoes in his government, and he “wanted a rapprochement, even a forced cooperation with the

Mulatto class.”53 Soulouque’s actions were widely reported on in France. The resounding French cultural silence over the Haitian revolution ended in grandiloquent fashion with the 1850 play Toussaint Louverture, written by poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine. In this arguably mediocre play, Lamartine suggested something of the strained relationship that tied ever‐evolving French national sentiment to black avenger representations. For Saint‐Aubin, Lamartine’s play through the fetishization of the black man, attempts to give a definition of white masculinity adapted to France’s new political situation following the 1848

51 Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 15. 52 Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 173. 53 Lyonel Paquin. The Haitians: Class and Color Politics (Brooklyn: Multi‐Type, 1983), 44.

185 revolution and the definitive abolition of slavery the same year.54 In post‐abolition

France, Haiti was no longer a silent threat; instead it became a point of reference by which to define one’s nation racially.

This was true for a progressive like Lamartine; it was expressed in much more drastic fashion in the work of by Arthur de Gobineau, The

Inequality of the Human Races (1853‐1855). Gobineau used the example of Haiti to underline what he saw as profound differences between “pure blacks” and mulattoes: only thanks to the “European blood” coursing through the veins of mulattoes who “tend, like all hybrids, to identify themselves with the more creditable of the races to which they belong,” had Haiti remained slightly civilized.55

For Gobineau, Haiti had proven as “depraved, brutal, and savage” as Africa, and “the history of Hayti, of democratic Hayti... merely a long series of massacres; massacres of mulattoes by negroes, or negroes by mulattoes” (49). In international public discourse increasingly influenced by scientific racist interpretations such as these,

Haiti’s political troubles boiled down to ‘Africanization,’ which also threatened Cuba.

Haiti’s mostly symbolic commitment to unified blackness, as once expressed in

Dessalines’s constitution, was a rhetorical bounty for the staunchest opponents of emancipation. Internationally, Haiti was the perfect bogeyman for pro‐slavery rhetoric, a figure of speech that could simultaneously embody racial terror and ridicule the notion of black political revolution.

54 Arthur F. Saint‐Aubin, “Alphonse de Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture and the Staging of White Masculinity,” Nineteenth Century French Studies, 35.2 (2007): 333‐351. 55 Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races. Trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Putnam and

186

Haiti and black America

During the Grand Council meeting, Madame Montego, wife of the mulatto Colonel

Montego, asks a candid question: “'What aid may we expect from Hayti—she is independent?” The Cuban poet Plácido didactically replies: “‘Hayti is a noble self‐ emancipated nation, but not able to aid us, excepting to give such of us shelter, as might find it necessary or convenient to go there’” (289). When The Weekly Anglo­

African published Blake, between 1861 and 1862, even Haiti’s status as a shelter was being questioned within the African American community. Delany’s recent conversion to African emigration, following his Niger Expedition, certainly influenced his opposition to , a constant topic of debate in African

American newspapers of the time. In 1860, a year after overthrowing Soulouque,

Haitian president Fabre Geffrard launched a new campaign calling on U.S. blacks to rejoin “the common country of the black race.”56 Like his predecessors, Geffrard knew well how Haitian history resonated with U.S. blacks. His campaign followed earlier efforts to encourage U.S. blacks to emigrate to Haiti. They had ended in disaster.57 Wary of Geffrard’s scheme, Delany also resented the juggernaut methods employed by the man in charge of the campaign, Scottish American radical James

Sons, 1915), 48. 56 William Seraille. “Afro‐American Emigration to Haiti during the Civil War.” The Americas 35.2 (1978), 187. 57 Haitian emigration had black (Prince Saunders) and white (Loring Dewey) advocates in the United States. The Haitian government accepted to support their endeavor by paying for U.S. blacks to come settle on land it would provide them. Most of those who made the trip only stayed for a few months: “Estimates vary as to the number of African Americans who emigrated to Haiti during the 1820s. The Haitian government subsidized the passage of six thousand, although the total number of emigrants might have been higher…” (Dixon 46). Not as many followed Rev. James T. Holly in his 1858 New Haven colony, but the ill‐prepared U.S. settlers suffered greatly from harsh living

187 Redpath. Activists committed to notions of black agency and self‐sufficiency were particularly dismayed by Redpath’s whiteness, and Delany voiced reservations in strong terms:

Neither do I regard or believe Mr. Redpath, the Haytian Government Agent, nor any other white man, competent to judge and decide upon the destiny of the colored people or the fitness of any place for the bettering of their condition, any more than I should be a Frenchman to direct the destiny of Englishmen.58

In paralleling skin color and national identity, Delany asserts his nationalist program, but also questions the commitment of Haitian authorities to self‐definition as the “common country of the black race.” With Geffrard, the gens de couleur elite was back in power in Haiti, and his choice of Redpath as agent represented for many

Haiti’s inability to truly overcome color prejudice.

As a free, dark‐skinned U.S. black, Delany must have related in odd ways to the Haitian national narrative and its foreign variations. Delany named one of his sons after Toussaint Louverture. He also named his son born in 1859 Faustin

Soulouque, which suggests something of his appreciation for the despot’s singular commitment to black power. Henry Blake’s personal history, in turn, also echoes

Haitian history: he is a free black creole by birth, and he expresses throughout the novel the elitist vision of the black race rather typical of his caste. He is wary of slaves, whose lack of education and spine may jeopardize the project, unless they are initiated into his Masonic‐inspired “secret.” His conspiracy rests on a fraternity of worthy, educated black readers, more often than not picked among the wealthy, although this is presented as a matter of pragmatism more than social prejudice.

conditions on the island, whose details were discussed in the black press.

188

Blake’s Masonic conspiracy is another way he is linked to David Walker.

Blake travels the states educating black people into the “secret,” an obvious reference to masonic rites both Walker and Delany were privy to. The secret is also, much more pragmatically, a reference to the education denied the enslaved and accessible to freemen. Walker’s vision of black missionaries of literacy is here undertaken by Blake. The Masonic overtones confirm that education to also be an initiation into interpretation, hermeneutics: the educated black man enters a

Masonry of readers and interpreters of history that exists in spite of the hostility of white pro‐slavery advocates and the problematic stance of white abolitionists studied earlier. With Blake, Delany set out to wrestle with the Atlantic tradition of the black avenger, and produce a new hero to write over Toussaint and his predecessors, real or imagined. We have to see him as a repetition with a difference of the literary black avenger, in which Delany attempts to deal with the white

Western tradition of the black avenger, but also American abolitionist versions of the trope.

Avengers of America

Robert Levine has revealed the ties that bind Delany’s Blake to two other contemporary black heroes of U.S. literature: Frederick Douglass’s Madison

Washington in The Heroic Slave (1853) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred (1856). He exposes the mutually influential relation between public abolitionist debates and

58 Weekly Anglo­African, 19 January 1861.

189 literary production. Douglass’s novella “can be read as a proleptic response to

Delany’s criticisms of Stowe. It can also be read as a critical revision of Uncle Tom’s

Cabin,” argues Levine, while Dred “can be regarded as an African‐American inspired revision of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”59 Blake, in turn, appears to be “a response, both critical and admiring, not just to Uncle Tom’s Cabin but also to Dred” (177). Gregg D.

Crane specifically points to the three as books that “are part of an American literary tradition that investigates rights, power and the racial composition of the

American community through fictional narratives that appropriate and subvert the legally effective narratives of racial oppression fashioned by American courts and legislatures” (Crane 527‐528). Within the African American community, the issue of

Stowe's representation of black characters occasioned heated discussions, the most visible of which opposed Douglass and Delany in the pages of Frederick Douglass's

Paper. While both men had issues with the book, Delany was particularly critical of

Stowe's caricatural portrayals of blacks, and underlined the necessity for the black

American community to rely on their own for social uplift. Douglass, although he took Stowe's defense against Delany's attacks, certainly shared some of his reservations about the book. Douglass expressed these reservations the same year in The Heroic Slave, a novel Robert S. Levine considers a “critical revision of Uncle

Tom's Cabin” (Levine 83). Stowe's portrayal in Uncle Tom's Cabin of the “full, glossy black” Tom as subservient and enduring, and of the “bright and talented young mulatto man” George Harris as rebellious and freedom‐seeking were informed by dubious views on race.

59 Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Representative Identity

190 The Heroic Slave contrasted Stowe's tale of the humble and non‐violent Tom with a fictionalized account of the adventures of Madison Washington, a real life, black slave who had famously used violence to achieve his freedom. The novella tells the story of a white Northerner, Listwell, who during a trip to the Southern states happens upon a slave soliloquizing in the woods about his desire for freedom.

Listwell, deeply troubled by the speech, is turned into an abolitionist .

Each chapter describes a new episode in the two men's collaboration: Madison

Washington escapes to the North a first time and stops randomly at Listwell's house, who helps him. In the third chapter, Listwell sees Madison on a slave gang, captured as he tried in vain to help his wife escape. Listwell provides Madison with files as he is taken to a boat for sale in Richmond. We learn in the final chapter that Madison and the slave broke free from their chains thanks to the files, mutinied and took over the boat, which they forced to dock in the British colony of the Bahamas, where they finally gained freedom. Douglass's corrective to Uncle Tom's Cabin sent a message: not only were all slaves not as resilient and passive as Tom, they were eager and ready to fight for their freedom. Douglass intervened on the literary stage, testifying to the importance he set in fictional representations of blackness and their possible influence on readers. With her second slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the

Great Dismal Swamp, Stowe integrated comments raised by her first book in writing a story more deeply dedicated to black resistance to oppression. Levine calls Dred

“an African American‐inspired revision of Uncle Tom's Cabin,” noting echoes of

Stowe's interactions with Douglass, and in the very

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 83; 146.

191 fabric of the text (Levine 146). The novel makes efforts to present more complex black characters.

Especially striking for our purpose here is the character of Dred, the Nat

Turner‐inspired, mystical black revolutionary who lives in the Great Dismal Swamp.

The novel mostly focuses on events surrounding Nina and Tom Gordon, a young and sympathetic white Southerner and her brutal drunkard of a brother, who run a plantation along with Harry, the mulatto slave who also happens to be their half‐ brother. The figure of Dred quite literally looms in the shadows, seemingly appearing out of thin air on several occasions. Dred leads a ubiquitous yet semi‐ invisible community of maroons in the Dismal Swamp, where they wait for the God‐ ordained time to take violent retaliation against the slave order: in his typical Old

Testament style, Dred declares, “When the Lord saith unto us, Smite, then we will smite!”60 Significantly, Dred is killed alone on the eve of a slave uprising as he is wandering out of the safe space of the swamp.

Robert Levine sees in Henry Blake a transparent incarnation of Martin

Delany himself, an “effort on [Delany’s] part… to define, fashion, and celebrate his representative identity as a Mosaic black leader” (Levine 177). During Blake’s first incomplete run in The Anglo­African Magazine in 1859, Delany wrote to William

Lloyd Garrison that he hoped to “make a penny” with Blake, a comment Levine sees as a proof that Delany’s ulterior motives were material and pragmatic, and the novel mere dabbling into commercial fiction in order to finance the activities dear to his heart—in this case, his then upcoming Niger Exploring Expedition (179). Such

60 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Take of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), vol. II, 232.

192 strongly biographical readings have contributed to a vision of Blake as the literary incarnation of Delany’s major political projects. Nevertheless, looking at Blake from the perspective of literary history may help reconsider a novel often judged a clumsy and clunky work of literature. Yet Delany’s novel places itself quite willfully within a long literary tradition of racial representation that focuses on heroic and morally superior black protagonists, reduced into slavery and brought to lead generally failed revolts against the slave system.

Prominent in this cultural tradition are representations of the Haitian leader

Toussaint Louverture. Indeed, starting even before 1804, it had been common practice to reduce the Haitian Revolution to its most commendable figure rather than Dessalines. The very tragedy of Toussaint’s fate made him a perfect cultural product, able to both embody the spirit of revolt and obfuscate the material minutiae of a complex and bloody conflict. Toussaint’s death, in fact, is a crucial element of his legend: it certainly illustrates well the ruthlessness of his French opponents, but it also paradoxically isolates him from the revolution he led. A dead

Toussaint was a much more easily manageable symbol, one that could be used to both attack France and contain the political relevance of the Haitian Revolution.

Wordsworth's famous Ode to the fallen revolutionary thus celebrates the military leader at his most powerless moment, as if he could only be considered a hero in

England when he was no longer a threat to its involvement in the slave trade.61

Toussaint's life story was too good to be true: it mapped onto the black avenger trope with which British audiences were perfectly familiar. By focusing on

61 For a fuller analysis of the poem, see Cora Kaplan, “Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint

193 Toussaint, one could subtly imply that with its righteous leader the righteous revolution had died. Toussaint dead, the Haitian Revolution had lost its soul, and turned to savagery.

It is no surprise, then, that Stowe invokes Wordsworth's poem during Dred’s burial. She uses the verses that most confine the Haitian General to a passive, natural role, rather than a political one:

Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exaltations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind (Stowe 299)

And indeed, after Dred's death, his friends disperse like the wind. The long awaited revolt never takes place, and the Swamp community disappears, as if the leader had been its only cement and reason for existence. In this way, Stowe seems to somewhat unwittingly suggest that, much like in Oroonoko, the former slaves' resolve can only survive as long as their all‐knowing leader. Yet the “Mosaic leader” figure Levine sees in Madison Washington, Dred and Henry Blake has a literary history of its own, which sheds a new light on the intertextual relation between these three texts and on the nature of Delany's contribution with Blake. These three characters have something in common that is decidedly un‐Mosaic: they have all resolved to use righteous physical violence against their oppressors, where Moses left the violence against the Egyptian oppressor to God. They are spiritual leaders because they are warriors.

L’Ouverture and the Literary Imagination,” History Workshop Journal 46 (1998): 32‐62.

194 The physical attributes of the three heroes illustrate their heroic nature.

Madison is described as manly, “tall, symmetrical, round, and strong... with the strength of the lion... His face was 'black, but comely'.... His whole appearance betokened Herculean strength; yet there was nothing savage or forbidding in his aspect.”62 The timid declaration of black beauty related to Washington’s face has the added strength of biblical origin: Douglass borrows it from the Shulamite woman of the Song of Songs 1:5. Madison Washington's physical characteristics are echoed in interesting ways in Dred:

He was a tall black man, of magnificent stature and proportions. His skin was intensely black, and polished like marble. A loose shirt of red flannel, which opened very wide at the breast, gave a display of a neck and chest of herculean strength. The sleeves of the shirt, rolled up nearly to the shoulders, showed the muscles of a gladiator. The head, which rose with an imperial air from the broad shoulders, was large and massive, and developed with equal force both in the reflective and perceptive department. The perceptive organs jutted like dark ridges over the eyes, while that part of the head which phrenologists attribute to the moral and intellectual sentiments, rose like an ample dome above them” (Stowe. Vol. I 240) Dred and Washington are both endowed with “herculean strength.” Yet Stowe describes Dred like a statue, which suggests deep‐seated unease with the very notion of a slave hero, as well as it unmistakably echoes Aphra Behn’s description of

Oroonoko, in which she notably writes that “the most famous statuary cou'd not form the figure of a man more admirably turn'd from head to foot” (Behn 33).

Blake similarly plays heavily with Behn’s text, but his repetitions with a difference reveal an original plan to radically alter the tradition. We are given very little detail about his appearance throughout the novel. By comparison to the

62 Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave. Three Classic African­American Novels. Ed. William L.

195 sometimes embarrassingly specific physical descriptions provided in classic black avenger tales and in Douglass and Stowe, Delany’s description of Blake is surprisingly subdued:

a black—a pure Negro—handsome, manly and intelligent, in size comparing well with his master, but neither so fleshy nor heavy built in person. A man of good literary attainments... . He was bold, determined and courageous, but always mild, gentle and courteous, though impulsive when an occasion demanded his opposition. (Delany, Blake 16‐17) The most visual and physical element we learn is that Blake is “a pure Negro.” There is nothing extraordinary about his build, and nothing is revealed of his facial features. In fact, what may be most remarkable about Blake, especially within the black avenger tradition, is how little we know of his looks. Blake may be reminiscent of Delany himself, but only because Blake is a voluntarily vague “pure Negro,” an abstract hero in counterpoint to the black avenger tradition up to Douglass's own variation on the topic. With Blake, Delany begins to reintroduce the collective where the individualistic black avenger had mostly contributed to erasing it. He does this in part by painstakingly writing over the black avenger tradition.

Covering the Oroonoko tradition

According to Laura Doyle, Oroonoko “commences the work of the Atlantic novel” in both exposing and accepting race as the measure and limit of modern definitions of freedom (Doyle 115). Doyle charts a literary tradition born in seventeenth century

England, in which freedom is presented as a “race myth,” the birthright of Saxons untamable in England and abroad. Anglo‐Saxons take their freedom everywhere

Andrews (New York: Mentor Books, 1990), 28.

196 they go, circulating the themes and tropes central to their myth. Much of the myth’s power seems connected to storytelling as a form of (hostile) takeover. The narrator finds her place in modernity at Oroonoko’s expense: by taking over the telling of his life, she distinguishes herself as a colonial subject from Oroonoko, the fascinating object of her narrative. The relative freedom she finds here rests on the cultural exploitation of Oroonoko, just as modern Anglo‐Saxon freedom rested on the exploitation of Africans. Doyle argues further that the centrality of this scenario to

Atlantic culture means that “African American writers must adopt the race plot of freedom, extending its genealogical idea to African peoples. Thus do Afro‐Atlantic counternarratives at once resist and embrace the racial order of Atlantic modernity”

(6).

Oroonoko shows that in modern nations reading is also necessarily writing and interpreting; the appropriation of Oroonoko’s experience is a historical cover‐ up, a (re)writing of history necessary to national sentiment. Doyle is right in that the racial logic underlying this phenomenon had by the nineteenth century become the foundation for modern nation‐making, and so the race plot is the norm. But this plot cannot be transferred wholesale to fit the situation of black people in the United

States, for paradoxically, the standardization of the black drop rule, by effectively erasing the possibility of an independent mulatto class, made purity narratives an especially complicated affair. Oroonoko is a race plot only for a white reader; for black readers, it is more readily a black avenger plot, and this is what Delany set to rewrite in Blake. His goal is to re‐appropriate the black hero and rewrite his story so that it serves as a founding myth of blackness, rather than whiteness. He does this

197 by echoing, altering and repurposing aspects of Oroonoko, most prominent among them the scene of the middle passage.

In Aphra Behn’s novella, Oroonoko and his retinue are taken on board a slaver by a regular at the prince's court, a British captain “very well known to

Oroonoko, with whom he had traffick'd for slaves” (Behn 56). Seemingly returning

Oroonoko's hospitality, the captain offers to let the prince and his entourage visit his ship. But he has them seized and put in chains, and takes off for the American coast.

Outraged at being thus humiliated, Oroonoko starts a hunger strike, in which his entourage soon joins him. The captain coaxes him into eating again, after assuring him that “he should be freed as soon as they came to land” (59). Left to roam free on the ship, Oroonoko gives his word that he will not try to take control of it, and convinces his devoted followers not to attempt anything. On landing in Surinam, the captain sells them all immediately into slavery. As we find out in bits and pieces throughout the novel, Blake’s with a slave ship was involuntary: as a young man, the freeborn Henrico Blacus decided to join the crew of what he thought was a Spanish man‐of‐war. Blake is even more clueless than Oroonoko, but just as self‐righteous: on finding out the ship’s true nature as a slaver, he voices an

“expression of dissatisfaction at being deceived (Delany, Blake 294). This is enough to irritate the ship captain, who in retaliation sells Blacus as a slave on their return to the Americas. Blake’s outrage does not seem directed so much against the slave trade as against the lie he fell for: his father is a wealthy Cuban trader who is more than likely to have used slave labor. Blake’s questionable relation to slavery is reminiscent of Oroonoko’s, who is personally close to the European slave traders

198 whom he supplies in war prisoners, until he is treacherously sold into slavery by the

English ship captain he thought to be his friend. The freeborn, elite Blake has to experience the abasement of slavery to understand and oppose it. Yet it is not until

Blake’s wife Maggie is taken away from him that he decides to begin his campaign against slavery. On finding out his wife’s fate, Blake declares to her master Colonel

Franks: “I’m not your slave, nor never was and you know it! And but for my wife and her people, I never would have stayed with you till now”(19). In this again, he is reminiscent of Oroonoko, who only organizes a slave uprising when he comes to the realization that, as slaves, his wife and unborn child are under constant threat from their masters. Blake gets his political education in the heart of the slave trade.

These similarities are signposts erected in the text to better emphasize how it departs from Oroonoko. Oroonoko is characterized by a permanent sense of bewilderment; he is time and again foiled by the bad faith of white men around him.

He dies of overestimating the moral conscience of everyone around him, and of believing that the heroic code of honor he lives by has any sway in the new world.

Henry Blake is not so naïve: the initial treachery that occasioned his enslavement is lesson enough for him. This is the aspect of Delany’s novel that sets it not just in opposition to Oroonoko, but also to Doyle’s allegedly unavoidable and eminently individual Atlantic “logic of race.” When Blake sets out against the peculiar institution, he does so armed with his own plot, and with the conviction that success will demand organized, collective action. This is made clear in Blake’s second trip on a slave ship, one he very purposefully chooses to undertake. His goal in joining the slaver's crew is to “tak[e] her in mid‐ocean as a prize for ourselves, as we must have

199 a vessel at our command before we make a strike.” Once on the African coast, he will negotiate with Krumen leaders. Blake somehow knows them well, and expects to

“obtain as many [men] as I wish, who will make a powerful force in carrying out my scheme on the vessel” (198). The atmosphere on the crossing to Africa is heavy with wariness and foreboding, as the white captains quickly become suspicious of Blake.

In Africa, Blake disappears during several days while the ship fills with its human cargo, but it is unclear what he does during this time, beyond spying on the local slave factor. On the way back from Africa, the slaver is again chased by a British ship, and the captains order black crew members to throw overboard six hundred of the “dead, dying and damaged” slaves (229). Blake “looked on without an evidence of emotion” (230). Later in the passage, the slaves led by “fine specimen of a man” and native chief Mendi manage to procure weapons during a tempest and seem ready to take over the ship. A puzzling scene then follows that shows the two

American captains catching glimpses of Mendi and his fellow slaves up in arms in the hold, and discussing the best way to contain the upcoming mutiny as thunder and lightning shake the vessel. The weather then clears, and the ship arrives in

Cuba. We are told that “Blake during the entire troubles was strangely passive to occurring events below,” seemingly because of the suspicion under which he was throughout the journey (236). But what of his original plan to take over the ship, and what of the slaves in the hold armed with billhooks and knives? It is unclear how they are made to surrender, but “the most restless spirits among the captive were disposed of as soon as possible” (238).

200 How or why the mutiny plot is abandoned as it is about to come to fruition is the kind of twist for which Delany’s novel has often been faulted. It dangles the possibility of an outcome similar to that of Douglass’s The Heroic Slave before taking it away. This may well be the main point in this curious passage: to distinguish this story from Douglass’s, and show it to be one of willful, thought out collective salvation rather than individual safety. Rather than sail for the English islands, Blake chooses to wait and organize for a massive strike. Blake sees his mission as an essentially international rather than merely U.S. American one, directed against the transnational commercial institution of slavery. A ship mutiny alone would likely yield little. The revolted slaves are more useful on land than on : once back on

Cuban shores, Blake decides to spread the news that the slaves were rebellious, thus bringing down their price, making it possible for him and his allies in Cuba to buy them all. Blake seemingly adapted his plan to the circumstances, abandoning the idea of taking over the ship to privilege the recruitment of manpower in Africa. This particular aspect is crucial to define the originality of Blake within black avenger tradition. The mutiny was a red herring, and it is presented—clumsily so, to be sure—so as to even the novel’s readers. Blake’s plan is more complex.

Throughout the novel, Blake recycles the motto of the subservient parents of his wife, which he had seemingly rejected early in the novel: “stand still and see the salvation.” In his mouth, the words of Christian passivity become code for revolutionary strategy, an order to the organized slaves around the hemisphere to wait for the signal to begin a continent‐wide uprising. The middle passage shows

Blake frustratingly practicing what he preaches.

201

The freemasonry of the race

It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks; because, generally, with the latter an additional and different light must be brought to bear on what he thinks; and his thoughts are often influenced by considerations so delicate and subtle that it would be impossible for him to confess or explain them to one of the opposite race. This gives to every colored man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality; there is one phase of him which is disclosed only in the freemasonry of his own race. ‐‐J.W. Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex­Colored Man

Indeed, Blake was not entirely passive on the ship: he made contact with Mendi and

Abyssa, military and spiritual leaders for the new slaves. They later appear again among the members of the Grand Council. The would‐be mutineers become the shock troops of an organized revolution. The cost of Blake’s strategy is chilling: six hundred die to ensure that the remaining four hundred or so make it to Cuba to become soldiers for the black revolution. Yet the design of the plan and its execution signal a crucial departure from the classic black avenger tale, in which the righteous leader finds, when action is needed, that his followers have abandoned him. Black crewmembers aware of Blake’s plan also follow his actions and do no directly confront the white crew. Blake calculates his actions meticulously, and in full awareness of the way the slave system functions. Buying slaves is the name of the game; it is the principal articulation of the commercial logic of slave society. In following the precepts of the slave trade, in playing the market, Blake shows his knowledge of white rules and his ability to make them work for black revolution.

For Houston Baker Jr., engaging with the “economics of slavery” is a staple of

202 African American literature: “classic works of Afro‐American expressive culture will reveal a negotiation of the economics of slavery leading to black expressive wholeness.”63 With his scheme to drop the price of the African slaves, Blake demonstrates his profound understanding of the slave system, as he simultaneously transcends it.

Blake's actions on the ship were a test of wills, and in the process he found in

Mendi and Abyssa strong delegates, officers in his cause, the kind of cadre necessary to efficient military action. So much is implied when Mendi's importance to the movement is described:

Mendi was expected to be a powerful accession to their forces, as, being a native chief, he would meet with many of his race whose language he understood, and was thereby better suited to them than many others among them. The mere slave, as such, was deficient in discipline, except that which unfitted him for self‐reliance. That was the curse which blighted his moral prospects… . ( Blake 239) It bears noting that Mendi himself is a black avenger figure, as reminiscent of

Oroonoko as Blake. Yet Blake and Mendi are notably different from the slave prince in that they put their extraordinary nature and talent at the service of their

(imagined) community. Oroonoko's followers live and die for him; he is a prince among Africans, naturally noble. Slavery only matters to him inasmuch as it insults his sense of honor. The slaves that later abandon him in battle, although they “[pay] him divine homage,” also recognize in him “that Prince who had, at several times, sold most of 'em to these parts” (Behn 64). The man who later laments the cowardice of his followers and declares them to be “by nature slaves” is therefore

63 Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro­American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 114.

203 the one who made them slaves in the first place (88). Oroonoko blames the failure of the uprising on followers he never considered his equals, and whose welfare was never his concern. He is driven by personal interest: his goal is merely to spare his son the shame and horror of slavery, and the uprising comes as a second thought, a means to a rather selfish end.

Not so with Blake; in choosing to travel a second time on a slave ship, he is not just recruiting for his cause, but also indirectly reliving the middle passage. He vows to take agency, and turn the trauma of the original unrooting into a moment of rebirth. In the process, he alters in Mendi both Behn’s and Douglass’s versions of the black avenger trope: by the end of the middle passage, Mendi’s righteous, and likely inefficient, outrage has been redirected for efficacy. A sea mutiny at best would have met the same end as the Amistad’s or the Creole’s, with the relocation of slaves in places where their rebellious spirit would not harm slavery. In Cuba, Mendi becomes one of several leaders, a member of the Grand Council, a collective body aiming at collective liberation. Blake purposefully departs from the black avenger tradition by offering a collection of heroes instead of a single figure. Crucially, the members of the Grand Council represent the many shades and many social categories of Delany’s imagined black community, the “African race” that “includes the mixed as well as the pure bloods” (247 fn). Members of the Council can be found among “the fairest complexion among , who were classed as white,” but also “fine looking mulatto officers” and wealthy blacks; some are planters or merchants, soldiers, artists, artisans and slaves.

The Grand Council is an unelected representative body, a synecdoche for a

204 black race understood as a political choice rather than mere biological accident. Its collection of extraordinary leaders provides a fictional answer to the reductive individualism of the black avenger figure. Pride in one’s black roots being the cement of the movement, it also exorcises through practice the color prejudice that so harmed the ever‐present Haiti. Blake’s own scorn for uneducated slaves disappears when he initiates them into his plan. Initiation grants them a status more important than social belonging. The secret society in which future rebels and members of the Grand Council are initiated is the black race considered as a political choice. What we know of the Grand Council members confirms Delany’s efforts at providing a myth adequate for his fictional, all‐encompassing black nation: all social and ethnic groups that form unified blackness are represented, from “noted gentlemen” of Cuba, mulatto planters and military officers, to people “of humble pretensions,” slaves just arrived from Africa like Mendi. They form a heroic representative body for a nation in the making.

This concern lies at the core of Delany’s endeavor in Blake; though it rests on presenting a collection of extraordinary individuals, it also strives to meld them into a future black nation. Thus Blake forfeits the sentiment and romance characteristic of The Heroic Slave and Dred for a more direct revolutionary message. To be sure, sentiment is not absent from Blake; it is, after all, the sale of his wife Maggie that sets

Blake on his crusade against the slave system. Blake's devotion to his wife is one of the most poignant aspects of a novel that generally eschews melodramatic effect. By comparison, the death of Madison Washington's wife in The Heroic Slave is timed for maximum pathos: she is shot by slave drivers as Washington finally comes back to

205 help her escape with him. While familial drama drives Blake's plot for much of its first part, it is eventually evacuated as the rationale for revolt. So much is made clear in an exchange between Blake and Maggie: “'As God lives, I will avenge your wrongs; and not until they let us alone—cease to steal away our people from their native country and oppress us in their own—will I let them alone. They shall only live— while I live—under the most alarming apprehensions. Our whole race among them must be brought to this determination, and then, and not til then, will they fear and respect us” (192). The way Blake starts his sentence with the personal (“I will avenge your wrongs”) only to slip into the collective (if the first “us” may be referring to Blake and Maggie, it soon turns to “our people”) is telling: the pain inflicted upon Maggie by her former masters originally pushed Blake to act. Once he is reunited with his wife, his struggle continues, but it is not personal anymore.

Action has become a matter of “political arithmetic”: “whatever liberty is worth to the whites, it is worth to the blacks; therefore, whatever it cost the whites to obtain it, the black would be willing and ready to pay, if they desire it” (192).

The political arithmetic offered by Douglass in The Heroic Slave is profoundly different: from the opening scene of Madison Washington's soliloquy in the woods, individual freedom is presented as the key to the freedom of the collective. As noted by Gregg D. Crane, “Douglass argues from his own individual merit for the rights of the entire race” (Crane 541). The (first person) singular eloquence of this “man of rare endowments” convinces Listwell to “atone for [his] past indifference for this ill‐ starred race” (Douglass, 30). This arithmetic is also intimately connected to United

States politics: Williams, a sailor on the Creole present during the mutiny, testifies

206 that Madison Washington's speech about freedom on taking over the ship made it seem “as if the souls of both the great dead (whose name he bore) had entered him,” and that his “are the principles of 1776” (66; 68). A lineage between the and violent struggle against slavery is also evoked in Dred, in terms echoing Douglass's “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”: “The slave has heard, amid shouts, on the Fourth of July, that his masters held the truth to be self‐ evident, that all men were born equal, and had an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that all governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed” (Stowe, vol. I 248). Stowe's Dred is Denmark Vesey's son, but also, as noted by Levine, “a stand‐in for another 'son,' or ideological descendant, of Vesey—Nat Turner” (Levine 162). Yet for all the national imagery,

Dred's influence does not go far beyond the Dismal Swamp; Dred dies after setting out on his own to observe the actions of hostile white Southerners.

The maroons of the Dismal Swamp also play a crucial role in Blake. They are led by Gamby Gholar, a former companion of Nat Turner, who has been hiding in the swamp since the rebellion, close to thirty years earlier. The Swamp maroons are portrayed as old, superstitious and unreliable storytellers. They try—in vain—one of their tricks on Blake, attempting to scare him with a “large sluggish, lazily moving serpent” which Blake instantly identifies as “so entirely tame and petted that it wagged its tail” (Blake 114). Among other such apparently comical behavior, they claim outlandish connections to the Revolutionary War, or rather “de Molution wah,” and when prodded by Blake, assert that General Gabriel, the leader of the

1800 Prosser slave rebellion, also took part in it. For all his contempt for their

207 “conjuration and such foolishness and stupidity,” Blake nevertheless plays along. He eventually gets the conjurers' blessing and is anointed priest among them (136). On the one hand, this scene seems to be poking fun at Stowe and Douglass's attachment to the American Revolution. As noted by Andy Doolen, in their incorrect references to the Revolutionary War, the high conjurers suggest an alternative historiography, one that reinscribes the largely obfuscated black participation in the Revolution, but also substitutes a line of black heroes for the fathers of American independence and emphasizes the fact that the former are still working at completing the quest for freedom the latter did not bother to finish: “in prayer, prophesy, and song, another version of the Revolutionary War is being narrated, this one not linked to the

Founding Fathers or their documents” (Doolen 162).

Blake is amused by the theatrics of the High Conjurors, maroon slaves living hidden in the Dismal Swamp. He dismisses their magic‐‐which bears much resemblance to Haitian voodoo‐‐as mere means to be feared by the slave population.

He nevertheless seeks their approval because it “makes the more ignorant slaves have greater confidence in, and more respect for, their headmen and leaders” (Blake

126). If Blake is somewhat dismissive of the High Conjurors, he nevertheless recognizes their power among self‐aware black people, the power of their hermeneutics; he recognizes them as pre‐print storytellers. He mocks their unrefined ways, but knows that the Conjurors’ peculiar take on American history may not be historically accurate, but is nevertheless a powerful interpretation and appropriation of America’s central mythology of freedom. The High Conjurors’ uneducated revisionist history of the American Revolution burns with the fire

208 necessary to Blake’s movement. It is significant that the chapter describing Delany’s encounter with the High Conjurors also discusses the “Brown Society,” “an organized association of mulattoes, created by the influence of the whites, for the purpose of preventing pure‐blooded Negroes from entering the social circle, or holding intercourse with them” (109). Blake’s encounter with one of those mulattoes almost results in his arrest. The Conjurors’ ways may be easy to ridicule, but their commitment to black revolution is undeniable. The contrast reveals that education alone is not sufficient; what is necessary is a nation of readers and interpreters.

Blake’s plan is to federate around blackness as a political choice. As a result,

Blake’s plot is international not merely in location: it borrows details and even characters from the most renowned, most revered black uprisings of the hemisphere. It is connected to U.S. slave revolts by the blessing of the High

Conjurors, to the Escalera conspiracy through the character of Plácido, who appears anachronistically in the novel. The structure of his conspiracy evokes Masonic organization, but also Cuba’s cabildos de nacíon, “voluntary grouping[s] by common ethnic identity of the numerous African “nations” forcibly imported to Cuba” where free and enslaved blacks gathered, and that played an important role in the Aponte rebellion (Childs Aponte 96). Blake conflates time periods, organizational details and political goals to distill the perfect black revolution. Though social standing and education are important for the Grand Council, ultimately what matters is the members’ political commitment to blackness. Dedication is measured by one’s willful and complete rejection of white supremacy. All members of Blake’s Grand

209 Council are bound by that very commitment, mulattoes included. As shown by

Ifeoma Nwankwo, though Delany himself readily “equates Blackness with Black manhood” and dark skin, in the Grand Council he allows for a more widely inclusive vision of blackness, one in which willing mulattoes identifying with blackness have their place as equals.64 Nwankwo posits that Delany makes Plácido into a “race man” for Cuba, who defends a version of blackness “that includes common blood, an activist political stance, and a more profound spiritual connection,” displacing racial belonging into the domain of politics rather than mere biology. This political blackness had been Dessalines’s project, and still constituted the kernel of awe powering the Haitian legend. But the—mostly white—legend built around this event stood in the way. To reconnect with Dessalines’ project, a new narrative was needed, one capable of reviving the righteous terror the Haitian revolution instilled in slaveholders without suffering from subsequent history and historiography. The members of the Grand Council were the new black heroes necessary to this new black narrative.

Discussing the influence of Free‐Masonry over the “black masculine ideal,”

Maurice Wallace is, however, reluctant to emphasize Masonic overtones in Blake.

Yet Blake can indeed be seen as a literary “model of black masculine perfectibility,” the typical member of an African American community in the making, and as such not an idealized individual but indeed an idealized community. This notion is confirmed by the title of the novel, which provides us with the crucial and

64 Ifeoma Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identityt in the Nineteenth‐Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 56‐57.

210 profoundly new contribution of Delany's novel to the black avenger canon: it implies that the heroic leader of the black people did not so much represent them as he had learned from them. In this title, one can choose either Blake or the Huts of America as the hero of the novel, as they are meant to perpetually stand in one for the other.

Wallace sees a more striking example of Masonic influence in forms of self‐ fashioning used by Delany during the Civil War. Reflecting on Delany’s famous portrait in U.S. Army uniform, Wallace sees in it a sign of his turn from

“Constitutional cipher and political nonconformist to disciplinary individual and

‘model’ citizen… extraordinary in one sense, ‘typical’ in another” that also announces “the military formalism of half a century later.”65 It bears noting that the line Wallace draws between Delany and Garvey goes directly back to

Toussaint Louverture, and more specifically his representation as popularized first in his portrait in Marcus Rainsford’s Historical Account (Clavin 132). Delany made himself out to be an “American Toussaint,” the mythified version of the Haitian leader manufactured to serve the purposes of Civil War African American liberatory politics. Delany’s Civil War pragmatism does not contradict his effort in Blake so much as confirm his goal: recover Haitian history, but also cover it in African

American terms, the same way his portrait self‐consciously paints over the Haitian model. His homage to Toussaint’s portrait is also a very conscious painting over the

Haitian model, the final step of a movement begun with Blake.

Blake as we know it ends before the announced general uprising, but it

65 Maurice Wallace, “'Are We Men?': Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black

211 nevertheless manages to evoke a sense of communal black agency. By depicting black revolution as a painstakingly rational and organized collective movement,

Blake offers an antithesis to the slaveholding Americas’ horror narrative of black revolution, and to its bogeyman, the black avenger. He embodied slaveholders’ nightmares and abolitionist dreams in the shape of Toussaint Louverture. Simplified stories of the Revolution share easily recognized structures, narrative or plot devices, crowd pleasers of sorts. The black avenger trope is such a simplifying, yet powerful narrative trope. Blake denounces the way this trope can work for white supremacy, and for that reason makes it central to its own argument. Blake is very much an illuminated black avenger narrative, aware of its narrative lineage, and proactive in its attempt to appropriate the trope. Delany explodes the format: an incontestable hero in the first part of the novel, Blake relinquishes some of his centrality to the novel’s plot just as he begins sharing revolutionary duties with the members of the Grand Council.

No copies of the issues of the Weekly Anglo­African containing Blake’s purported final chapters are known to exist, so the success of the planned uprising remains for us in abeyance. This Blake nevertheless offers a political vision that is also the revision of a popular scenario. The “African race” is a black Pan‐American project: it designates Cuba, the heart of the Americas, as the future homeland of the coming nation. The African Americans described in Blake are connected to the

Haitians, but they will form a distinct nation, a “better” one no doubt, if only because

Freemasonry, 1775‐1865,” American Literary History 9.3 (1997), 412.

212 it purports to learn from Haiti’s mistakes, starting with projecting a carefully constructed literary image of itself. Of the many ways in which Western powers worked to silence the Haitian Revolution, the black avenger trope is perhaps the most widely circulated, and the most subtly undermining. Though always located at the heart of collective movements, black avenger narratives are intrinsically tales of individual greatness, and as such work against the wide movements they portray, often sympathetically. Delany's Blake must be read within and against that literary tradition, as a commentary on the ways in which it contributed to impose a deforming lens over historical occurrences of black revolution. At a time of profound hopelessness for U.S. blacks, Delany's Blake and its coalition of black avengers attempted to offer a new narrative of black revolt, one that reinscribed the sense of black political agency once imparted by the Haitian Revolution by writing it over, and writing over it. Much as Blake refers and comments upon the literary tradition of the black avenger trope, Delany’s portrait refers and comments on the pictorial tradition of historical black avengers, introducing its latest variation: the African

American avenger, inspired by and drawn over centuries of forebears. Blake writes over Haiti to better organize the revolution necessary to the construction of a black country wiser for the lessons learned from the Haitian experience, but decidedly separate from it. Delany’s novel presents a somewhat secularized version of the missionary spirit that breathed in Reverend James T. Holly’s Haitian emigration scheme in the 1850s. The peculiar nationalism expressed in Blake, while it saw no actual development, embodies sentiments of black cultural and spiritual superiority that would live long in African American culture.

213 In his own lecture on Toussaint Louverture delivered concurrently to

Wendell Phillips’, William Wells Brown expressed clearly the terms in which African

Americans had begun considering their relation to the West Indies: “The West India islands are eventually to fall into the hands of the sons and , and the sooner we take possession of them and develop their resources, the better it will be for ourselves, our children, and for humanity.”66 For all accounts and purposes, the black avenger had by the Civil War been translated to the United States.

66 See Pine and Palm, 31 August 1861.

214 Chapter IV

An American Tradition

‘You say civilizationa. Thata for biga mana, not for poor mana and blacka mana. No. Civilizationa no gooda.’ Two years later it was announced in the County Bulletin that Caesar Antonio Amato, of Reggio, , had married Miss Josephine Walsh, a descendant of one of the oldest families of the State of . It is to be hoped that Amato "absorbed" the American idea to the point where he could understand the meaning of our civilization. At this writing we do not understand the American civilization. Robert L. Waring As We See It (161‐2)

If the presence of the black avenger trope in African American and American literature were any measure of dissatisfaction for living conditions of blacks in the

United States, one might think that the Civil War had brought solace to the community. Yet things were of course not so rosy. If the Reconstruction period carried promise for the integration of African Americans into the body politic, what with African Americans being elected to national office throughout the

Reconstructed South, these developments did not come easy: as soon as the last shots of the Civil War had been fired, white supremacists in the South constituted terrorist groups whose goals was to keep black peopled down by all means. The Ku

Klux Klan remains the most infamous of these, but it was hardly the only one. The lesser known Red Shirts or White League, “military arm of the Democratic Party” in the South and proponents of white power, led such brazen acts of violence as the

Colfax Massacre (1873) or the Battle of Liberty Place (1874), where sections of the

Louisiana White League led military‐style attacks against representatives of local and federal government. From 1869 to 1877, the Grant administration oversaw

215 meaningful advances for the African American community, with the securing of the

15th Amendment, the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. These advances were brutally rescinded with the election of Grant’s successor, Rutherford

B. Hayes. In return for victory in the elections, Hayes agreed to the Compromise of

1877, by which he removed Federal troops stationed in the Southern states. Within two decades, Jim Crow had taken a hold of the former Confederate states. As Dred

Scott had defined the state of racial relations in the antebellum period, another

Supreme Court decision would embody Jim Crow: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) infamously decided that “the statute of Louisiana… requiring railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in that State, to provide equal, but separate, accommodations for the white and colored races… are not in conflict with the provisions either of the Thirteenth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.”1

The decision also marks, according to Kenneth W. Warren, the birth of

African American literature, “a post‐emancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation, which ensued after the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction.”2

Elaborating on comments by James Weldon Johnson, Warren distinguishes antebellum black American authors as “Negroes who were writers—or perhaps one could helpfully say that they were writers who were not yet Negro writers and that antebellum writing by black Americans became African American literature only

1 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 2 Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1.

216 retroactively”(7). In the same vein, Warren sees the contemporary “turn to diasporic, transatlantic, global and other frames” as an indication that what once made the peculiarity of African American literature has lost its distinctiveness. The terms offered by Warren for this periodicization are highly debatable; this project quite clearly shows that plenty of antebellum black writers clearly saw themselves as African American writers—yet through Warren’s argument one can recognize the undeniable inward turn of African American literature in the postbellum period.

Where African Americans had once been considered less than citizens, they were now officially, if not factually, members of the American nation. Warren’s classification is useful in that it helps clarify the terms of national belonging of black literature in the postbellum United States. African American literature as defined by

Warren takes American race laws to task, defines itself in relation to them and to the living condition they impose on the African American community as well as the restrictions and expectations they bring to bear on African American literature.

Whereas with Blake—arguably the first example of a U.S. American black avenger—the international dimension of the plot worked as a negation of the United

States, a move outward, in the postbellum period black avenger plots become for a time exclusively warnings, rather than resolutions. Blake meant to create an independent black nation; his fictional successors hope for the recognition of their community as a sub‐nation of sorts. Among them were the protagonists of Imperium in Imperio (1899), the first abd best remembered novel by Sutton Griggs, a minister, pamphleteer, and activist.

Imperium in Imperio is routinely described as a black nationalist novel based

217 on its general plot more than the ideas the novel actually defends. Griggs’s text is not especially revolutionary. The title of the novel, itself evocative of Delany’s definition of the African American community as a nation within a nation, is both a diagnosis and a plan. In fact, it presents itself as a dreamed black version of the United States, or, more accurately yet: a dream for one black state in the Union, a segregated, genuinely separate and genuinely equal section of the U.S. reserved for the black race. Griggs’s novel very clearly engages the black avenger tradition: Griggs opposes a Christ figure to a mulatto avenger, countering Delany’s American avenger with an

African American national redeemer.

A black nation within the United States

Imperium in Imperio is a tale of two heroes, the poor, dark‐skinned Belton Piedmont and his childhood friend, the wealthy, light‐skinned Bernard Belgrave. The first three chapters in which Griggs introduces his two heroes on their first day of school emphasize the novel’s educational message. African Americans must get education, or, in the words of the parson who convinces Mrs. Belmont to keep her son in school in spite of his white teacher’s clear hostility: “De greatest t'ing in de wul is edification. Ef our race ken git dat we ken git ebery t'ing else. Dat is de key. Git de key an' yer ken go in de house to go where you please... Ef yer take Belton out of school yer'll be fighting 'genst de providence of God.”3 Seemingly smitten with

Belgrave’s pretty mulatto mother, the teacher takes a liking to Bernard, while he focuses his hatred on Piedmont. The teacher’s partiality turns the boys into lifelong

3 Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem (1899; reprint, New York:

218 friends, and pushes both of them to excellence. They compete for recognition as best pupil in the school, and Bernard only wins because of the racist bigotry of jury members who cannot condescend to let a dark‐skinned boy win. They both graduate and go on their separate ways: Bernard, supported by his mother’s wealth, gets his education at Harvard. After delivering the graduation speech, he meets a mysterious white man, a Senator with a national reputation but whose status in white Virginian society has prevented him from officially recognizing Bernard’s mother and his own son. But he has plans for Bernard: he wants him to settle in Virginia, become a lawyer, and “scale the high wall of prejudice” (93). Against all odds, Bernard soon manages to get elected as a representative in Congress.

Belton grows in a profoundly different manner, and early on seems likely to become a classic black avenger. In school, he sets up a sophisticated prank against his teacher as revenge against his mistreatment. After he is in turn humiliated in front of the assembled student population of his university, Belton resolves to kill his tormentor in a vengeful fury. The University president visits Belton to “[show] him what an unholy passion revenge was. He showed that such a passion would mar any life that yielded to it,” following which a shameful Belton vows never to fall prey to the red mist of revenge again: “henceforth a cardinal principle of his life would be to allow God to avenge all his wrongs” (77). In his following adventures, Belton becomes a teacher, meets his future wife and has a brush with Reconstruction politics. Looking for better employment, Belton finds that opportunities for educated African American men are few. Other men in the same predicament “grew

Arno Press, 1969), 23.

219 to hate the flag that would float in an undisturbed manner over such a condition of affairs…, they began to think of rebelling against it and would wish for some foreign power to come in and bury it in the dirt” (131). The growing antinational sentiment among his peers worries Belton, who sees the future of the community within the

U.S.A.

Belton’s wife gives birth to a baby so light‐skinned that Belton suspects her of adultery with a white man, following which he leaves his family home to go teach in a in Louisiana. There, Belton miraculously manages to survive a lynching in which he is hanged, shot in the head, and almost dissected. Belton escapes this fate by killing his would‐be dissecter, only to surrender himself to the state governor. His subsequent trial is taken all the way to the Supreme Court, where he is defended by none other than Bernard, who secures an acquittal for

Belton. Bernard’s happiness is short‐lived: when he proposes to his fiancée, she chooses death rather than marriage to the mixed race man she loves, having vowed never to contribute to the dilution of the black race. In her death note, she asks of

Bernard that he ‘dedicate [his] soul to the work of separating the white and colored races,” which he agrees to do (175‐176).

Soon after, Belton contacts Bernard and summons him to Thomas Jefferson

College in Waco, Texas, where he is a teacher. Belton tells Bernard of discovering an

African American conspiracy dedicated to “secure protection for their lives and the full enjoyment of all rights and privileges due American citizens” (183). Faking outrage at their treasonous actions, Belton asks Bernard to help him denounce the secret society to the government, which a disgusted Bernard refuses to do. In a

220 ritual evocative of Masonic initiation rites, Belton then pretends twice to execute

Bernard, only to drop him into a secret chamber where, finally satisfied by

Bernard’s resolve, Belton introduces him to the Imperium.

The Imperium was founded “in the early days of the American Republic” by an unnamed black scientist reminiscent of Benjamin Banneker, who made a fortune publishing a “book of science which outranked any other book of the day that treated the same subject” (191). He used his wealth to build a secret society whose

“first object was to endeavor to secure for the free negroes all the rights and privileges of men, according to the teachings of Thomas Jefferson. Its other object was to secure the freedom of the enslaved negroes the world over” (191). After the

Civil War, the Imperium trained teachers to teach newly freed African Americans the true meaning of freedom. African Americans launched a number of secret societies after the Civil War. Faced with unchallenged white supremacist terror after the Reconstruction, the Imperium federated them all. Each society added a shared final degree of initiation: “the last degree was nothing more nor less than a compact government exercising all the functions of a nation” (194). The Imperium is quite literally the “freemasonry of the race” invoked a decade later by James Weldon

Johnson in The Autobiography of an Ex­Colored Man, the safe space in which black men reveal the side of themselves which they hide from white people. We have seen this notion developed in Blake, where this freemasonry was staunchly international, with networks mapped onto the routes of the slave trade. Blake’s conspiracy was a black freemasonry bound transnationally and aiming at the constitution of a black

221 nation in the Americas; the Imperium strives for the constitution of a black

American nation within the U.S.A.

Built in the image of the U.S. government, it has an elected Congress and a standing army. It also has peculiar things to say about American . This black American nation is inseparable from its state apparatus. The intellectual, commercial and political elite of the race are also, conveniently, its political representatives. They represent the people, but it seems clear that only secret society members can elect and be elected. And in order to become a member, one has to give proof of his belonging to the community, it appears: Bernard did not know about the Imperium because his and his mother’s relation to the black race had not “been clearly understood” (196). Belton has been a member since college, and he reveals the secret now because the Imperium unanimously chose Bernard to be their first President.

The U.S.‐centric outlook revealed here is not innocent: the Negro scientist hinted at here is reminiscent of Benjamin Banneker, who is most remembered for his correspondence with Jefferson, in which he criticized the Founding Father for his hypocrisy regarding slavery. This disagreement is glossed over, and only Jefferson’s teachings remain. The Imperium means to realize the promise of the American

Revolution for African Americans, and then for blacks everywhere. It aims at replacing Haiti as the epitome of black power, and become the global black power the island nation failed to truly become. The “doctrine of equality as taught by

Thomas Jefferson” is enough to get a black teacher fired in the Southern states, explains Bernard during his first speech as a President (214). This doctrine is so

222 sound that the Imperium applies it wholesale to its own nation, a black Jeffersonian body. Lynn R. Johnson sees in the secret chamber “a transfigured slave ship hold” and in Griggs’s novel “an American Middle Passage text,” characterizing the condition of African Americans in the U.S. as a “limbo between segregation and integration and a psychological suspension between African and American identity.”4 A unified black community is the necessary first step towards national

U.S. unity; the novel “portrays the turbulent voyage to citizenship as a metaphorical

Middle Passage during which African Americans labored to formulate the most effective strategies for their collective survival” (29).

In the final chapters of the novel, we see the Imperium gather for a big event centered on the grieving family of Felix A. Cook, an African American named postmaster by President McKinley and assassinated by “a mob of white demons in human form” as he attempted to escape the fire they had set to his house (Griggs

202‐203).5 President Belgrave takes the stand to utter a call for action: “the time for words had passed and the next and only thing in order was a deed” (223). Yet in order to act, the members of the Imperium have to agree on a course of action.

Orators stand to defend different proposals: an aged representative advocates integration; a younger one emigration to Africa; a third one race war. With each speaker the audience grows more supportive. Bernard’s speech was received in complete, introspective silence; the old man is copiously jeered, the emigrationist well received, though judged impracticable, and the warmonger elicits cheers and

4 Lynn R. Johnson, “A Return to the Black (W)hole: Mitigating the Trauma of Homelessness in Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio,” Southern Literary Journal 42.2 (2010), 15. 5 The incident is based on the real life murder of Frazier Baker, postmaster of Lake City, South

223 ovations from his audience. His description of the horrors suffered by African

Americans brings the crowd to tears and to suddenly break into a hoarse cry for war.

When the assembly, whipped into a frenzy, is ready to vote for war, Belton stands to deliver “one of the most remarkable feats of oratory known to history”

(227). His speech counter‐intuitively defends the benefits of American slavery:

“when we calmly survey the evil and the good that came to us through American slavery, it is my opinion that we find more good for which to thank God than we find evil for which to curse man” (232). Addressing in turn the different fields of racist white oppression, Belton offers an attentive, passive plan: “let us trust Him for vengeance, and if we pray let our prayer be for mercy on those who have wronged us for direful shall be their woes’” (242). Belton wants to reveal the existence of the

Imperium, prove to the white world that blacks are worthy of the Republic through

“four years of endeavors to impress the Anglo‐Saxon that he has a on his hands” (245). If this fails, he wants to organize a lawful takeover of the state of

Texas: emigrating en masse to one of the last Southern states to permit blacks to vote—albeit with dire restrictions—would guarantee demographic superiority, and eventually control of the state. Belton’s final resolution is that “we sojourn in the state of Texas, working out our destiny as a separate and distinct race in the United

States of America.”

Bernard offers Belton a counter‐proposal, by which the Imperium would remain secret while it organizes a secret take‐over of Texas and the infiltration of

Carolina, in 1898, in the circumstances used by Griggs to describe the death of Cook.

224 the U.S. Navy. When ready, the Imperium would help the U.S. black population move to Texas, destroy the U.S. Navy and take the state over along with Louisiana, which would then be given to enemies of the U.S. Texas would secede from the Union and form a separate black nation. Belton refuses to agree to what he sees as treason, and resigns his position in the Imperium, a decision he pays for with his life. Yet how different is Bernard’s plan? Its violence sets it apart, and Belton has no hope that white Americans will ever recognize African American worth, but secession is the main difference. Granted, less than forty years after the Civil War, the idea would not be taken lightly—yet Belton’s plan reaches a similar conclusion concerning the irremediable racial separation at work in the U.S. Belton’s plan operates a rather astonishing synthesis between the old dream/nightmare of a black American nation and the United States, by asserting that the two notions are compatible. In Griggs’s novel, the African American nation is an undeniable fact; what is still to be decided is the form it will take: a pacific, unionist, Plessy v. Ferguson‐inspired, nation within the nation, accepted and respected as such by the U.S.; or a violent, secessionist and independent nation, black version of U.S. irredentism from state to territory.

The import of revenge in each plan is what most decidedly sets them apart.

Bernard’s reaction to the war speech during the assembly is tellingly contrasted with Belton’s cool headed rejoinder: moved by the orator’s words, he “swore a terrible oath to avenge the wrongs of his people” (226). Bernard’s thirst for revenge seems intrinsically related to the fact that he has lived a comparatively sheltered life, growing up wealthy and well‐educated. Bernard is a classic tragic mulatto,

225 whose only brush with despair—in the death of his girlfriend Viola—is caused by his mixed‐race descent. As such he both elaborates on black nation‐building—a black avenger trope motif—and personal revenge for mixed ancestry, a characteristic of the tragic mulatto that is nevertheless inverted here, when compared to the tragic mulatto of white abolitionist fiction in which “half‐white equals reason, half‐black equals emotion.”6 Bernard’s passionate dedication can hardly be blamed on his black half, when black masculinity in the novel is represented by Belton, the epitome of reasonableness.

Belton lived a life of poverty, humiliation, survived a lynching and escaped a death sentence, yet holds on to his own oath, made in college, to leave revenge to

God. When he kills a white man, it is strictly in self‐defense. Belton’s plan is to confirm the African American community as a nation within the nation and turn

Texas into the black state of the Union. He takes the segregationist logic of Plessy v.

Ferguson to its logical end: if African Americans were to lawfully take control of a state when white supremacists unlawfully took control of the South, surely then they would be allowed to create a state where blacks would be granted equal rights and opportunities. Belton’s plan is compatible with Jeffersonian democracy, but also with segregationist views. It provides an alternative to the old nightmare of the black American nation here embodied by Bernard’s plan. Refusing to act out of revenge, therefore, distinguishes this organized African American nation from the old nightmare scenarios of the white world; it also sets it apart from the Southern white community. Indeed, revenge in Imperium in Imperio is all the more despicable

6 Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Character as seen by White Authors,” Journal of Negro Education 2.2

226 that it has become the chief excuse for lynching in the New South. Berl Trout, the narrator that opens and closes the novel, was a member of the Imperium and of the shooting squad that executed Belton. He judges that “when he fell, the spirit of conservatism in the Negro race, fell with him” (262). Trout is convinced that the leadership of Belgrave will lead to catastrophe. He decides to “reveal the existence of the Imperium that it might be broken or watched,” thus saving Belton’s vision and the Union in the same movement (264). In this sense, Griggs’s novel is a fictional version of the jeremiad: the United States is spared a catastrophe, but the text purports to be a final warning that things may well change. Racial terror in the

South splashed the pages of newspapers all over the country, reminding the U.S. that race remained a central problem for the nation.

Rejecting revenge in The Marrow of Tradition

In 1898, the majority black city of Wilmington, North Carolina was the scene of a chilling example of the white supremacist violence through which Jim Crow imposed itself in the Reconstructed South. Municipal elections had brought a biracial, Fusionist list at the head of the town. Local Red Shirts and other white supremacists, claiming to be acting to defend Southern womanhood –an argument familiar to readers of Ida B. Wells’s A Red Record published five years earlier—first destroyed the offices of the only black newspaper in the state. Weapons in hand, they then forced the municipal government to resign their positions, killing in the process of their campaign of terror possibly hundreds of African Americans. The

(1933), 195.

227 coup provided Charles W. Chesnutt with material for his second novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901). The novel follows Dr. Miller, an African American physician coming back to South Carolina to open a black hospital. His wife is the illegitimate half‐sister of Mrs Carteret, wife to Major Carteret, leader of the town’s white elite and owner of the white newspaper, through which he agitates for white supremacy.

Chesnutt’s novel provides a variation on the black avenger trope in the character of Josh Green, “a black giant” with a “reputation for absolute fearlessness.”7 Green first appears in the novel as an anonymous black man riding secretly on the train to Wellington, Chesnutt’s fictional version of Wilmington.

Doctor Miller espies Green jumping from the train as it is stopped at a water station in order to get a drink. Miller notices Green cast a “glance of intense ferocity… suggest[ing] a concentrated hatred almost uncanny in its murderousness” at Captain

George McBane, a despicable man who “represented the aggressive, offensive element among the white people of the New South, who made it hard for a negro to maintain his self‐respect or to enjoy even the rights conceded to colored men by

Southern laws” (57). Later in the novel, Green goes to Miller’s practice for a broken arm. The black stevedore incurred the injury in a fight with “one er dem dagoes off'n a Souf American boat” (109). Dr. Miller’s doesn’t condone Green’s recklessness and warns him against the potential repercussions of his actions and recommends he

“endure a little injustice, rather than run the risk of a sudden and violent death.”

Green, though, has other plans. He already knows how he will die: “in a quarrel wid a w'ite man… an' fu'thermo', he 's gwine ter die at the same time, er a little befo'”

7 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1901),

228 (110). Green has a very specific white man in mind, McBane, of course, who years before killed Green’s father while leading a Ku Klux Klan assault on the Green household that also made Green’s mother lose her mind.

The terms in which Miller ponders Green’s resolve are especially interesting:

He could not approve of Josh's application of the Mosaic law of revenge… McBane was probably deserving of any evil fate which might befall him; but such a revenge would do no good, would right no wrong; while every such crime, committed by a colored man, would be imputed to the race, which was already staggering under a load of obloquy because, in the eyes of a prejudiced and undiscriminating public, it must answer as a whole for the offenses of each separate individual. To die in defense of the right was heroic. To kill another for revenge was pitifully human and weak: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," saith the Lord. (113‐114)

This passage summarizes a representational change that one can connect to the rise of Jim Crow. Miller is wary of Green’s personal revenge plot because it is bound to bleed into the collective, become a negative example for white racists to use against the race at large. His ambivalence towards Green is nevertheless apparent throughout the passage: if he is morally opposed to the “pitifully human and weak” practice of revenge, he recognizes in Green the resolve necessary to “defend a right.”

Miller seems ready to support self‐defense, but opposes revenge as fodder for an endless cycle of violence, “the fruit of one tragedy, the seed of another.”8 Yet in

Miller one recognizes a martyr complex, where one’s moral superiority is measured by the ability to suffer wrongs rather than striking for right: dying a martyr is heroic, but killing in retaliation is weak. Miller’s political arithmetic, like Belton

Piedmont’s in Imperium in Imperio, marks a turn from Delany’s treatment. Where

Delany showed indecision and passivity as a sign of slaves’ lack of education, both

109.

229 Griggs and Chesnutt—though in significantly different ways—portray violence at large and vindictive violence in particular as symptoms of emotional immaturity and educational deficiency. If in the antebellum era the righteous avenger could be portrayed as an example for the community, in Jim Crow America, educated African

Americans know that the suffering of the many may be blotted out by the actions of the one:

Absorbed in the contemplation of their doubtful present and their uncertain future, they gave little thought to the past, ‐ it was a dark story, which they would willingly forget. He knew the timeworn explanation that the Ku ‐ Klux movement, in the main, was merely an ebullition of boyish spirits, begun to amuse young white men by playing upon the fears and superstitions of ignorant negroes.(114)

The story of the past is all the darker when it is written by your enemies. Under Jim

Crow any hint of individual bad behavior counts against the race at large. This is the trick of white supremacist terror: it flips the logic of exemplarity so dear to abolitionist and African American activists upside down. The official narratives of lynching as published in the press reveal a rhetorical, textual legacy connected to the black avenger trope: the dictatorship of the extraordinary, exemplary black as measure of black worth. Every lynching victim is portrayed as an extraordinary threat, to Southern womanhood, to Southern safety, to the white race, etc. The scenario of white supremacist terror considered good enough to justify lynching in the public record is an eternal revenge plot, an endless series of scapegoating rituals. Its terrible efficiency lies in the way it manages to break down series of organized, widespread campaigns of racial terror into individual instances of revenge, while simultaneously implying the entire race in each isolated case. The

8 Ibid.

230 seemingly contradictory dynamics of white supremacist rhetoric is encompassed in the Southern life of an expression, “waving the red shirt.” As explained by Stephen

Budianski, the expression was born of Southern reports on a speech made in

Congress by Butler, the former Union General known in the

South as “Beast Butler.”9 Butler told the tale of a Northerner recently whipped nearly to death by members of the Ku Klux Klan; Southern newspapers pretended that Butler had used as a prop the man’s blood‐soaked shirt. The expression

“waving the red shirt” became a way for Southerners to deride evocations of white supremacist terror on the national stage. As Stephen Budianski notes, the most baffling aspect in the way this expression was used is that Southerners did not deny allegations of violence so much as simply mock them: the Red Shirts, one of the many armed gangs that enforced racial terror in the South, thus named itself after this expression.10

Of course, if Southern white supremacists invented the bloody shirt so that they could dismiss it, it was because the logic of exemplarity and metonymy at work in this invention reproduced the logic they used to justify their own abuses.

Individual lynchings were generally presented as defending the race at large, and the waves of racial terror rippling beyond the purview of these reported events were the unnamed reality of allegedly isolated, exemplary issues. This is a paradoxical dynamic, to be sure, that endlessly switches its major and minor terms:

9 He owed this nickname to his General Order No. 28 issued when Butler was military commander of New Orleans, by which “it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” 10 See Stephen Budianski, The Bloody Shirt: Terror after Appomattox (New York: Viking, 2008).

231 this example proves that all blacks are dangerous, but Southerners “make an example” of him to put fear into black collective consciousness, while silencing the extent of the actual terror among this collective. The collective dimension, abstracted through the exemplary in storytelling, is here erased from the story.

Robert Jewett and John Sheldon Lawrence see D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation

(1915), a film adapted from Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905), as a “classic statement” of “the myth of an innocent public afflicted by evil foes” that bring the innocents to use “heroic violence” in order to save themselves.11 Dixon had not yet begun publishing the novels of his “Klan cycle’ when The Marrow was published, but his revisionist portrayal of racial strife in the South was already circulating widely.

Jewett and Lawrence argue that the “theme of the defenseless City Set upon a Hill seems to have been decisively shaped by cowboy Westerns in the last third of the nineteenth century” (179). While this is certainly true, I would argue that the genre also rose in opposition to the old black avenger tradition. That the tradition was hardly defended by African American authors in that time period only suggests how thoroughly it was covered by strictly American narratives.

For Miller, Josh Green can only worsen the situation by confirming the vision invoked by the white supremacist press to bolster this violence in the first place.

White supremacist terror as portrayed in The Marrow of Tradition is a media campaign built with very concrete goals in mind: the small group of white supremacists running the show from Carteret’s office act mostly out of personal greed. Carteret attacks the town’s black newspaper at least in part out of outrage for

11 Robert Jewett, John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth. 2d ed. (Lanham: University Press

232 seeing a black man competing with him. Destroying newspaper offices and presses has long been a specialty of the white supremacist and pro‐slavery movements in the United States, a transparent attempt at controlling the means of production of the story. However, Southern propaganda in The Marrow of Tradition comes in other forms: when Northern entrepreneurs and their wives visit the town, “the ladies were much interested in the study of social conditions, and especially in the negro problem.” They soon find themselves led by Southern guides who provide them with the official storyline, and make sure they not meet anybody or see anything that might contradict the South as presented by its tourism‐dedicated denizens. The crowning event in this improvised tour is a “genuine negro cakewalk” (Chesnutt,

117).

On this occasion, “degenerate aristocrat” Tom Delamere, known in

Wellington’s white society as “a dream of a dancer, unexcelled in cakewalk or ‘coon’ impersonations, for which he was in large social demand,” conceives of a “brilliant idea.” He will ‘black up’ and participate in the cakewalk. In blackface and in clothes taken from his grandfather’s servant Sandy, Delamere is apparently very convincing: he wins the cake with a performance that leaves his “sable companions… equally swayed by admiration and jealousy” (119). Although no one appears to realize that Delamere is not black, Ellis, a white witness to his performance, judges his “grotesque contortions, somewhat overdone, even for the comical type of negro.” But Ellis is unable to explain his unease at the performance until much later in the novel: “Ellis had never pretended to that intimate knowledge

of America, 1977, 1988), 176.

233 of negro thought and character by which some of his acquaintances claimed the ability to fathom every motive of a negro's conduct, and predict in advance what any one of the darker race would do under a given set of circumstances” (119). Yet he sees some amount of confirmation of his racial prejudice in this behavior.

Of course, what he sees is a racial projection. Chesnutt makes extremely clear that black victims of lynching, no matter what they actually did, are always murdered not so much for being black as for being (mis)matched to white constructs of blackness. Delamere’s blackface is a perpetual exaggeration; both as a dancer and as a murderer he overdoes it, but nobody seems able to immediately diagnose his act. Significantly, even Sandy misrecognizes himself in Delamere’s mimicry. The comical scene shows a passably drunk Sandy finding himself in the middle of the night following Delamere who is wearing Sandy’s clothes. Sandy thinks he is seeing a haunt, a ghostly version of himself. He puzzles at the vision in the following terms:

"Ef dat 's me gwine 'long in front," mused Sandy, in vinous perplexity, "den who is dis behin' here? Dere ain' but one er me, an' my ha'nt would n' leave my body 'tel I wuz dead. Ef dat's me in front, den I mus' be my own ha'nt; an' whichever one of us is de ha'nt, de yuther must be dead an' don' know it. I don' know what ter make er no sech gwines‐on, I don't. Maybe it ain' me after all, but it certainly do look lack me.” (167)

The comical tone notwithstanding, Sandy’s logic is fairly accurate: Delamere’s disguise indeed spells Sandy’s death, and the force of prejudice makes his own version of himself the least likely to matter in the eyes of the white public. Indeed, later in the novel the consequences of misrecognition will become more dire: Sandy is accused of a murder Tom Delamere committed in blackface, while wearing

234 Sandy’s clothes. Delamere frames Sandy by giving him some of the victim’s belongings, but more importantly Sandy is condemned by the newspaper campaign immediately launched against him. He is miraculously saved from the lynch mob gathering outside his cell by the selfless intercession of the elder Delamere. Chesnutt suggests the scale of the collective downfall of this story:

Nothing further was ever done about the case; but though the crime went unpunished, it carried evil in its train. As we have seen, the charge against Campbell had been made against the whole colored race. All over the United States the had flashed the report of another dastardly outrage by a burly black brute, ‐ all black brutes it seems are burly, ‐ and of the impending lynching with its prospective horrors. This news, being highly sensational in its character, had been displayed in large black type on the front pages of the daily papers. The dispatch that followed, to the effect that the accused had been found innocent and the lynching frustrated, received slight attention, if any, in a fine‐print paragraph on an inside page. The facts of the case never came out at all. The family honor of the Delameres was preserved, and the prestige of the white race in Wellington was not seriously impaired. (233‐234)

Josh Green reappears as Sandy seems likely to be lynched. He is shown in the process of gathering a group of black men to guard the jail against Sandy’s would‐be lynchers. The local white newspaper has been agitating, and people come from nearby towns to observe and participate in the promised lynching. Green knows of

Sandy’s innocence for having spent the evening of the crime with him, but he also knows that his testimony will count for naught. The only solution he sees is collective action.

Dr. Miller, ever the voice of moderation, disagrees. A stand would only bring more hostility on blacks, “and instead of one dead negro there 'd be fifty” (189).

According to him, the only available solution is to find a decent white man; “one

235 good white man, if he choose, may stem the flood long enough to give justice a chance” (195). Miller succeeds on this occasion, but cannot do anything against the next supremacist assault. On pretext of general outrage generated by a critical column published in the black newspaper, white supremacists destroy the paper’s office and press and take over the town, searching blacks for weapons on the streets. Soon they are shooting them on sight. Green organizes an armed militia, once again for self‐defense rather than attack. He meets the de facto black community leaders, Watson the lawyer and Dr. Miller, and asks both of them to lead the group. Watson, on his way out of town forever, refuses to lead: “You won’t gain anything by resistance” he says, invoking his family to justify refusing Green’s proposal (282). Miller, looking for his wife and son, refuses leadership as well:

I should like to lead you; I should like to arm every colored man in this town, and have them stand firmly in line, not for attack, but for defense; but if I attempted it, and they should stand by me, which is questionable, ‐ for I have met them fleeing from the town, ‐ my life would pay the forfeit. Alive, I may be of some use to you, and you are welcome to my life in that way, ‐ I am giving it freely. Dead, I should be a mere lump of carrion. (282) He also advises Green to abandon his plan; but Green is driven to action, partly because he has no family left to worry about: his mother, we find out, died that very morning. She was the last person standing between him and revenge. He is now ready to die.

Miller’s conciliatory speech makes for an interesting counterpart to

Oroonoko’s rebellion speech. It is followed by a fairly similar discussion between

Oroonoko and Tuscan, in which the latter exclaims: “were we only men, would follow so great a leader through the world. But oh! consider we are husbands, and parents too, and have things more dear to us than life; our wives and children…”

236 That discussion saw the party of heroic resistance win over Tuscan’s family‐ oriented moderation. In this conversation, Green’s speech to the group puts him in the lineage of Oroonoko:

All right, suh! Ef I don' live ter do it, I 'll know it 'll be 'tended ter right. Now we're gwine out ter de cotton compress, an' git a lot er colored men tergether, an' ef de w'ite folks 'sturbs me, I should n't be s'prise' ef dere 'd be a mix‐up; ‐ an' ef dere is, me an one w'ite man 'll stan' befo' de jedgment th'one er God dis day; an' it won't be me w’at ‘ll be 'feared er de jedgment. Come along, boys! Dese gentlemen may have somethin' ter live fer; but ez fer my pa't, I 'd ruther be a dead nigger any day dan a live dog! (283‐284)

He is driven by a fundamentally different urge. Oroonoko’s act was very much the opposite of revenge: he was fighting to protect his son’s future rather than to correct past wrongs. As an avenger, however righteous in his behavior, Green is necessarily condemned by the Christian logic of the novel. He has to die, because in committing to revenge he arrogated God’s prerogative. He shows full awareness of this throughout the novel. Green dies exactly the way he had announced to Dr. Miller, in a deadly embrace with Captain McBane:

Armed with a huge bowie‐knife, a relic of the civil war…, he reached the line of the crowd. All but the bravest shrank back. Like a wedge be dashed through the mob, which parted instinctively before him, and all oblivious of the rain of lead which fell around him, reached the point where Captain McBane, the bravest man in the party, stood waiting to meet him. A pistol‐ flame flashed in his face, but he went on, and raising his powerful right arm, buried his knife to the hilt in the heart of his enemy. When the crowd dashed forward to wreak vengeance on his dead body, they found him with a smile still upon his face. One of the two died as the fool dieth. Which was it, or was it both? "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord, and it had not been left to Him. But they that do violence must expect to suffer violence. McBane's death was merciful, compared with the nameless horrors he had heaped upon the hundreds of helpless mortals who had fallen into his hands during his career as a contractor of convict labor. (309‐310)

Green and the black avenger tradition are contrasted with the alternative trope

237 pushed by Chesnutt, the rational, conciliatory forgiving Christian. However moderate Miller is, he is something of a race man still, not just in his commitment to the community, but also in spirit:

"My advice is not heroic, but I think it is wise. In this riot we are placed as we should be in a war: we have no territory, no base of supplies, no organization, no outside sympathy, ‐ we stand in the position of a race, in a case like this, without money and without friends. Our time will come, ‐ the time when we can command respect for our rights; but it is not yet in sight. Give it up, boys, and wait. Good may come of this, after all." (283)

Miller is an alternative to a scenario known to be produced by and profitable to whites. In this sense Chesnutt continues the work of Blake, but considers non‐ violence as a valid possibility. Miller’s abnegation reaches Christ‐like extremes in the final pages of the novel: he finally finds his wife and son, only the latter is dead, killed by a stray bullet during the white supremacist assault away from which Miller had attempted to remain. His righteousness is so complete there is no challenging him as a character. That is quite transparently the goal of the narrative, which it announces regularly throughout the novel—if exemplariness is of the essence, this story will provide an untouchable hero.

Yet Miller gives hints that he could well become an avenger: in the final pages of the novel, when after finding his son killed by the rioters, Miller is asked by

Carteret to come save his son, he refuses flat out, declaring “as you have sown, so may you reap!” In the words of Bryant, “this is a high moment in the inner history of the African American and has been long awaited: appropriate vengeance against an oppressor.”12 But this vengeance by default, for seeming fit, is rather obviously

12 Jerry H. Bryant, Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 113.

238 morally wrong—Carteret’s son is as innocent as Miller’s was. Miller’s decision to retaliate by not helping is immediately rescinded. He lets his wife decide, and she eventually asks him to save the Carteret boy. Compassion prevails; the glimpse of revenge in Miller does not come to fruition, and more crucially, it does not spread from the individual to the collective. In Miller, Chesnutt proposes an individual,

Christian antidote to the collective horror of lynching: in saving Carteret’s son,

Miller reneges on the possibility of turning black national sentiment into action. In the image of the apparent reconciliation of his wife and her white half‐sister, Miller’s gesture is meant to make the uneasy truce between his family and the Carterets a metaphor for the American nation at large, one that forces union beyond the color line. He offers an alternative to the white supremacist collective dynamic at work throughout the novel.

In eschewing a role as racial/national leader, Miller escapes the narrative determinism imposed by white supremacy, one that relies on conventions of violence and revenge most drastically expressed in what David Garland calls “public torture lynchings,” a highly ritualized form of public murder born in the 1890s and characterized by the involvement of big crowds. Garland presents them as

“collective performances that involved a set of formal conventions and recognizable roles.... Lynchers sought to represent their violent acts as collective rituals rather than private actions.”13 Garland further advances that lynchers were performing a kind of “morality play,” and “their adoption of the ritual forms of public executions was an implicit appeal for legitimacy that invited collective recognition” (808).

13 David Garland, “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth‐Century

239 Yet these actions rested on a decidedly ambiguous rhetoric, in which by contrasting the righteousness of collective retribution with the alleged weakness of official, legal retribution, lynch mobs presented themselves as reacting against a form of oppression. Garland notes that the official rhetoric of these lynchings, as expressed in the newspapers that called for them, or in the speeches that later defended them, justified the executions as forms of justice. The victims were always accused of having committed a heinous crime that demands an equally heinous retribution. In the process lynchers asserted much more; they reinforced racial order, and the presence of the crowd gave the proceedings a semblance of respectability: “The crowd converted an act of private justice into a public act. It politicized it, converting its significance from an act of unlawful violence into a law of its own” (815). That law was white supremacist law, and it was also a form of national self‐definition:

mass lynchings were crowd events through which lynching activists and their supporters proclaimed a distinctive communal identity. They defined themselves as sovereign in opposition to state (and later, federal) authorities for whom their actions were not law but lawlessness... The central function of these rituals was to assert and celebrate a specific communal identity— sovereign, Southern, supremacist—by brutally responding to black crimes that challenged that self‐image and, more obliquely, to any white reformist politics that would undermine it. (818‐819)

The self‐victimization so typical of postbellum white supremacist rhetoric adapts the old rhetorical style of Anglo‐Saxon insurgency inherited from the English and

American revolutions. By portraying themselves as unfairly dominated by blacks, they produce the thinnest of cover stories. Of course, these stories never needed more than the appearance of truth. Lynchers rarely, if ever, got into judicial trouble,

America” Law and Society Review 39.4 (2005), 807.

240 and when they did their trials were little more than public pantomime. Local authorities that did nothing to stop the violence had to play their part and pretend to run an investigation; a judge would act out a trial. Much like the previous act, that part of the morality play was not very elaborate, but it followed equally clear conventions: the accused would stand trial and then be cleared of all wrongdoing.

Justice had been served.

Lynchings resemble scapegoat rituals in their execution. Yet, contrary to scapegoating rituals as described by René Girard, they assuage no general outburst of violence within the white community. Their primary purpose is to remind blacks of their status as sacrifice fodder, pariahs within white society, and make clear that racial boundaries were also unbreachable national borders. In ancient societies, slaves were scapegoat material, but also potential citizens: Southern public torture lynchings made clear that African Americans would never get that opportunity.

They are a perversion of the ritual described by Girard in that here, a scapegoating allegedly performed against generalized violence that serves to perpetuate it, a closed circuit of violence resting on the eternal distinction between whites and blacks: “to allow a black rapist or murderer the due process of law would be to treat him as a citizen, a fellow American, a fellow human being. The public torture lynching worked to deny this fellowship and to insist on the utter worthlessness of any black man who offended against white people” (817). Black avenger plots traditionally contrasted individual excellence with the mediocrity of the mass, insisting on the hero’s natural nobility to justify his taking a leading role. Miller’s nobility leads him to refuse leadership, thus reverting traditional black avenger

241 dynamics. His singularity is exemplary, but it enjoins the black community to act as a collection of individuals rather than a political group.

In turn, Chesnutt shows that the black avenger narrative as embodied in Josh

Green is too weak to compete with the white nationalist narrative, as well as it is materially unable to compete. Yet the American alternative offered in the end of the novel is even weaker: the federal national union suggested by the half‐sisters’ agreement only comes to white Southerners as a second thought, in time of need, and nothing suggests that it will last longer than needed. Chesnutt’s integrationist scenario is rooted in bitterness and weighs exclusively on the black community, that must not only suffer wrongs in silence but still prove more human than its foes.

Importantly, then, for Chesnutt the way to integration lies in rejecting the black avenger scenario and showing it as an impasse. The American nation Chesnutt suggests is one that recognizes, if reluctantly, its multiracial character, and more importantly, the fact that the individuals—rather than the communities—that make it up are irrevocably tied together, even by blood. Black avengers in African

American fiction at the turn of the tend to be negative examples, engines of national division.

As We See It: Black Western

Yet the black avenger scenario was not altogether rejected. Its close ties to notions of masculinity proved too important at a time when it seemed that African

Americans needed to prove themselves as citizens and, therefore, as men. When shown to be noble, as Robert L. Waring’s Abe Overley in As We See It (1910), the

242 black avenger is committed to the United States, and appears as an avenger in the

American grain, a variation on what Robert Jewett and John Sheldon Lawrence call

“the American monomyth”: “the American monomyth begins and ends in Eden.

Stories in this genre typically begin with a small community of hard‐working farmers and townspeople living in harmony. A disruption of harmony occurs, and must be eliminated by the superhero, before the Edenic condition can be re‐ established in a happy ending (Jewett, Lawrence, 170). Waring’s novel clearly shows the influence of the “frontier vigilante” Jewett and Lawrence also notice in Griffith’s

Birth of a Nation. Waring’s black avenger is Abe Overley, the fifth by this name to grow up on an Alabama plantation owned by white Overleys who not only bear the same first and last names, but share birth years with them. The white and black

Overleys each come from a “stock of nature’s noblemen”: the first of the white

Overleys struck an agreement with the first of the black Overleys after buying him at a slave : he would never whip him, and in turn Abe would become his faithful right hand man. The natural nobility of the Overleys contrasts with the essential lowliness of “crackers.” The Overley plantation is the original Eden of this American tale, a pastoral, idyllic place where whites and blacks live in harmony. This Eden is threatened by the Lashum family, poor whites formerly in the employ of the

Overleys, who by ill means became very wealthy during the Civil War. The war left the Overleys almost ruined, and to save the plantation they’ve had to borrow money from Lashum, whose secret dream is to take over the Overley plantation.

The two young Abes go to college to Oberlin, where black Abe (white Abe is from then on called Malcolm) shows impervious dignity in clashes with hostile

243 white students. Horror strikes when Abe finds out that in his absence, his mother and sister were assaulted by a small group of white men among whom was Buck

Lashum, recently dismissed from Oberlin after attempting to stain Abe’s reputation through treachery. Driven by the desire to avenge his humiliation and encouraged by his father, Lashum led his party to the black Overley residence, and whipped both women to death. This news has tremendous effect on Abe; he literally transforms, until “he looked the very incarnation of the avenging demon.”14 He vows first to avenge his mother, but in the same scene is soon saying “I will be revenged.”

Impervious to all appeals to reason, Abe the avenging demon sets out in pursuit of the culprits, hunts them down one by one and kills them, leaving by each body a piece of the horse trace with which they originally committed their crime.

His revenge evokes classic revenge tragedy, and he is ready to live by the convention that an avenger, once his deed is done, will live—if at all—on the outskirts of society: “I shall then be an outcast, a homeless , an , maybe, with my hand raised against mankind and a price upon my head. God alone knows how it will end... Though I face death at the fiery stake in this world, though I am sure to be engulfed in the fires of hell in the next world, my mother shall be avenged!” (171). Still it follows more closely yet the conventions of the “frontier vigilante” of cowboy Western novels, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902). In the course of his adventures as lawman in the Wild West, Wister’s hero lynches cattle rustlers, an act that horrifies his love interest. Judge Henry justifies the

Virginian’s actions in these interesting terms:

14 Robert L. Waring, As We See It (Washington D.C.: Sudwarth, 1910), 120.

244 “Judge Henry," said Molly Wood, also coming straight to the point, "have you come to tell me that you think well of lynching?" He met her. "Of burning Southern negroes in public, no. Of hanging cattle thieves in private, yes. You perceive there's a difference, don't you?"... "What is the difference in principle?" she demanded. ... [I]n all sincerity I see no likeness in principle whatever between burning Southern negroes in public and hanging Wyoming horse‐thieves in private. I consider the burning a proof that the South is semi‐barbarous, and the hanging a proof that Wyoming is determined to become civilized. We do not torture our criminals when we lynch them. We do not invite spectators to enjoy their death agony. We put no such hideous disgrace upon the United States. We execute our criminals by the swiftest means, and in the quietest way. Do you think the principle is the same? ... I think that they are not. For in the South they take a negro from jail where he was waiting to be duly hung. The South has never claimed that the law would let him go. But in Wyoming the law has been letting our cattle‐thieves go for two years. We are in a very bad way, and we are trying to make that way a little better until civilization can reach us. At present we lie beyond its pale. The courts, or rather the juries, into whose hands we have put the law, are not dealing the law. ... Call this primitive, if you will. But so far from being a defiance of the law, it is an assertion of it‐‐the fundamental assertion of self‐ governing men, upon whom our whole social fabric is based.15

For Judge Henry, the Virginian’s recourse to “private lynching” is the only possibility of justice in a place where organized justice has no actual sway, a land that lies beyond the pale of civilization. Of course, his description could be applied word for word to the situation in which African Americans found themselves in the South, unprotected by civilization, and unable to find justice in the courts of law. When he starts on his vendetta, Abe Overley is applying Judge Henry’s precepts to the letter, thus making his narrative a variation on the frontier vigilante version of the

American monomyth. No doom befalls Abe once his mother and sister are avenged; he is absolved by his fiancée, marries her, and is allowed to finish his studies at

Oberlin. Peace comes back to Eden: the Overley plantation is saved from the

Lashums by a coalition of Southern gentry, and Abe Overley finds a plantation of his

245 own, where his family can finally live decently.

The Overleys, black and white, bear the same name because they are of the same world: natural aristocrats, the pinnacle of American democracy according to

Owen Wister:

It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of man. For by it we abolished a cut‐and‐ dried aristocracy. We had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice‐loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, "Let the best man win, whoever he is." Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. (147)

It may come as no surprise then, that there is precious little black community to speak of in this novel. Except for Abe Overley’s family members, the most notable black characters are Black Sue and her children. Black Sue is Nick Lashum’s mistress and every bit his counterpart, an evil and bitter woman somehow involved in most of Lashum’s deeds. Waring’s novel, faithful to Wister’s vision of democracy, shows that natural aristocracy and natural lowliness alike can be found among whites and blacks.

The black community in As We See It is a secondary thought. When Abe is asked to serve a nation, it is a foreign one: Japanese envoys attempt to convince him to join the Japanese Army “because they felt that he would be of great service to

Japan, should a conflict come on between the two countries” (Waring 229). The envoys evoke Abe’s mother in hopes of kindling hatred for the United States in him, and he goes home pondering their offer until he abruptly declares to his wife:

15 Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York: MacMillan Co., 1902), 433‐436.

246 “Nancy, my mother appeared to me in my thoughts. She held the Stars and Stripes proudly above her head while her other hand was extended to me. My mother wills that I shall defend the flag of my country” (230). His refusal shocks the Japanese who had never considered that “a Negro’s heart was governed by the same honorable impulses that other men’s are…; in short, that a Negro is a Man” (231).

Manhood can only be proven in the face of the nation by the ability to defend women, as the epigraph to the novel clearly suggests: “to those negro men who dare defend the womanhood of their race.” Waring taps into the hackneyed gendered vision of the nation16 which he ultimately shares with white supremacist authors,

“the same code, of course, that ostensibly drives the lynching myth, the powerful symbolism of women for the patriarchal world” (Bryant 84). Waring makes his bid for American manhood and citizenship by applying her to the classic “metaphoric or symbolic role” women tend to play in nationalist scenarios. Her suffering is sublimated, and Overley is redeemed into the Edenic American nation when he refuses to follow the Japanese.

In the United States as defined by Wister, the vigilante is the last barrier of democracy, the individual safety valve engaged when the system fails.

Characterization in this novel follows the stages of the American monomyth, notably in the way it dissolves all complexity through what Jewett and Johnson call “mythic massage,” “the process of assuring spectators that the gap between myth and reality can be bridged… Complex social problems are solved with a single gesture; tangled

16 See Anne McClintock, “ ‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Press, 1997)

247 human relations are sorted out and resolved; evil is eliminated with a single heroic stroke” (Jewett, Lawrence, 51). Thus Waring gestures towards the collective reality of white supremacist terror in the South only to reduce it to an individual matter, the story of individual nobility of a black man with no connections whatsoever to his racial community. In rejecting the collective vision so typical of the race literature of his time, Waring was not simply asserting his novel as an unabashedly American effort; he also announced the individualized terms along which the black avenger trope would evolve in relation with U.S. American literature.

After protest: Chester Himes

The American invasion of Haiti in 1915 brought the island back into U.S. culture, contributing to an increasing mystique of the mass movement. Over the almost two decades of American occupation, Haitian culture entered the American mainstream, and along with voodoo drums and , Haitian historical figures found their way back into the U.S. culture. Interestingly, King Henry I of Haiti was perhaps the

Haitian most discussed in America at that point, his life story and more particularly his death being adapted into such famous plays as O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, and repeated and reiterated in numerous other American texts on Haiti. This focus on

Henry, presented as the early incarnation of bad self‐government and ridiculed for his aristocratic pretensions also served to downplay and ridicule a rather worrisome black avenger figure at home: Marcus Garvey, whose United Negro

Improvement Association claimed by 1920 (the year O'Neill's play was first released) over four million members. The return of Haiti at the forefront of

248 American race politics led to deep revisions of the black avenger trope, especially as the work of historical and cultural recovery of the revolution led by Communist thinkers and writers focused on the Haitian Revolution as a collective movement of international scope.

The country at large saw profound changes with the First World War, but those were perhaps nowhere as drastic as among the African American community.

With the Great Migration, the so‐called “Negro problem” took on radically new aspects. In the words of Alain Locke, “the problems of adjustment are new, practical, local and not peculiarly racial. Rather they are an integral part of the large industrial and social problems of our present‐day democracy. And finally, with the Negro rapidly in process of class differentiation, if it ever was warrantable to regard and treat the Negro en masse it is becoming with every day less possible, more unjust and more ridiculous.”17 The artists of the , political obedience notwithstanding, shared the notion that their art would emphasize the necessity to look at African Americans as a community of individuals. Their very modern insistence on the newness of their artistic endeavor could not hide the fact that their demands were in many ways variations on the same old demands for recognition as full citizens and human beings in the United States. What the more left wing artists of the time period introduced was a class‐based analysis of the race situation in the

U.S., which in turn reintroduced the use of transnational frames of analysis.18 In his introduction to the New Negro anthology, Locke focused on the U.S. national frame:

17 Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke ed. (1925, New York: Touchstone, 1997), 6. 18 On this topic, see Brent H. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of

249 The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas. But this forced attempt to build his Americanism on race values is a unique social experiment, and its ultimate success is impossible except through the fullest sharing of American culture and institutions. There should be no delusion about this. American nerves in sections unstrung with race hysteria are often fed the opiate that the trend of Negro advance is wholly separatist, and that the effect of its operation will be to encyst the Negro as a benign foreign body in the body politic. This cannot be—even if it were desirable. The racialism of the Negro is no limitation or reservation with respect to American life; it is only a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the stream of his progress into an efficient dam of social energy and power. Democracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels are dosed. Indeed they cannot be selectively dosed. So the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other. (12) Dismissing the separatism of a Garvey, Locke recycles the theme of the actualization of the American dream: either America stays true to its democratic word, or it is a lie. All that African Americans want is a share in the dream. Locke’s metaphors are especially striking: the kind of separatism once portrayed negatively by Griggs is here presented in very organic terms, as a cyst in the body politic. The image suggests also how little stock Locke puts in the political power such an effort would yield: as a nation within the nation, the African American community would amount to little more than a nuisance, a “benign foreign body” with next to no influence on the life of the body at large, but also the ominous possibility of excision. In his metaphor of the dam, Locke further explains the dynamic of racialism. It is a utilitarian response, a way to redirect the impediments to black development strewn by white racism so that they do not stifle community growth, if they prevent the African American stream to merge into the American flow. Locke’s singular, the

Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

250 New Negro, stands very clearly for the whole race here. This is not the case for all

African American artists of the time period. George Schuyler infamously described the African American as a “lampblacked Anglo‐Saxon” in “The Negro Art Hokum.”19

Schuyler somewhat disingenuously argues that being the “subject to the same economic and social forces” as his fellow white American citizens, the African

American was therefore but another expression of the American spirit.

Langston Hughes’s rejoinder to Schuyler, “The Negro Artist and the Racial

Mountain,” did not so much disagree with Schuyler’s argument as it took it to a different level. Hughes argued that claims to want to simply be an artist, as opposed to a black artist, were sure signs of the self‐hatred that comes with black middle‐ class education, where white standards are allegedly paramount. His article calls for artistic celebration of blackness, an emphasis on themes deemed too black for mainstream American culture by both white and middle class black audiences and critics. Hughes aims at a medium between this call for racial, collective definition, and a for artistic independence, which he calls “racial individuality”: “we younger

Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark‐skinned selves without fear or shame.”20 The raced individual is not easily separated from the race and that is not what Hughes has in mind here, but ways in which such distinction could be achieved took center position in African American debates in the following decades. Claude McKay’s portrayal of the seedy underbelly of Harlem in Home to

19 George Schuyler, “The Negro Art Hokum,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Angelyn Mitchell ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 52. 20 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Angelyn Mitchell

251 Harlem was infamously received with disgust by W.E.B. DuBois as an effort “to cater to that prurient demand on the part of white folk for a portrayal in Negroes of that utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk from enjoying…

He has used every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.”21 To serve as propaganda, black art could not be allowed to offer characters likely to support negative views of African Americans. It had to take into account and preempt audience expectations. But African Americans could not afford to be limited by the collective dynamic of “racialism.”

This is the argument developed by Edward Bland in his oft‐cited 1944 article,

“Racial Bias and Negro Poetry,” and taken up by Ralph Ellison in “Richard Wright’s

Blues.” Bland laments the twofold problem of African American verse: white readers blinded by racial prejudice are unable to access the “Negro’s attitude towards life’; and African American verse suffers from a “provincial view of life.”22 The ideas developed in African American poetry are symptomatic of the defense mechanism built by the community in the hostile circumstances of Jim Crow America. As a result,

Negro verse deals with what might be called pre‐individualistic values. Individualism is the emphasis that would oppose the interest of the individual to that of the group, state, society, Nature, and the like. He is the measure of all things. Thus whatever happens is significant because it happens to him… These assumptions form part of the value‐system of most white writers. In the pre‐individualistic thinking of the Negro, the stress is on the group.

ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 59. 21 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Two Novels,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry L. Gates and Nelly McKay eds. 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2003). 22 Edward Bland, “Racial Bias and Negro Poetry,” Poetry 63.6 (1944), 330; 328.

252 Instead of seeing in terms of the individual, the negro sees in terms of “races,” masses of peoples separated from other masses according to color. Hence an act rarely bears intent against him as a Negro individual. He is singled out not as a person but as a specimen of an ostracized group. He knows that he never exists in his own right but only to the extent that others hope to make the race suffer vicariously through him. (332) Ellison follows Bland in noting that the dynamic is twofold, the result of external and internal pressure. In his discussion of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Ralph Ellison analyzes Wright’s rebellion as described in his autobiography as a “groping for individual values in a black community whose values were… ‘pre‐individual’.”23 The suppression of individualism noted by Bland in poetry echoes the same phenomenon in African American daily life. In the reception of Wright’s book,

Ellison also sees the signs of the tyranny of white expectations: white Southerners

“either deny the Negro’s humanity… or they protect themselves from their guilt in the Negro’s condition and from their fear … by attributing to them a superhuman capacity for love, kindliness, and forgiveness,” constantly force‐fitting black experience onto these ready patterns. “It is only when the individual, whether white or black, rejects the pattern that he awakens to the nightmare of his life” (209). This is the existential epiphany Ellison draws from Wright’s book: Wright exposes the profound horror of the “Southern pattern,” but his book provides no solution to the problem. Like the blues, it “fall[s] short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self” (221).

Ellison’s reading of Black Boy provides interesting inroads to the analysis of the peculiar ways in which African American literature in the 1940 and 1950s navigated the necessarily collective implications of treatments of the race issue, and

253 the individualistic imperative. The runaway success of Richard Wright’s first novel,

Native Son, set new expectations for African American literature that were just as restrictive as previous ones had been. By the late 1940s, authors were questioning these expectations in the United States but also across the Atlantic, in France, where

African American literature was receiving the same kind of attention African

American music had two decades earlier. At a time when black collective action was shaping up to take a decidedly non‐violent form, the specter of the black avenger still hovered over literature by and about African Americans, questioning the relation between individual development, individual representation, the racial community and the very concept of race.

In 1950, Georgia native Arthur Gordon wrote the novel Reprisal.24 The story bore strong resemblance to the 1946 Moore’s Ford, GA execution of two African

American couples by a white mob. The “last mass lynching in America,” a crime that caught national attention and pushed President Truman to create the President’s

Committee on Civil Rights, which led to the desegregation of the federal workforce and of the armed forces in 1948.25 In spite of the FBI’s involvement, no one was ever condemned for the crime, as the main witness and main suspect in the case always refused to name participants. In Gordon’s novel, three clear culprits are cleared of the crime in local courts, and also get away with beating an African

American teenage witness. Nathan Hamilton, the husband of one of the victims,

23 Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Antioch Review 5.2 (1945), 203. 24 Arthur Gordon, Reprisal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950). 25 Executive Orders 9980 and 9981. For more on the Moore’s Ford lynching, see Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (New York: Scribner, 2003).

254 teaching in Harlem at the time of his wife’s murder, then decides to secretly come back to Hainesville and avenge her. Gordon’s novel is a relatively standard revenge thriller, with a racial theme thrown in. His Southern white liberal background is given full range of expression: those white locals horrified into action by the lynching are portrayed more convincingly than the main protagonist, Hamilton. He evens the balance by killing all three culprits, and, as morality demands of blood redeemers, dies at the end of the novel. Hamilton commits suicide rather than fall into the hands of the white mob giving him chase after his last killing, leaving locals to ponder whether or not going back to the way things were is desirable or even possible.

Hamilton is an avenger in the Western mold: the novel ends with the promise of a new Southern Eden, devoid of brutality—righteous or not—now based on racial harmony. It comes as no surprise that Gordon’s novel was adapted into a film that bore but little resemblance to its source material: set in Arizona, George Sherman’s

Reprisal! followed the half‐white, half‐Native American rancher Frank Madden confronted with white prejudice and violence. Cowboys lynch Native Americans, and it is up to a self‐hating to avenge his (half)brethren. These changes may have made the film palatable for a wider audience in a year, 1956, that saw increasingly violent mass reactions to school desegregation in the South. With this racial translation, the film was bound to avoid being labelled a protest piece. That the novel risked that fate was on the mind of some white critics, who emphasized that its serious topic did not diminish its entertainment value without making it an effort in sensationalism, contrary to “most of the novels based on racial conflict in

255 the South.”26 Gordon’s fairly conventional treatment of lynching was deemed acceptable as the fruit of his ‘honest indignation.’ Prurience, sensationalism, “the repellent combination of sex and sadism that has become one of the least pleasant development in modern fiction” were characteristics routinely applied to African

American ‘protest authors,’ Chester Himes being chief among them.

Himes and the protest novel

The protest novel label was attached to Himes from the publication of his first novel,

If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), the tale of Bob Jones, an African American metalworker in a Los Angeles shipyard doomed by the pathological desire and hatred his white female colleague Madge bears him. Critics compared the novel to the unavoidable Richard Wright's Native Son for its depiction of the crushing determinism of racism in American society. Himes described in painfully direct fashion what he would call elsewhere “America's sex and racism syndrome.”27 Yet, if

Himes's early novels appeared to espouse the deterministic perspective of protest fiction, his sarcastic and bitter tone suggested some differences from Richard

Wright's blend of naturalism, as well as an original voice in African‐American fiction.

The novel received praise from some critics, including Richard Wright and James

Baldwin, but reviews were generally mixed, and many voiced dismay at its

“overwhelming bitterness and hatred.”28 Criticism only grew harsher with Himes's

26 Harrison , “Lynching Avenged.” Review of Reprisal by Arthur Gordon. Saturday Review, September 16 1950, 17. 27 Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt. New York: Paragon House, 1971, 4. 28 R.E.C., “Race in the Rough.” Review of If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes. Phylon 7.2 (1946), 210.

256 following novels. The aptly named Lonely Crusade (1947) evoked racist practices in trade unions and the duplicity of Communist Party members towards African

Americans. The book infuriated the Communist press and drew acid comments from part of the black press. In Himes's own words, “everyone hated the book...the left hated it, the right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it” (Himes, Quality, 100).

The book was critical of trade unions' race politics, and Himes seemed to offer no way out of the race issue, so what good could it be?29 Many critics judged severely what Philip Butcher termed Himes's “unilluminating concern with violence,”30 dismissing it as an attempt to cash in on popular tastes at the cost of realism, and questioning Himes's necessary commitment to racial uplift. Worse yet,

Himes’s very experience as a black man was called into question by Milton Klonsky in a particularly scathing review for Commentary. Klonsky felt that through books such as Himes's “the dignity of the cause and the dignity of the injured themselves must suffer.”31 Such dead reckoning of Himes's position in relation to the black question soon became standard for reviewers of his work. By the early 1950s,

Himes was generally reviled in the United States for the grim, allegedly pointless darkness of his stories, and for a tone at odds with the expectations brought about by the protest genre and by the white liberal influence on this genre. Milton Klonsky went as far as to say that “although the author himself is a Negro, his book is so

29 In a 1964 article for the New York Herald Tribune, John Williams showed how lasting such feelings were by quoting a recent letter from NAACP Labor Secretary Herbert Hill dismissing a screenplay by Himes as “nothing more than a travesty on Negro life in Harlem... hav[ing] no relationship to reality and... not redeemed by any literary values” (Williams 21). 30 Quoted in Alain Locke, “A Critical Retrospect of the Literature of the Negro for 1947.” Phylon 9.1 (1948), 6. 31 Milton Klonsky, “The Writing on the Wall.” Review of The Lonely Crusade by Chester Himes. Commentary 5 (1948), 189

257 deracinated, without any of the lively qualities of the imagination peculiar to his people, that it might easily have been composed by any clever college girl.” This kind of reception certainly influenced the speech Himes delivered later that year at the

University of Chicago on “The Dilemma of the Negro writer.” According to Jodi

Melamed, Himes “charged that white racial liberal practices of reading African

American literature for information retrieval and sympathetic identification amounted to an act of racial power.”32 Himes's speech was the basis for the stylistic turn he would operate a few years later with The End of a Primitive, which “satirizes the culture, ideology and social milieu of literature in order to make racial liberalism visible as a mode of racial regulation that ironically operates new forms of racialized violence and discipline though the very mechanisms of its antiracism” (772).

Melamed's insightful analysis of U.S. racial liberalism is indispensable to this study, both for what it reveals and what it leaves out. In asserting that Himes “published

[End of a Primitive] immediately after his University of Chicago speech,” Melamed elides seven years of his life, during which he traveled around Europe. Already settled in France at the time, Richard Wright had told Himes wonders about Paris.

Though Himes “didn't expect any utopia,” by the end of the 1940s he “wanted out of the United States” (Himes, Quality 133). In 1952, he made the trip to France.

Existential blackness

French interest in African American culture was not new; Paris had been a city of refuge for African Americans since the 1920s. The comparatively good treatment

32 Jodi Melamed, “The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes's End of a Primitive Sounds the Limits

258 African Americans had received in the city between the two world wars had generated the Paris Noir myth, in which Paris was a counterpoint to Jim Crow. The myth tended to ignore the abuses to which black populations were subjected under

French rule. As post‐World War II Paris welcomed an increasingly diverse and politically conscious African American community, the myth regained some currency, with the help of Parisian elites. Not that the issues faced by France's own black populations were hidden. Colonial questions made for no small part of Fourth

Republic public debates: independence movements were flourishing throughout the colonies and the government was working hard at putting them down.33 The

Parisian literati were of course aware of and often involved in different activities related to decolonization. The existentialists collaborated with Alioune Diop's

Présence Africaine and ran in the same circles as the Négritude poets, and in keeping with their left wing politics generally supported independence movements.34

Yet for the most part, France's “Negro problem,” for being seen as one aspect of worldwide liberation struggles, remained a remote concern for the Parisian literati. The French overwhelmingly saw it as a colonial, and therefore somewhat external, issue. Only in 1946 did the “old colonies” of the Caribbean become départements and their black inhabitants more than mere colonial subjects. Africans could only become citizens if able to obtain a diploma showing their understanding of French culture. To be sure, institutional racism in France remained outwardly

of Midcentury Racial Liberalism.” American Literature 80.4, 770. 33 The wars of independence in Indochina (1945‐1954) and Algeria (1954‐1962) tend to overshadow other conflicts such as the bloody repression of the 1947 uprising in . 34 If Les Temps Modernes were seized several times by the French police for their strongly pro‐ independence editorial line, Albert Camus's reluctance to take sides during the Algerian war of

259 more subtle than Jim Crow: the French had no qualms using colonial troops in both world wars; black people, including Senghor and Césaire, sat in the National

Assembly. But for the French, discussing the American Negro problem had different, and indeed more self‐serving implications. American culture was becoming unavoidable, with American troops still present in liberated France and already becoming a source of resentment for Frenchmen of all political stripes. Taking the side of African Americans was tantamount to a political act and the “Negro question” became, in the words of Michel Fabre, “a brick to hurl in the window of American propaganda.”35

Yet the French were genuinely fascinated by American culture at large, and

African American culture in particular. In the 1920s and 1930s, French critics and aficionados pioneered serious critical appreciation of jazz and, more importantly, celebrated black musicians as the authentic inventors of the genre, at a time when they were barely allowed to play to white audiences in their country of origin. After the war, the whole St Germain scene centered around jazz clubs animated and patronized by the most preeminent representatives of the Parisian intelligentsia, among them existentialist figureheads such as Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean‐Paul Sartre. It is especially significant that many of the St

Germain luminaries were fluent in English: this made them crucial cultural links between American and French culture after World War Two. As Paris was liberated, most French jazz lovers discovered the latest musical trends from the U.S.A. by

independence also comes to mind. 35 Michel Fabre, “Richard Wright's critical reception in France: censors Right and Left, négritude intellectuals, the literary set, and the general public.” The Mississippi Quarterly 50.2 (1997), 308.

260 mixing with Americans. In the process, they also discovered white American soldiers' complete lack of interest in the history of jazz and their intense racial prejudice. After four years without American literature, France went through a craze for American pulp fiction, best exemplified by the creation within the prestigious Gallimard publishing house of a collection dedicated to detective fiction: the famous Série Noire, started by Marcel Duhamel in 1945. Pulp fiction was widely considered a window into the American soul, and the genre's bleak and merciless style of choice a reflection of its time and place of origin. The St Germain literati acted as cultural gatekeepers in this trend; they read first, selected, translated and framed theoretically American fiction in general and African American fiction in particular to the wider French public. Thus, the majority of French readers discovered Richard Wright and the “Negro problem” as understood and presented by the existentialist group. Sartre and Camus visited the United States early in 1946 and met Wright, whose story “Fire and Cloud” Sartre had published in translation in the first issue of his journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945. In May 1946, Wright came to visit France, officially invited by Claude Lévi‐Strauss on behalf of the French government. Wright became an instant sensation; he met with the leading intellectuals of the country, and by the end of the month several of his stories were translated and published in popular French newspapers.

On the heels of Wright's triumphal visit, the existentialists made the “Negro problem” a cause célèbre. Wright's “Early Days in Chicago” was featured in the

August 1946 special issue on the U.S.A. of Les Temps Modernes. Wright's Native Son would finally be published in French translation (by Hélène Bokanowski and Marcel

261 Duhamel) in 1947. Before then, in November 1946, Jean‐Paul Sartre himself had taken on the “Negro question” with La Putain Respectueuse, his successful play about lynching in the Jim Crow South. As shown by Michel Fabre, this sudden and profound interest in Wright and the “Negro problem” was related to “the ideological implications of French literary criticism,” which betrayed “strong ideological bias in their interest in literature as social action” (Fabre, 308). This outlook is evident in

Madeleine Gautier's review of Native Son in the first issue of Présence Africaine in

1948. Gautier hails the book's potential to make its reader “penetrate to the heart of the U.S. social problem in all its gravity, scope and mystery.”36 Wright, “with the power typical of his race,” explores the psychological dimensions of the American race problem, says Gautier, and “one cannot doubt the authenticity of the atmosphere depicted with such vigor in this novel. It is a source of information that beats studies, reports and statistics by a hundred yards, the same way physical presence beats a photograph... .”37 Gautier's words also suggest the peculiar mix of primitivist and ethnographic outlook pervading white French liberal views of

African Americans. It owed much to an already decades‐old French tradition of jazz criticism.

Voix Nègre and Surrealism

Jazz and jazz criticism were for many Frenchmen the prism through which they had

36 Madeleine Gautier, Un romancier de la race noire: Richard Wright.” Review of Un Enfant du Pays (Native Son) by Richard Wright. Présence Africaine 1 (1948), 163. My translation. 37 Ibid., 163; 165. My translation; “...avec cette puissance typique de sa race”; “...on ne peut douter de l'authenticité de l'atmosphère qui est rendue avec une telle vigueur dans ce roman. C'est une source d'informations qui dépasse de cent coudées comptes rendus, reportages, statistiques,

262 come to encounter African Americans in the first place. According to Matthew F.

Jordan, in the early stages of jazz's introduction in France after World War I, “French culture critics got exposed to jazz more by way of recorded music than live concerts,” and focused in their analyses on “a certain kind of voice in jazz performance..., la voix nègre” (the Negro voice).38 As Jordan shows, the notion both covered an actual, though vaguely defined grain of voice, “but also something that we could think of as a metaphysical voice... that says something about—or can be heard as speaking to—the plight of les nègres and/or the human condition” (91). For

French critics, la voix nègre was what separated authentic, black jazz from its commodified white version. As Jordan shows, French critics eventually found out that, in many cases, singers they had touted as authentic “Negro voices” without seeing them turned out to be white (95). They had an explanation for this embarrassing mistake: the phonograph, critic André Coeuroy advanced, “is the school of emulation,” and could help apt pupils imitate what remained defined as an essentially black style of singing. After these mistakes were acknowledged, the notion of an essential Negro voice did not disappear so much as it fused into a new distinction between “hot” and “straight” jazz proposed by jazz critic Hugues

Panassié: “The word ‘hot’ served the same function and did the same cultural work as la voix nègre had in jazz criticism, but made the particular timbre, tone and affective approach to expression something that need not, at least overtly, depend on race” (97). Indeed, while on the surface the movement led by Panassié distanced

autant qu'une présence dépasse une photographie.” 38 Matthew F. Jordan, “Recorded Jazz and La Voix Nègre: The Sound of Race in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Nottingham French Studies 43:1 (2004), 90.

263 itself from this racial distinction, it was also characterized by its quest for the pure, original form of jazz. By the late 1930s, Hugues Panassié had traveled the Great

Migration backwards to designate turn‐of‐the‐century Storyville, New Orleans, as the birthplace of jazz, and black Dixieland as the unit of ethnocultural authenticity by which to measure all of jazz's subsequent incarnations. This trend, followed by four years of German occupation, effectively cut France off from the American jazz scene. When the first bebop records arrived in liberated Paris with American G.I.s,

French jazz bands were emulating Jelly Roll Morton. While some, like Boris Vian, managed to embrace the new style while still appreciating the old, Panassié and his consorts rather ironically condemned it as inauthentic. Camps formed and pro‐ and anti‐bebop critics and listeners entered into what became known as la querelle du jazz. Panassié could not 'hear' the essential Negro voice over the modern noise of bebop, which he saw as too much influenced by Western music. He felt that through close and extensive study of jazz, he had been able to distill what only came naturally to Negroes: the‐‐in this case, musical‐‐essence of blackness.

In his profound respect for African American musical expression and his interest in African American musical history, Panassié seemed, and indeed often was, in agreement with the rising figures of the different groups of black cultural and political nationalism, from the writers of the Harlem Renaissance to their

French‐speaking counterparts of the Négritude39 movement. The latter were supported by Sartre in “Black Orpheus,” his famous preface to Senghor's 1948

Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry in which he presented Césaire in

39 Panassié would notably contribute articles to Alioune Diop's Présence Africaine.

264 particular as successfully adapting surrealistic methods of writing to politically engaged ends. This is all the more significant in that Sartre condemned Surrealism for having betrayed its revolutionary promise, which he saw realized in Césaire. If

Sartre's interest in black literature rested in part on his overall negative judgment of the Surrealist legacy, it is interesting to note that such was not the case with all the

French “cultural gatekeepers” responsible for the introduction of African American fiction in postwar France. Two of the most important translators of African

American texts at the time, Marcel Duhamel and Boris Vian, though personally close to the existentialists, felt closer to the cynical, nihilistic bend Sartre lamented in

Surrealism, and this sensibility shaped their outlook on African American literature.

Early in 1944, while France was still under German occupation, Duhamel had somehow obtained Wright's “Big Boy Leaves Home” and translated it for the underground journal L'Arbalète, along with texts by other American authors. Soon after the liberation of Paris in August 1944 he traveled to London to renew translation rights and secure new contracts for the list of English‐speaking authors published by Gallimard, including Erskine Caldwell, Steinbeck, Hammett, Chandler, and quite a few more nobody had yet read in France, many of which he would go on to translate himself.40 Though he actively participated in existentialist publications,

Duhamel was not quite on the same ideological wavelength. He had been at the heart of the Surrealist movement, whose “distinctive ideological stamp” his Série

Noire bore, according to Jonathan Eburne. At definite odds with the existentialist view of engaged literature, Duhamel's project performed “an extension of

40 Marcel Duhamel, Raconte pas ta vie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), 511‐513.

265 surrealism into the public sphere.”41 It proposed to counteract the didacticism of politically engaged naturalist literature with the less obviously political snicker of black humor, the voluntarily loose notion introduced by André Breton in his

Anthology of Black Humor which Mark Polizzotti reluctantly defined as“a partly macabre, partly ironic, often absurd turn of spirit.”42 Himes's alleged

“unilluminating concern with violence” was therefore edifying to Duhamel where, and probably because, more moralistic souls were repulsed by it. Duhamel recognized there the foundations on which he and Himes would eventually build their collaboration on the Harlem series.

A second key figure was Boris Vian, “the Prince of St Germain,” a jazz DJ, jazz columnist, jazz concert organizer and jazz trumpeter. Vian also wrote articles for diverse publications and translated American texts for Les Temps Modernes and

Duhamel's Série Noire. Vian was a follower of turn of the century absurdist writer

Alfred Jarry, one of the many authors included by Breton in his Anthology. Jarry was the creator of 'pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions,” about which Vian asserted that “one of the fundamental principles of 'pataphysics is equivalency. This might explain why we refuse what is serious as well as what isn't, since for us, they are exactly the same thing, it's pataphysical. Whether you want it or not, you're always doing pataphysics.”43 His taste for equivalency was not necessary to

41 Jonathan P. Eburne, “The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism, and the Série Noire.” PMLA 120. 3 (2005), 811. 42 Mark Polizzotti, “Introduction: Laughter in the Dark,”in André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor. 1940, 1966 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), vi. 43 My translation; “un des principes fondamentaux de la pataphysique est d'ailleurs celui de l'équivalence des contraires. C'est peut‐être ce qui vous explique ce refus que nous manifestons de ce qui est sérieux et ce qui ne l'est pas, puisque pour nous c'est exactement la même chose. C'est pataphysique, qu'on le veuille ou qu'on ne le veuille pas, on fait toujours de la pataphysique.” Noël

266 everyone's liking; his “Chronicles of a Liar” did not last long in the pages of Les

Temps Modernes, where Vian's jokes jarred with the overall serious tone. Vian's involvement in the fledgling French jazz scene is especially relevant to our discussion. If many of the French literati were jazz aficionados, Vian was a specialist.

As such, he knew well the debates on racial authenticity that were shaking the

French jazz world. Though acquainted with both Panassié and Sartre, Vian had profound divergences of opinion with them. He would lampoon Panassié's jazz essentialism in countless columns during the querelle du jazz years, and was a friend of Sartre but no disciple of his: in a 1946 column for La Rue, he quipped: “I am not an existentialist. Indeed, for an existentialist, existence precedes essence. For me, there's no such thing as essence.”44 This statement also suggests where he stood regarding Panassié's dreams of sound and racial purity. A similar mix of provocation, humor and derision for the seriousness of others would generate the black avenger novel that would put Vian on the literary map: I Spit on your Graves.

Vernon Sullivan

I Spit on Your Graves is the story of Lee Anderson, an African American light‐skinned enough to pass for white. His brother was lynched for getting mixed up with a white girl. Lee Anderson is out for revenge, and his plan is dreadfully simple: move to a different Southern town where nobody knows him and where he can pass for white,

Arnaud, Les Vies Parallèles de Boris Vian (Paris: 10/18, 1970), 369. 44 My translation: “Je ne suis pas existentialiste. En effet, pour un existentialiste, l'existence précède l'essence. Pour moi, il n'y a pas d'essence.” Qtd in Arnaud, ibid., 244.

267 seduce a rich white girl, reveal his true race to her and kill her. Working days at the local bookstore, he manages to become a fixture among a crowd of boisterous white youths. He soon sets his sights on Lou and Jean Asquith, the two daughters of a rich planter, and executes his plan. Though increasingly sickened by his own scheme,

Anderson eventually rapes and kills both sisters. Found out by one of the girls’ friends and chased by police, he is shot to death in a barn before “the townspeople

[hang] him anyway because he was a nigger.”45

The genesis of this novel has become the stuff of literary legend: asked by his friend the publisher Jean d'Halluin to suggest an American novel he could publish to capitalize on the pulp fiction fad, Vian declared he would write a best‐seller in ten days: a book by a pretend African American author, Vernon Sullivan, he would pretend to have translated. The publisher's advertisement presented the elusive

Vernon Sullivan as “a young author no American editor has dared publish.”46 The novel would likely have gone almost unnoticed but for the lawsuit for “incitation to debauchery” brought against it by an association for moral action in February 1947.

Its success only increased after it was found by the body of a woman murdered by her lover. The novel started flying off the shelves. Investigated with increasing scrutiny, the Sullivan hoax was soon uncovered. Vian had never set foot in the U.S.A., and it showed. His America was full of errors and approximations, but his description of the stifling atmosphere of systemic racism hit home. If Vian's knowledge of the American decor came mostly from his readings, what he knew of

45 Boris Vian, I Spit on your Graves. Trans. Boris Vian and Milton Rosenthal. 1948 (Los Angeles: TamTam Books, 1998), 177. 46 My translation; “un jeune auteur qu'aucun éditeur américain n'a osé publier.” Qtd in Arnaud, ibid.,

268 American racism had been passed on to him by the many African American artists he had come to know in Paris. James Baldwin thought that the novel was informed by “that rage and pain which Vian (almost alone) was able to hear in the black

American musicians, in the bars, dives, and cellars of the Paris of those years.”47

Scandal made the novel a best‐seller, to Vian's own despair. He was led to defend the book much more than he would have liked, as he himself considered it a joke. Yet, as

Baldwin further notes, the joke revealed much serious information about French

(mis)understanding of the way race was lived in the United States. Baldwin advanced that

one of the reasons—perhaps the reason—that the novel was considered pornographic is that it is concerned with the vindictive sexual aggression of one black man against many women... The novel takes place in America, and the black man looks like a white man—this double remove liberating both fantasy and hope, which is, perhaps, at bottom, what pornography is all about. This is certainly what that legend created by Rudolph Valentino, in The Sheik, is all about... and this fantasy contains the root appeal of Tarzan... white men who look and act like black men—act like black men, that is, according to the white imagination which has created them” (46‐47).

It arguably revealed much about the position Vian himself was writing from. His joke was one for cultural insiders, only funny for those in the know, but also funny about those in the know. This vision of the black man as phallus, a fantasy Frantz

Fanon would deconstruct in Black Skin, White Masks a few years later, was promoted by Négritude poets and defended by none other than Jean‐Paul Sartre. In

“Black Orpheus,” he declared that “the black man remains the great male of the

162. 47 James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Laurel Books, 1976), 47.

269 earth, the world's sperm.”48 Vian's novel pushed the image to its grotesque extreme, providing a basis for the criticism of the Négritude movement's and Sartre's position on blackness Fanon would soon develop. In Black Skin, White Masks, he would also mention how Vian's novel as instrumental in revealing the sexual ambiguity at the heart of Negrophobia.49

I Spit on Your Graves was published before either Les Temps Modernes's serial translation of Black Boy or Native Son were published in France. The first 'protest novel' read by most Frenchmen turned out to be the voluntarily vulgar copy of an inaccessible original. Vian's book dared literary critics to recognize the true accents of a black voice in his knowledgeable white hoax. And it worked, somewhat. Fooled for a time, some did analyze the novel thinking its author to be truly African

American, with interesting results.50 By introducing the protest novel in France with a hoax, Vian had tainted the political discussion around the genre. In the process, he had also introduced, possibly unwittingly, “a means to explore what is meant by an

African American novel (and voice) in the first place.”51

48 Jean‐Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” What is Literature? and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988),316. 49 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 159. 50A January 1947 review of the novel in Les Lettres Françaises thus judged that if the author “an American half‐Negro,” “purported to defend the Negro cause, which we hold dear, his uses a form of reverse racism that certainly has excuses, but does not deserve approbation” (H.T. 4). Duhamel himself says Vian's manuscript fooled him, although “the systematic violence and a certain attitude regarding blacks seemed to me fabricated and somewhat repulsive” (555). 51 Stephanie Brown, “'Black comme moi': Boris Vian and the African American voice of translation.” Mosaic 36.1 (2003), 66.

270 A form of banter characteristic of Negroes52

Though some recognized the humor in Vian's trick, most were not impressed.

Mainstream newspapers devoted sensationalist articles to the graphic sex and violence of the novel. Many in the French literary circles found moral and political fault with Vian's hoax. Among the first French critics to jump on the issue was black

Martinican author Joseph Zobel, who pilloried I Spit on your Graves in a 1947 article for Les Lettres Françaises. Zobel felt that readers might mistake the novel for “the formally realistic story of a poor Negro's fit of desperation... and that the book has the merit of discussing a conflict of which we know everything, and of revealing one of its possible solutions, however ignoble, considered by a certain category of its victims.”53 Zobel also knew this had not been written by an African American, and felt that Vian's endeavor was dangerous. Zobel thought that black literature was and should be irreproachable, lest it reflect badly on the black community at large.

Indeed, he wrote that the main characteristics of “the poetry and the novel blacks across the Atlantic... gave to the United States” were their function as “defensive weapons, testimonials of struggle, need for justice, joy of living, desire for freedom.”

The anger, violence and vengeance displayed in Vian's novel was “betraying a race that deserves friendship and respect.” The book presented black men as brutes and ran the risk of scaring white audiences at a crucial time when “Negroes—American

52 In the Introduction to the 1966 edition of the Anthology of Black Humor, Breton declared that “this book, published for the first time in 1939 and reprinted with a few additions in 1947, marled, as it is, its era. Let us simply recall that when it first appeared, the words “black humor” made no sense (unless to designate a form of banter supposedly characteristic of “Negroes”!) (Breton xii). 53 Joseph Zobel, “Les Nègres et l'Obscénité en Littérature.” Lettres Françaises. 25 July 1947, 4. My translation; “... un récit réaliste dans sa forme, d'une crise de désespoir d'un pauvre nègre... et que ce livre aurait au moins le mérite d'aborder un conflit dont on connait l'ensemble, et de révéler une des solutions, fût‐ce la plus ignoble, envisagés par une certaine catégorie de ses victimes.”

271 or French” were going through a “cultural awakening.”54 The author of Sugar Cane

Alley felt that his own literary reputation as a black man was directly tied to the network of white liberal condescension, literature and race politics exposed by

Vian's book. He underlined something Vian apparently only realized as the scandal unfolded: though the graphic sex and violence of the novel made the headlines,

Vian's pretending to be an African American, and therefore blurring a racial definition deemed crucial to the assessment of the novel, was truly the heart of the matter. And it was much more than a joke. Introduced to the protest novel through

Vian's ultra‐violent hoax, the wider French public might just infer that revenge, sex and violence, these superficial characteristics of the genre, were accents specific to the literary Negro voice, a true representation of African Americans' views of themselves.

Indeed, I Spit on Your Graves toyed with the dynamite of racist stereotypes. At different points in the novel, the people around Anderson seem close to discover the truth of his racial belonging. Dexter, the man who introduced him to the Asquith sisters, while observing closely Anderson at a beach party, thus notes: “You know, you’re not built like everybody else, Lee, you’ve got the same kind of drooping shoulders as a colored prizefighter” (Vian 34). In an oft‐quoted dialogue from the novel, Lou Asquith comes close to discovering Anderson's true racial identity when she ponders the origin of Anderson's peculiar voice:

'I don't know. You're alright physically, but it isn't that. Your voice, maybe.... It isn't just an ordinary voice.' 'That comes from singing and playing the guitar.' 'No,' she said, 'I've never heard singers or guitarists with a voice like

54 Ibid. My translation; “... l'éveil culturel des nègres—Américains ou de nationalité française‐‐...”

272 yours. I have heard a voice that yours reminds me of, yes, it was back in Haiti. Some black men.’ (94‐95)

The excerpt is especially significant for the way it invokes voix nègre theories and summons visions of Haiti. Lou is ultimately unable to understand what her ears have told her and recognize in Anderson a black man. When she finds out, Dexter tells her, and it is too late: she shoots Lee in the arm but he manages to overpower her, reveal his back story and kill her. She is also unable to read the cultural reference she herself introduces: although the circumstances in which she met them appear to negate Haiti’s history of resistance to white oppression—Lou’s father owns “a flock of sugar‐cane plantations in the West Indies” (85). The Constitution forced by the

United States on Haiti during the 1915‐1934 U.S. Occupation made it possible for foreigners to own land in Haiti, which had been expressly forbidden since independence. This indirect Haitian reference weighs heavy on a tale of racial revenge, as it evokes the most striking result of U.S. presence in Haiti: the return of the white planters, arguably the original target of the slaves’ revenge. Lou goes on to argue that white bands are better than black ones, only to have Anderson reply that

“whites are in a better position to exploit the Negro's inventions (95). Yet by invoking voix nègre criticism, Vian made clear that however praiseful on the surface, essentialist analysis could always be the tool of racists. This is the bittersweet paradox embodied by Lou Asquith and her bobby soxer friends. They, and behind them American (and soon global) popular culture could exploit, enjoy and emulate

African American culture while, like Lou, admitting to “hat[ing] the colored race.”

The passage not only underlines the profound absurdity of Lou’s racism; it also

273 questions the erudite scenarios considerations on race tend to rest on, whether they be conservative or liberal.

In his following Sullivan novel, The Dead all Have the Same Skin (1947), Vian challenged Zobel's authority to speak for African Americans:

There was even an individual who claims to be a black man from Martinique... who affirmed that a Black man could never have written that book because he himself knows how Blacks live. Well, let's just say that this particular Black is about as qualified to comment upon his American brothers as a Chinese resident of San Francisco is capable of resolving the current upheavals in Shanghai. (116)

Fanon would criticize what he saw as the essentializing nature of Négritude along similar lines, arguing that “Negro experience is not a whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes” (136). Vian set out to demonstrate this point and more. His protagonist, Dan Parker, works as a bouncer in a night club; he has been successfully passing as white for years, until his long estranged brother comes to town and threatens to reveal the truth about his racial background if Dan does not give him money. Parker goes on a rampage to protect his secret, realizing on the way that the blackness he has so long repressed is returning with a vengeance: after having sex with black women, Parker finds himself unable to satisfy his white wife, and he punctuates his actions with a constant stream of self‐conscious racial discourse.

But there's a catch; Dan Parker is not “black,” even though he always believed he was. He was raised in a black family, but his parents were white. Parker finds out too late to save himself, but soon enough to leave readers asking themselves how much allegedly essential racial characteristics might just be socially—or fictionally,

274 as it were—determined. With this final twist, the embarrassing ways in which

Parker and others were able to “see” his blackness throughout the novel (in his build, in the close scrutiny of his fingernails, in his taste for violence and for the

“characteristic” smell of black women) are shown to be as unreliable as the author name on the book's cover. The joke is on the reader, for buying the lie of a seemingly omniscient and therefore truthful narration. Race and discussions of race are presented as an endless play of mirrors, a conceptual mise en abyme within a narrative mise en abyme. The racial fiction that is Vernon Sullivan is mirrored in Dan

Parker, and the critical reception of his novels was always already mirrored in the racialist assumptions driving the plot. Blackness is revealed as a shifting political and cultural marker both intangible and eminently constructed. The truth of African

American experience happens outside of the text. Its external manifestations in art, what of it can be evoked in print can, to some extent—and much like jazz—be emulated, mimicked, and copied, without yet diminishing this experience. What in the artistic manifestations of the African American experience is considered authentic rests, ironically enough, on what the listener or the reader already considers authentic. The lesson Vian had drawn from his original hoax and the way it was received was simple enough: there was no such thing as voix nègre but context.

Vian showed that apparent manifestations of blackness through art could not quite be trusted as such, especially not in translation. He demonstrated that “raced,

'real' selves, black and white, are always the products of fictions of one kind or another,” and “ask[ed] at what cost readers, including himself, privilege the

275 'authenticity' of the writer over the text itself in their unwillingness to question the racializing of the word” (Brown 66). Yet nobody had to take the lessons of the joke seriously. The essentialist criticism exposed by Vian's hoax did not go away. It can be seen at work in the making of Himes's French reputation. Thus when If He Hollers was first translated into French in 1948, Himes's racial authenticity was invoked by critics specifically to distinguish his books from those of white French writers arguably inspired by Himes in the first place. The 1949 review of If He Hollers by

Jean‐Claude Brisville published in the literary monthly La Nef thus put Himes's novel in line with Vian and Malartic's own takes on the protest genre:

In spite of all the sympathy one feels for the Negro protest novel, we are paying a dear price for our admiration for Richard Wright, which, one has to admit, is being exploited. For example, between If He Hollers and the busy works of a Vian‐ Sullivan or of an Yves Malartic, the only difference might be authentic experience. That, some will say, is essential. Yes, but only if this experience is served by an art strong enough that we can tell it apart from a vulgar pastiche. And it is not the case here. In truth, the story, or rather the misadventures of colored man Robert Jones, which would be too long to recount here, smell as if they came right out of the mold. This mold, no doubt, will be used again. And let us admit that the product can be consumed without boredom. It is true that Marcel Duhamel's signature package—mass produced, satisfaction guaranteed—is enough to rouse one's appetite, and reassure in the same moment with its famous taste.55

55 Jean‐Claude Brisville. Review of S'il braille, lâche­le (If He Hollers, Let Him Go) by Chester Himes. La Nef 50 (1949), 131. My translation; “En dépit de toute la sympathie que l'on se sent pour le roman nègre à tendance revendicatrice, il faut bien avouer que l'on est en train d'exploiter et de nous faire payer cher notre admiration pour Richard Wright. Par exemple, entre S'il braille, lâche­le et les travaux en chambre d'un Vian‐Sullivan ou d'un Yves Malartic, il n'y a—peut‐être!— que la différence d'une expérience authentique. C'est l'essentiel, me dira‐t‐on. Oui, mais à condition que cette expérience soit servie par un art assez fort pour que nous puissions la distinguer d'un vulgaire pastiche. Et ici ce n'est pas le cas. A vrai dire l'histoire, disons mieux: les mésaventures de l'homme de couleur Robert Jones, qu'il serait un peu long de conter, sentent le moule. Un moule qui servira encore, n'en doutons pas. Reconnaissons d'ailleurs que le produit se laisse consommer sans ennui. Il est vrai que l'emballage signé Marcel Duhamel—gros débit, garanti à la chaîne—suffit à vous ouvrit

276 Although he acknowledges Richard Wright and therefore the American origin of the protest novel, Brisville interprets the protest “mold” as a repetitive “package” conceived by the likes of Duhamel, Vian and Malartic, future translator and friend of

Chester Himes, who had published in 1947 Au Pays du Bon Dieu, a novel about an

African American's dealings with American racism in the South of the United States, the North, and eventually in the segregated U.S. Army in World War II France.

Brisville felt they had merely transcribed a foreign recipe and commercialized it, tried their hand and proved rather successful at adapting it. To tell the real thing apart from its copy, strong, 'spicy' art was needed that would make one taste that authentic experience. This culinary take on the voix nègre argument is rather ironic.

Brisville laments that he has not recognized in Himes's writings the “je ne sais quoi” that should have helped him tell the authentic black voice from the white French copies, something he arguably had felt in the writings of Wright, which he likely read in translations by none other than Vian and Duhamel. Yet Wright, as we have seen, had come chaperoned by the existentialist organ Les Temps Modernes. Brisville demanded serious art, and the Série Noire, in his opinion, was not very serious.

Duhamel only selected novels with which he felt a certain aesthetic and/or ideological affinity. As Eburne demonstrates, he had found in If He Hollers the spark of black humor Himes would develop into a raging fire for his Harlem Series. Himes himself saw what he defined as “surrealist absurdity” in his novels as “something borrowed” from the “lived experience of black Americans” (Eburne 807). Surrealist absurdity could certainly be detected in the bitter irony of Bob Jones's fate in If He

l'appétit, et à le rassurer en même temps de sa saveur célèbre.”

277 Hollers, who joins the army to avoid a jail sentence for a rape he did not commit, all following a savage beating at the hands of his white colleagues. Yet if the Harlem series embodies the final stage in Himes's movement towards a self‐aware racial parody, The End of a Primitive must be read like the eulogy delivered at the funeral of his old protest novel writing self, inspired by Vian's caustic joke but also engaging the international tradition of black avenger narratives.

The beginning of The End

Himes wrote The End of a Primitive during trips to France, England and Spain, between 1952 and 1953. His manuscript was refused by a series of American editors before it was accepted in 1955 only to be published in a heavily truncated version. Gallimard published it in translation the same year, but used the original unexpunged version. Neither version did very well commercially, but the novel made Himes a “minor celebrity in the [Latin] Quarter.”56

The End of a Primitive is the story of Jesse Robinson, a forty‐something black writer, and Kriss Cummings, a white woman in her late thirties. If her career has been a success, Kriss's intimate life has been a long disaster: to escape from her parents' house she married Ronny, a “chunky, habitually boozed, over‐brilliant, condescending, Yankee‐hating, low‐browed, black‐haired, misanthropic

Mississippian,”57 whom she had met in college and never quite liked. Ronny cheated on her throughout the following ten years of their marriage. In spite of these

56 Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity (New York: Paragon House, 1976), 38. 57 Chester Himes, The End of a Primitive (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997), 108.

278 multiple affairs, he was impotent with her, and in retaliation Kriss cheated just as often, mostly with black men, writers and artists met through her job at the

Rosenwald Foundation. This had not bothered the enlightened Ronny, a self‐ confessed “extreme Negrophile” who had himself been known to enjoy “the beds of his black colleagues' wives without any condescension whatsoever” (16). That is, not until Ronny had discovered his “homosexual urges” in psychotherapy. The treatment somehow also changed his views on blacks, whom he started liking less, which “always struck him as being very strange” (16).

Jesse has issues all his own: his first two novels were critical successes but brought him little money, and his last has been rejected flat out by his publisher. It is a sordid, bitter protest novel, and according to his editor “the public is tired of the plight of the poor downtrodden Negro;” what the public wants is “a black success story” (124). But Jesse's book is an autobiography in disguise, and his life is a failure.

His marriage has fallen to pieces, and Jesse spends his days drinking hard liquor. Out of the blue, he contacts Kriss, with whom he had an affair a few years earlier. They arrange to meet at her apartment for dinner, but find themselves regularly interrupted in their exchanges by visits from old friends and lovers. Frustration mounts as Kriss and Jesse ruminate over the havoc wreaked in their lives by the constraints of patriarchal and racist systems, get drunker, meaner, and increasingly violent as their usual release valve, sex, is constantly deferred. The novel ends with

Jesse emerging from a drunken stupor only to realize he has stabbed Kriss to death.

Himes considered this novel his best, an opinion many critics came to agree with along the years. Yet the pitch dark humor of the novel and its overwhelming

279 bleakness generated uneasy comments about its relevance, or lack thereof, to the race problem, when it generated comments at all. It garnered very few reviews in the year it was published. Its “buffoonery,”58 embodied in such eerie elements as the recurrent TV show featuring a talking chimpanzee prophesying on coming world events, mixed oddly with angry introspection and social commentary. Often recognized as the link between Himes's protest novels and his detective novels, The

End of a Primitive is also very much an articulation between countries and audiences, in which Himes, already living out of the United States, is considering the implications and terms of the esteem granted him by the French public. Himes's awareness of these two audiences pervades the novel. The prophetic mode is not limited to the chimpanzee's pronouncements: the treatment of Jesse Robinson's manuscript I Was Looking for a Street by his editor suggests on the part of Himes bitter memories about his last novel, a profound awareness of the reactions this new novel would cause, and a reflective mise en abyme on the place of black literature in the 1950s American literary establishment. Within the novel, Jesse imagines his editor's reaction to his latest novel before he has to actually hear it. Pope the editor breaks the news to Jesse that his book has been refused, and explains how it happened:

“[I] like the book. I fought for it all the way. I think all it needs is cutting. But Hobson thinks it reads like fictional autobiography. And he doesn't like the title...” “Why not publish it as an autobiography then?” “It would be the same. Hobson thinks the public is fed up with protest novels. And I must say, on consideration, I agree with him.” “What's protest about this book?” Jesse argued. “If anything it's

58 Himes wrote that “the French, who published it first, referred to the book as 'sadism and buffoonery'” (End, 12).

280 tragedy. But no protest.” “The consensus of the readers was that it's too sordid. It's pretty strong—almost vulgar, some of it... The reader is gripped in a vice of despair and bitterness from start to finish—“ “I thought some of it was funny.” “Funny!” Pope stared at him incredulously. “That part when the parents wear evening clothes to the older son's funeral... Alright maybe you don't think that's funny—“ “That made me cry,” Pope accused solemnly. (123‐124)

This scene is as much a reflection on Jesse's novel as it is one on Himes's, and ultimately on mid‐1950s black fiction at large. This is what Jodi Melamed has dubbed Himes's “killing joke” whose main target is “the culture, ideology, and social milieu of literature in racial liberalism” and main goal to “make racial liberalism visible as a mode of racial regulation that ironically operates new forms of racialized violence and discipline through the very mechanisms of its antiracism” (Melamed

772). Melamed sees The End of a Primitive as “Himes's final attempt to intervene in what he identified in 1948 as 'the dilemma of the Negro writer,' which 'lies not so much in what he must reveal, but in the reactions of his audience’” (790).

This is how End of a Primitive relates to the black avenger tradition, though that connection may appear tenuous. Kriss’s murder seems more of an accident than a premeditated act, and motive is not readily available. Yet in the last pages of the novel, as Jesse ponders the significance of his act, he sardonically presents it as an achievement of sorts, an act by which “Jesse Robinson joins the human race” (Himes,

End, 205). In this puzzling scene, Robinson presents murder as the “end product of the impact of Americanization” on him; while this murder outwardly conforms to the racist stereotypes of predatory black masculinity, it also puts Robinson squarely in the American grain. Acting the violent as opposed to the righteous one,

281 conforming to a different scenario, Robinson finally is granted a place among mankind. Revenge here is also in the foreboding, in what Robinson’s gesture implies: “Knew they’d keep fucking around with us until they made us human. They don’t know yet what they’re doing. Fucking up a good thing. Best thing they had for all their social ills… .” Follows a litany of rhymes suggesting that white‐on‐black violence served a cathartic function for white society: “Feel Low? Lynch Negro!...

Can’t fuck? Shoot a Buck!” (205). Robinson’s sarcastic tirade suggests that allowing the black man into this cycle of violence makes him a full‐fledged American citizen.

Somewhat paradoxically, Robinson is liberated by surrendering to white expectations.

The dilemma of the Negro writer took on related, yet different characteristics in France. For seeing novels by African Americans in an ethnographic and political light not altogether different from their American counterparts, French readers also had enough national distance to give the benefit of the doubt, if not credence, to

Himes's writing style. In a 1954 article, Gabriel Venaissin thus compared Chester

Himes's The Lonely Crusade to what he calls “novels of false testimony,” in which authors “transcribe [their] experience but... not [their] existence.”59 What made

Himes's novel a good one was not so much its style, which could be imitated, nor the mere, possibly one‐time, experience of racism, but indeed the author's status as a full‐fledged victim of racism: “it is not enough to have been the actor in the drama that makes the book... one has to have been its victim. True witnesses are victims.

59 Gabriel Venaissin, “Le roman du faux‐témoignage.” Esprit 212 (1954), 464. My translation; “...il a transcrit son expérience. Mais c'est une expérience, pas une existence...”

282 And I call a false witness the author of a testimony without suffering.”60 Venaissin saw Himes's novel as a testimonial, a text whose main value is documentary, and as such much more genuine than the works of “false testimony” of a Vian or Malartic.

The text itself takes a secondary position to the racial identity of its author; the text as manifestation of blackness is less crucial than a recognition of the presence of blackness, however ineffable, in the text. This was a bold critical pirouette, a return of the repressed voix nègre criticism. But here as in jazz criticism, outright race‐ based arguments had been rendered impossible by Vian's hoax. Vian had once stated that “in matters of jazz, blacks are necessarily right.”61 His hoax had been instrumental in pushing literary critics to declare that in matters of race in literature too, blacks were always right. Crossing the Atlantic had somewhat paradoxically given Himes the cultural authenticity necessary to say whatever he felt about

American racism, the same authenticity he had been denied in his country of origin.

How widespread Venaissin's take on Himes was is perhaps best illustrated by

Himes's own description of the way the African American male contingent in Paris saw relationships: “Most of us believed that white women only wanted to be fucked by us if we had been hurt by other whites...” (Himes, Life, 40). As constricting as this image of the African American man as perpetual victim of racism was, it was comparatively better than the perpetual rapist of American lore. It was no less absurd, and it also implied its share of sexual psychosis, but this French translation

60 Ibid., 465. My translation; “... il ne suffit pas d'avoir été l'acteur du drame qui fait le livre... il faut en être la victime. Les vrais témoins sont des victimes. Et j'appelle faux‐témoin l'auteur d'un témoignage sans douleur.” 61 Quoted in Frank Ténot, Boris Vian: Le Jazz et Saint­Germain (Paris: Du May, 1993), 39. My translation; “[l]es noirs ont forcément raison quand il s'agit de jazz.”

283 of the American “race and sex syndrome” provided more freedom of movement.

Himes mordantly exposes this in the following exchange between Jesse and Kriss in

The End of a Primitive. After having watched an episode of the TV chimpanzee's prophecies, Jesse and Kriss have a drunk conversation regarding the type of topic

Jesse could manage to treat in his books without offending anyone. Kriss suggests

Jesse emulate the popular romance novelist Kathleen Windsor, but Jesse disagrees with her prudish approach:

“But it's below the waist the color problem lies,” Jesse pointed out. “Lays!” Kriss corrected him. “It's not the lies but the lays that make the color problem.” “The lies make the lays and the lays make the lies,” Jesse expounded, feeling very clever. “If there were more lays and less lies it would soon be solved, or conversely, if there were more lies ad less lays it would soon be resolved. (Himes, End, 92)

Jesse and Kriss's pun plays at the most literal, intimate level; both have cheated on their spouses, lied to each other about the importance of those relations, and paid for it dearly in emotional suffering. But the “lays” they so cleverly refer to can easily be understood in their literary meaning, as historical poems and stories, myths.

Both American and French fictions of blackness eroticize the black man. “[W]hoever says rape says Negro.... The Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis,” says Fanon, using both Himes and Vian to illustrate what he knows to be the entire Western world's race and sex syndrome (Fanon, 170). These myths can be repulsive, attractive, or a mix of both, and so lies increase sexual desire and envy, which in turn make for better myths. Blackness is always already a story, a mise en abyme. As

Kevin Bell notes, for Jesse “the only avenue into self‐actualization is textuality, as he has literally written himself into personal subjectivity, staging a rhetorical 'identity'

284 by which to insert himself into the grand narrative of abstracted humanity.”62

Writing for Jesse is “generative,” a cultural form of intercourse, one in which he will be the sperm of the world alright, although this does not so much consist in imposing the terms in which he expresses subjectivity as in rearranging the means of expression he has to work with. Blackness is accessed strictly through its textual manifestations, and the way these express blackness ultimately depend on the reader's own understanding of blackness. The author only has so much control over this, and as Bell shows, “Himes realizes that language is not his to manipulate...; he finds himself within its grip and not the other way around” (204). He definitely breaks with the propriety of literary engagement à la Wright or Baldwin; he avoids outright social and political engagement to instead attack directly a “cultural metanarrative of American 'blackness'” in his writings (201). He does this precisely by putting into play “a delegitimated and outcast sensibility... augmented, reshaped and intensified exactly by those dimensions of lived experience unique to the scene of public fascination and public abjection... that is cultural blackness” (196). Not so surprisingly, Bell centers his analysis of Himes's “aesthetico‐political engagement” around a conversation between Wright and Baldwin witnessed by Himes at Les

Deux Magots in Paris. If the silent frame Bell discerns in Himes's description of the scene is provided by “the literary rules of professionalized 'blackness',” it is especially important that this scene would take place at the headquarters of literary

Paris. The literary rules Himes set out to undermine in his writings were indubitably international, and his books mean to destabilize notions of blackness, expose the

62 Kevin Bell, Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (Minneapolis:

285 system of lies and lays, the rules of fictional engagement at the center of the color problem on both sides of the Atlantic.

Zobel’s reaction to I Spit on Your Graves was reminiscent of the “pre‐ individualism” Edward Bland bemoaned in African American literature; this reveals something about the similarities between the place of African diasporic cultures in the United States and France, French alleged colorblindness notwithstanding. It is unlikely that Vian was aware of Griggs or Waring; he may have known of Chesnutt or even read him in English, yet his novel are a sarcastic take on their effort at

Americanizing the black avenger.63 Vian’s response to Zobel announces Frantz

Fanon’s observations on the First Assembly of Black Writers and Artists that gathered at the Sorbonne in 1956 representatives of the African diaspora from twenty‐four countries. The American delegation, composed of such authors as

Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, had come “[considering] their problems from the same standpoint as those of their African brothers;” yet soon they had come to the conclusion that “the Negroes of Chicago only resemble the Nigerians or the

Tanganyikans in so far as they were all defined in relation to the whites.”64 Vian’s hardboiled look at the race question was in no small part a smug commercial endeavor, but even so—if not because of this—it exposed the paradox peculiar to this particular form of individualized black representation: weighed by the white tradition of ethnographic outlook on black literature and by black “pre‐

University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 215. 63 Vian read American literature in the original English, but most of Chesnutt’s novels were not translated until recently. The first French translation of The Marrow of Tradition was published in 2009. 64 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Constance Farrington, trans. (New York: Grove Press,

286 individualism,” black anti‐heroes could not escape somehow being taken for race representatives. A black American avenger was still defined in that order. If, as

Fanon would assert, “every culture is first and foremost national,” American national definition was first and foremost racial, and the way out of that vicious circle did not seem self‐evident beyond the sarcastic treatment to which Vian and

Himes subjected it (154).

Both Vian and Himes demonstrate that in matters of race and literature, there is no truth but a palimpsest of representations and accreted layers of interpretations. Rather than treating their subject in the expected straight, documentary and realistic manner, Himes's Harlem Series novels mix the dead serious American race issue with non‐apologetic use of sex, violence and humor, smirking the whole way through. Himes’s move away from the transparent politics of protest started with The End of a Primitive is informed by a reflection on race and its embarrassing sway over international letters similar to the one revealed by Vian in his Sullivan novels. Himes said that The End of a Primitive portrays a black man as “a new man—complex, intriguing, and not particularly likable” (Himes, Hurt,

285). The form of truth Himes is shooting for is useless in the grander, calculating scheme of race relations, but rather a matter of individual honesty, a representation of his personal blackness. That this honesty would translate into black humor was, for Himes, a testimony to the utter nonsense of race. In the opening pages of the second volume of his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity, he declares:

If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life, eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim,

1965), 216.

287 one comes to feel the absurdity of life... The first time I read the manuscript of my novel The End of a Primitive, I knew I had written an absurd book. But it had not been my intention to write about absurdity. I had intended to write about the deadly venom of racial prejudice which kills both racists and their victims. (Himes, Life 1)

The unnamed country mentioned by Himes is not only the United States. Himes's novel fed on the innumerable examples of racist absurdity its author witnessed first‐ hand throughout his life, and the terms of French reception of his work certainly contributed to the realization of this absurdity. Jesse sheds his “primitivity” through murder as from the cover of his French reputation, Himes stabs a very Sartrean vision of blacks as admirable in their utterly “primitive” inability to harm.65 In the wake of the Vernon Sullivan affair, Himes was presented as an authentic African

American voice in contrast to Boris Vian, just as he remained a pariah of sorts in his home country. More than topical or stylistic similarities, their common appreciation of irony might ultimately be what makes it important to draw connections between

Himes and Vian. In their respective writings, they both set out to eviscerate race‐ based literary tropes, leaving them open for readers to try to divine the future of representations so stolidly rooted in certitudes of the past.

65 In an interview with John Williams, Himes declared “I remember Sartre made a statement... (I never had any use for Sartre since) that in writing his play The Respectful Prostitute he recognized the fact that a black man could not assault a white man in America. That's one of the reasons I began writing detective stories. I wanted to introduce the idea of violence” (Williams 218).

288

Conclusion

­But you see, a man who fights for an ideal is a hero. A hero who is killed is a martyr, and a martyr immediately becomes a myth. A myth is more dangerous than a man because you can't kill a myth… I mean, think of this curse running through the Antilles. Think of the legends and the songs. ­Better songs than armies! ­Better silence than songs.

‐Burn! (1969) Gilo Pontecorvo dir.

This is not an exhaustive study, nor does it pretend to be. It does not come close to discussing all the relevant texts within the literatures it uses as boundaries, and does not consider the likely variations on the trope in Spanish‐ and Portuguese‐ speaking cultures of the Atlantic world, although such research would confirm the ubiquity of the trope. Not included either are some of the most recent explorations of the theme, which for their self‐awareness and complexity could warrant their own dissertation. As a conclusion, I nevertheless want to gesture toward a few of those texts that, partly in reaction to the individualistic tendency of those studied in the last chapter, used the black avenger trope to try to reassert the importance of collective action in black liberation struggle.

As often, the roots of this trend are planted in the West Indies, the central crossroads of the Atlantic world. In 1938, Trinidadian author C.L.R. James published

The Black Jacobins, to this day the most iconic study of the Haitian Revolution. His study is heavily influenced by Friedrich Hegel and ’s great man

289 theory according to which “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.”1 That notion underlay James’s heroic portrayal of the foremost leader of the slave revolution, Toussaint Louverture. The general stands as a synecdoche for the entire revolution, as “the individual leadership responsible for this unique achievement was almost entirely the work of a single man—Toussaint Louverture.”2

As important as Carlyle’s influence on James is that of dialectic materialism. As a revolutionary Marxist, he takes into account the notion that history’s great men are products of their circumstances, “merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny” (x). Yet neither theory is enough to truthfully analyze historical events, James argues. His approach purports to borrow from both trends:

Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian. (x)

James’s portrayal of Toussaint Louverture as a hero is partly rooted in Romantic,

Victorian tradition, but it overflows this tradition. As James makes clear in this introduction, his history also bears the influence of the political events of his own time. While writing of the late eighteenth century slave revolution, James had in mind the Spanish Civil War, political oppression in Stalin’s USSR, and generally speaking “the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence” (xi). His was a history by and for that present, an analysis of past events meant to ring with contemporary events.

1 Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Divinity,” On Heroes, Hero­Worship, and the Heroic in History (New York: Wiley, 1861), 26. 2 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed.,

290 Following Hayden White, Scott entertains the notion that “certain formal features of a historical narrative‐‐plot, for instance‐‐contain within them determinate story potentials derived from the myth‐model or mythos... that underlies it.”3 James uses a romantic plot to tell the story of the Haitian Revolution.

Anticolonial stories, Scott tells us, “have tended to be narratives of overcoming, often narratives of vindication… and to tell stories of salvation and redemption.

They have largely depended upon a certain (utopian) horizon toward which the emancipationist history is imagined to be moving” (8). Romantic emplotment may be typical of twentieth‐century anticolonial writing, but it is the fruit of nineteenth century events and worldviews. Romantic influence on Marxist historiography is perhaps most obvious in the notion of class war, and in the portrayal of the working class as the collective hero of the revolutionary struggle. Yet history‐telling sits uneasily with anonymous protagonists. James faced a dilemma of representation: can one portray Toussaint as a hero, a of history, the embodiment of the struggle of thousands, and yet show ex‐slaves as the true force of change? James writes that “Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made

Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth” (James x). In the second edition of the book published in 1963, James would add seven paragraphs, a pause in the chronological flow, in which he considers Louverture’s defeat, and death. In this section, James analyzes Toussaint as a tragic character in an extraordinary play; “not Shakespeare himself could have found such a dramatic

revised (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), ix. 3 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 32.

291 embodiment of fate as Toussaint struggled against, Bonaparte himself; nor could the furthest imagination have envisaged the entry of the chorus, the ex‐slaves themselves, as the arbiters of their own fate” (James 292). Ultimately, for James,

Toussaint’s fatal flaw, his hamartia, was his “unbending adhesion to the prescriptive order of values he holds and rules by.” He could not imagine an alternative to his own autocratic plan for the improvement of life on the island. In the process, he lost the trust of the population. One lesson Scott draws out of James’s text is

… that the end of white domination and the tyranny of plantation slavery was one thing, the fashioning of a free black republic, the creation of a public and constitutional arena in which the newly emancipated black could appear and have her voice heard, quite another… Toussaint had precious little space within which to act. But act he had to. And when he did, he… opted to secure the economic (necessity) over the risk of the political (freedom). (Scott 220)

There is no purity in revolution, just different alloys of convictions and pragmatism combined in the crucible of circumstances. Romantic histories tend to present abstract freedom as the ultimate goal of revolution; the example of Louverture as drawn by James tells postcolonial nations that “the surrendering of freedom to necessity” is the true and unavoidable test of revolutions. In romantic histories, heroic figures are given precedence to such considerations. The black avenger, although he can herald the coming of the black nation, can also be an important narrative obstacle to its advent.

By the end of the 1950s, black nations were once again the order of the day.

Empires were crumbling; since the end of World War II colonies had been stirring.

France was among the first colonial powers to feel the wave: on V‐Day, French colonial authorities massacred thousands of peaceful nationalist demonstrators in

292 Sétif and Guelma, Algeria. They heard the message: immediate retaliation against

French settlers, the pied­noirs, caused a hundred casualties, that were in turn followed by grand scale reprisal: the French Army summarily executed Arabs on sight, bombed villages, as pied­noirs posses carried on their own atrocities. This cycle of violence led to a general uprising on November 1st, 1954, on the Toussaint

Rouge (Bloody All Saints Day), when the Front de Libération Nationale attacked

French positions throughout the country. Frantz Fanon, a Martinican World War II veteran and psychiatrist worked in the Blida‐Joinville hospital, developing new methods of treatment based on his study of the effects of systemic racism on oppressed populations. In 1952, he had published Black Skin, White Masks, a radically new outlook on matters of race based both on his personal experience as a black man in European settings and on his professional studies. Fanon soon joined the FLN, and became one of its ambassadors, editing the FLN’s newspaper but also representing the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic around Europe and Africa. He did not believe that the could ever gain independence, and so he invested himself into the African liberation struggle. His major work on the revolution, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961, a few months after Fanon escaped an assassination attempt by pro‐colonial terrorists, and mere months before his death from leukemia in an American hospital.

The book, though well received by France’s left‐wing press, was almost immediately banned. Two years later, it was released in English translation by

Présence Africaine, and picked up for distribution in the U.S. in 1965. Grove Press, the American publisher, advertised it as a “handbook for the revolutionary

293 movement throughout the world.” This constituted the book’s sales pitch, in a year that saw increased racist violence in the South, the first student demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the Watts riots, but also U.S. Marines invade the

Dominican Republic to support the pro‐U.S. autocratic regime. According to the book’s blurb

This is a book written in anger, by a leading spokesman of the revolution which won independence in Algeria a few years ago. But it is no mere diatribe against the white man or the West: Fanon’s is a cold anger, his intelligence is uncompromising, and as a doctor and a psychiatrist who has treated the bodies and minds of his fellow‐men, his compassion is great. The Wretched of the Earth is a work that will shock many, for in it Fanon, a political thinker who is a direct descendant of Engels and Sorel, calls for the use of absolute violence against colonial oppressors. His work is a manifesto which is being read and studied throughout the emerging nations of the Third World. It should be studied, too, by those in the West who wish to understand the multitude of forces behind the anticolonial revolution which is taking place in the world today.4

Angry, cold‐blooded, violent: Grove’s Fanon was a hero tailored for his time, and whose characterization owed much to Jean‐Paul Sartre’s problematic preface to his book. In his now familiar role as explicator of the black thing, Sartre interprets

Fanon’s text for his “fellow‐Europeans.” It is the sound of the Third World plotting against the West: “Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading centers and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices.”5 Further

4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Constance Farrington, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 5 Jean‐Paul Sartre, “Preface.” In Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Constance Farrington, trans.

294 along, Sartre adds: “Make no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this bitterness and spleen, by their ever‐present desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they have become men: men because of the settler, who wants to make beasts of burden of them — because of him, and against him” (Sartre 17). This passage resonates eerily with the final pages of The

End of a Primitive; yet where Himes sardonically presented murder as the way to individual achievement, Sartre suggests that Fanon presents mass murder as an equivalent solution for an entire group. Through Fanon, the Third World is getting ready for payback, what Sartre calls “the moment of the boomerang,” when in retribution for their reign of terror, “Europeans are massacred at sight” (20).

Violence is its own redemption; “like Achilles’ lance, [it] can heal the wounds that it has inflicted” (30). Violence, for Fanon, is not something to wish for so much as it is simply unavoidable, an aspect of what Scott calls the tragedy of enlightenment.

Sartre’s preface is a paean to anticolonial violence, where Fanon’s text is a measured, indeed cool‐headed, first‐hand analysis of the ways and means of decolonization. Yet undeniably Sartre’s take on Fanon made as much, if not more, of an impression as Fanon’s book itself.

And Fanon’s book did make an impression, especially on politically committed African Americans, the thousand anonymous footsoldiers of Martin

Luther King Jr.’s non‐violent civil rights campaigns, the freedom riders from all over the country that descended on the South from the mid‐50s on. Stokely Carmichael was one of them, a Trinidad‐born student who participated in all of the non‐violent

(New York: Grove Press, 1965), 13.

295 actions for which the Student Non‐violent Coordination Committee provided manpower. By 1966, the head of SNCC had had enough of turning the other cheek and called for Black Power. He did so with the writings of Fanon, his “patron saint,” in mind. Fanon had little to say about the African American liberation struggle. He thought that African Americans were faced with a problem “not fundamentally different from that of the Africans.” But Fanon observed that: “the principle and purpose of the freedom rides whereby black and white Americans endeavor to combat racial have little in common with the heroic struggle of the

Angolan people against the iniquity of the Portuguese colonialism.”6 The lesson of the First Congress of the African Cultural Society was the inherently national character of culture. The threat in letting one’s cultural goals be defined by the condescension of white racists was to lose sight of this fact and accept a “singularly racialized” outlook on culture. For Fanon, black struggle in America was not a national struggle the way decolonization wars were.

African Americans begged to differ, and did in the way they applied Fanon’s colonial analysis to their situation, in ways he likely would not have expected nor probably accepted. Carmichael could thus write in 1967: “Black Power means that black people see themselves as part of a new force, sometimes called the “Third

World”; that we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world…. Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, puts forth clearly the reasons for this and the relationship of the concept called Black Power to the concept of a

6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Richard Philcox, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 154. I am using Philcox’s more recent translation here because Farrington’s original translation inexplicably left out Fanon’s reference to the freedom riders.

296 new force in the world.”7 Fanon could not see the possibility of an independent

Martinique, and probably for the same reasons could not imagine an African

American nation, but his theory was instrumental in imagining that possibility.

Fanon’s book helped African American radicals form visions of anticolonial guerilla warfare on American city streets.

There was much talk of anticolonial struggle in the texts and speeches of

Carmichael, of the and other revolutionary organizations such as the Weather Underground that vowed to “bring the [Vietnam] war home;” the drastic, violent repression carried on against these same groups by law enforcement engaged in the infamous COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) certainly made it seem as if the war had already started; but it fell to writers to treat the theme . From Ronald L. Fair’s 1965 fable Many Thousand Gone to John Edgar

Wideman’s 1973 The Lynchers, the theme of localized or general mass African

American uprising pervaded the literature of the Black Power era. In John A.

Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969), after yet another white cop kills a young black man, political science professor and Civil Rights activist Eugene

Browning decides to get even and have the cop assassinated by a professional.

Browning thinks that the gesture will reveal black resolve to the entire country and curb racial violence. Things get out of control rapidly, as blind police reprisals lead

African Americans to mass retaliation and radical groups get involved. The novel ends as race war ignites the United States and brings the country on the brink of chaos.

7 Stokely Carmichael, Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New

297 Williams’ novel is a sophisticated take on the black avenger trope, its legacy and implications. Responsibility for what public opinion is prompt to perceive as a collective act of revenge is distributed between the five main characters: Browning, who sets the wheels in motion; the Don, the aging mobster who allows the killing to take place; Itzhak Hod, the actual killer, an Israeli hit man and former member of

Irgun; Greene, who claims the killing in the name of African American radical activism, and Trotman, “super‐militant with a vengeance,” who emulates Hod and kills the white supremacist responsible for killing Trotman’s sister.8 Revenge in Sons of Darkness is the essence of nation‐building, as with Hod who took part in the most ruthless episodes of the anti‐British terrorist campaign and subsequent war against surrounding Arab countries that cemented the existence of the state of Israel in the late 1940s. For Hod, national‐building is collective revenge informed by history: “the

Irgun had had that necessary historical view and to the Irgun the British were as much the enemy as the Germans had been, as much a debtor as any other people who had taken and given nothing or very little in return. There was a bill come due.

The Irgun was collecting payment” (54). Hod recognizes in African American activism echoes of his own days as a national redeemer in Irgun, but he is also fully aware that Greene and Trotman have as much in common with the Palestinians.

Avengers are also historians of sorts, because they keep national memory alive:

in Israel you were forever seeking a Martin Borman, an Adolph Eichmann, because the world forgets too easily, and there are things no one should ever forget. The world is reminded because there are always people to remind them. Like a Mr. Greene. What was that figure Mickey had given him about

York; Vintage Books, 1967), xi. 8 John A. Williams, Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light; A Novel of Some Probability (1969; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 23.

298 the number of black people killed in the slave trade? One hundred million over the centuries. Mr. Greene should not forget or permit anyone else to forget. (203)

Variations on the black avenger trope still appear regularly. To cite but a few,

Sherley Anne Williams’ and more recently ’s Paradise provide especially interesting takes on the trope for the emphasis they put on gender while addressing a pathologically masculine trope. In The Water Cure,

Percival Everett revises the black avenger as American myth in the light of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the attendant nationalist rhetoric. Black avengers die but never disappear. Multiple authors have contributed to deflate and dissect the black avenger trope along the years, questioning its problematic relation with race and racism, nation and nationalism. With this study, I hope to further contribute to awareness of the importance of this trope to global Atlantic culture. The black avenger trope has been crucial to modern understandings of race and national relations, and it remains relevant. Let me conclude with a telling contemporary example: in February 2012, the most iconic historical incarnation of this figure,

Toussaint Louverture, was the protagonist of a two‐part film made for the French television channel France 2. The film is conventional historical fiction fare: it begins with Toussaint prisoner in the Alps, and proceeds in typical biopic fashion through flashbacks as the General tells his life story to a fictional amanuensis. More problematic are the many liberties “Toussaint Louverture” takes with the historical record: in an early scene, Toussaint recollects being bought by Bayon at a slave auction where his father, too old to benefit the slave trader, is thrown into the sea to

299 drown. With this initial scene, director Philippe Niang portrays Louverture through most classical avenger features: the trauma of his father’s murder remains forever etched in his mind and evokes the original wrong Toussaint will set out to right through revolution. Louverture’s real father outlived him and was a hundred years old when he died.9 Historians complained in many venues about the long list of inaccuracies in the film. In the words of Marcel Dorigny, one of the leading figures in

Haitian Revolutionary studies, “it is good that this film exists… But we have to take it with a grain of salt, because some scenes were completely made up to shock the viewers. In the end, viewers will keep in mind the most striking scenes, that are also the most untrue!”10

The director replied: “I would have made a documentary had I wanted to be historically accurate,” and recognized “a true desire to cheat in order to offer a romanticized narrative capable of drawing in the greatest number of viewers.”11

Niang does not explain why he thought that voluntary historical errors might attract a wider audience. His embellishments worried Gérard de Cortanze, publisher of the recent biography of Louverture on which the film is based: “they show a desire to bypass historical truth so that whites appear to all be slave holders and negrophobes. What worries me is the way banlieue youths will react when they see

9 See Jacques de Cauna, “Essai de généalogie de la famille de Toussaint Louverture,” in Toussaint Louverture et l’indépendance d’Haïti, Jacques de Cauna ed. (Paris: Karthala Editions, 2004), 259. 10 Qtd in Christelle Devesa, “Toussaint Louverture : ‘Il faut regarder ce film, mais savoir que tout n'est pas exact’.” Premiere.fr. 13 February 2012. 11 May 2012. . My translation. 11 Qtd in Muriel Frat, “Toussaint Louverture provoque une polémique.” LeFigaro.fr. 15 February 2012. 11 May 2012. . My translation.

300 the film.”12 In France, the working class and immigrant populations tend to live in the projects‐filled banlieues, the suburbs of big cities. De Cortanze’s euphemism covers in France the reality of this makeup and the unspoken prejudice that goes with it: the sons and daughters of people of African descent—from sub‐Saharan

Africa but also the French West Indies—, most of them French citizens, have been presented as the colorblind Republic’s principal problem for the past thirty years or so. In 2005, banlieues denizens around the country rose up to fight police forces following the sadly familiar deaths of two innocent banlieue youths at the hands of the police. In the immediate aftermath of the riots, national discussions on the topic were hijacked by conservative pundits and politicians eager to instead discuss the alleged epidemic of anti‐white violence.

“Anti‐white racism” is what de Cortanze professes to fear in this declaration.

Readers will judge the worth of this analysis; but de Cortanze’s comment reveals something of the lasting potential of black avenger tales to instill fear of the black masses. The aforementioned scene was not the only one de Cortanze and others rightfully complained about, but it bears noting that what de Cortanze truly took exception to was the allegedly unfair portrayal of whites as racists. He apparently had no such qualms concerning the depiction of Rigaud as the ultimate tragic mulatto, hater of whites and black alike, or of Dessalines as a hot‐blooded brute, trigger‐happy brute. Of the other approximations of the film, one in particular will be of interest here: early in the film, a benevolent monk offers Toussaint a copy of

Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes, which Toussaint uses to learn to read, learn the

12 Ibid. My translation.

301 meaning of freedom, and of course discover his destiny as the avenger of his race.

The old literacy narrative is arguably much more palatable to those who worry that a 2011 TV film about a nineteenth‐century black revolutionary might trigger race riots in the French projects. De Cortanze’s worries, calculated though they might be, illustrate how pertinent the black avenger trope remains to matters of race and nation in the twenty‐first century.

302 WORKS CITED

Adéèkò, Adélékè. The Slave's Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2005.

Alderson, Robert. “Charleston’s Rumored Slave Revolt of 1793.” The Impact of the

Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Ed. David P. Geggus. Columbia:

University of South Carolina Press, 2001: 93‐110.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of

Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983; 1991.

Aravamundan Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688­1804.

Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Ardouin, Beaubrun. Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti. Vol. III. Paris: Dezobry et

Magdeleine, 1853.

Arnaud, Noël. Les Vies Parallèles de Boris Vian. Paris: 10/18, 1970.

Ashcraft, Richard. Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two treatises of Government.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology and African­American Literature: A Vernacular

Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work. New York: Laurel Books, 1976.

Balibar, Etienne. “Racism and Nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel

Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 1991.

Barbault‐Royer, [Colonel]. Du gouvernement de Saint­Domingue, de Laveaux, Vilatte,

des agents du Directoire. Paris: Debray, An V (1797).

303

Barthelemy, Anthony G. Black Face, Maligned Race: the Representation of Blacks in

English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1987.

[Beard, John R., Joseph Saint‐Rémy]. Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and

Autobiography. Boston: James Redpath, 1863.

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, or; the Royal Slave. In Oroonoko and other Stories. Ed.

Maureen Duffy. London: Methuen, 1986.

‐‐‐. Abdelazer, or the Moor’s Revenge. In Derek Hughes ed. Versions of Blackness: Key

Texts on Slavery from the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007.

Bell, Kevin. Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Bénot, Yves. “Diderot, Pechméja, Raynal et l’anticolonialisme,” Europe 405‐406

(1963): 137‐153.

Blackburn, Robin. The overthrow of colonial slavery, 1776­1848. London: Verso,

1988.

Bongie, Chris. Friends and Enemies: the Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.

Bland, Edward. “Racial Bias and Negro Poetry,” Poetry 63.6 (1944): 328‐333.

Bolívar, Simón. “Thoughts on the Congress to Be Held in Panama.” El Libertador:

Writings of Simón Bolívar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003: 169‐170.

Bowers, Fredson. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy: 1587­1642. Princeton: Princeton

304 University Press, 1940.

Breton, André. Anthologie de l'Humour Noir. 1939. Paris: Jean‐Jacques Pauvert, 1966.

Brette, A[rmand]. “Les gens de couleur libres et leurs deputes en 1789,” La

Révolution Française: Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 29 (1895):

326‐345; 385‐407.

Brisville, Jean‐Claude. Review of S'il braille, lâche­le (If He Hollers, Let Him Go) by

Chester Himes. La Nef 50 (1949): 130.

“British and Foreign History; Chapter XI,” New Annual Register for the Year

1802(1803): 366‐386.

Brooks, Joanna. “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black

Print Counterpublic.” William and Mary Quarterly 62.1 (2005): 67‐92.

Brown, Stephanie. “'Black comme moi': Boris Vian and the African American voice of

translation.” Mosaic 36.1 (2003): 51‐67.

Brown, Sterling A. “Negro Character as seen by White Authors,” Journal of Negro

Education 2.2 (1933): 179‐203.

Bryant, Jerry H. Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Buck‐Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Budianski, Stephen. The Bloody Shirt: Terror after Appomattox. New York: Viking,

2008.

305 Burke, Edmund. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. IX. Ed. R. B.

McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Burn! Dir. Gilo Pontecorvo. Perf. Marlon Brando, Evaristo Marquez, Norman Hill.

Europe Associates SAS. Film.

Camier, Bernard, Laurent Dubois, “Voltaire et Zaïre, ou le théâtre des Lumières dans

l’aire atlantique française,” Revue d’histoire moderne contemporaine 54.4

(2007): 39‐69.

Carlyle, Thomas. “The Hero as Divinity,” On Heroes, Hero­Worship, and the Heroic in

History. New York: Wiley, 1861.

Carmichael, Stokely, Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in

America. New York; Vintage Books, 1967.

Casellas, Jesús López‐Peláez. “The Enemy Within: Otherness in Thomas Dekker’s

Lust’s Dominion,” SEDERI, yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for

English Renaissance Studies 9 (1998): 203‐207.

Cauna, Jacques de. Toussaint Louverture et l’indépendance d’Haïti: témoignages pour

un bicentenaire. Paris: Karthala, 2004.

Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular

Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Chalmers, [Colonel] James. Remarks on the Late War in St. Domingo. London, 1803.

Channing, William Ellery. Letter of Dr. William E. Channing to James G. Birney.

Cincinnati: A. Pugh, 1836.

“Charlestown, Tuesday March 14.” American Recorder and Charlestown Advertiser,

14 March 1786.

306

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. Boston and New York: Houghton

Mifflin Co., 1901.

Childs, Matt D. The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic

Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Chiles, Katy. “Within and Without Raced Nations: Intratextuality, Martin Delany, and

Blake; or, The Huts of America,” American Literature 80.2 (2008): 323‐352.

Clarkson, Thomas. History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition

of the Slave Trade. Vol. I. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808.

Clavin, Matt. Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril

of a Second Haitian Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 2009.

Cleves, Rachel Hope. The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti­

Jacobinism to Anti­Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Clymer, Jeffory. “Martin Delany's Blake and the Transnational Politics of Property.”

American Literary History 15.4 (2003): 709‐731.

Cotterel, François‐Frédéric. Esquisse historique des principaux évènements arrives à

Saint­Domingue depuis l’incendie du Cap jusqu’à l’expulsion de Sonthonax;

leurs causes, leurs effets. Situation actuelle de cette colonie, et moyens d’y

rétablir la tranquillité. Paris: Gelé, an VI [1798].

‐‐‐. Santhonax et Laveaux repoussés par leurs commettants, ou prévue des nullités de

la députation de Saint Domingue pour l’an IV. Paris: Marchands de

Nouveautés, [1797].

307 ‐‐‐. Le Gouvernement de Saint­Domingue peint par lui même, ou mémoire de

l'Ordonnateur Henry Perroud, sur l'événement du 30 ventôse au Cap, contre le

Général Vilatte et les hommes de couleur, avec quelques réflexions

préliminaires à leur mémoire justificatif . Rochefort: Jousserant, [1797].

Crane, Gregg D. “The Lexicon of Rights, Power, and Community in Blake: Martin R.

Delany's Dissent from Dred Scott.” American Literature, 68.3 (1996): 527‐

553.

Cugoano, Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. Ed. Vincent

Carretta. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

‐‐‐. Réflexions sur la traite et l’esclavage des nègres. [trans. Antoine Diannyère]. Paris,

1788.

Dain,Bruce R. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early

Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Daut, Marlène L. Science of Desire: Race and Representations of the Haitian Revolution

in the Atlantic World, 1790­1865. Dissertation. University of Notre Dame,

2008.

‐‐‐. “Un‐silencing the Past: Boisrond‐Tonnerre, Vastey, and the Re‐writing of the

Haitian Revolution,” South Atlantic Review, 74.1 (2009): 35‐64.

[Day, Thomas, John Bicknell], The Dying Negro, A Poem. Third ed. London, 1775.

Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1998.

Delany, Martin R. Blake; or the Huts of America. Ed. Floyd J. Miller. Boston: Beacon

Press, 1970.

308 ‐‐‐. The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the

United States and Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, 1852;

1861. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2004.

Devesa, Christelle. “Toussaint Louverture : ‘Il faut regarder ce film, mais savoir que

tout n'est pas exact’.” Premiere.fr. 13 February 2012. 11 May 2012.

regarder‐ce‐film‐mais‐savoir‐que‐tout‐n‐est‐pas‐exact‐3115002>.

Dillon, Elizabeth M. “The Secret History of the Early American Novel: Leonora

Sansay and Revolution in Saint Domingue.” Novel: a Forum on Fiction 40.1/2

(2006): 77‐105.

Dixon, Chris. African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism, in the

Nineteenth Century. West Port, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. 3rd ed. Durham: Duke University Press,

2003.

Doolen, Andy. “ ‘Be Cautious of the Word ‘Rebel’’: Race, Revolution, and

Transnational History in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America,”

American Literature 81‐1 (2009): 153‐179.

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself.

Boston: De Wolfe and Fiske Co., 1892.

‐‐‐. The Heroic Slave. Three Classic African­American Novels. Ed. William L. Andrews.

New York: Mentor Books, 1990.

309 Doyle, Laura. Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity,

1640­1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Dred Scott v. Sandiford 60 U.S. Reports (6 March 1857),

Drexler, Michael J., Ed White. “The Constitution of Toussaint: Another Origin of

African American Literature.” Blackwell Companion to African American

Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Malden: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2010.

Dubroca, Louis. The Life of Toussaint Louverture, Chief of the French Rebels in St

Domingo. Translated form the French. London: H.D. Symonds, 1802.

Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: the Story of the Haitian Revolution. New

Haven: Belknap Press, 2005.

Du Bois, W.E.B. “Two Novels,” in The Norton Anthology of African American

Literature. Eds. Henry L. Gates and Nelly McKay. 2nd ed. New York: W.W.

Norton and Co., 2003.

Duhamel, Marcel. Raconte pas ta vie. Paris: Mercure de France, 1972.

Earle, William. Obi; or, the History of Three­Fingered Jack . Ed. Srinivas Aravamudan.

Toronto: Broadview, 2005.

Early, Gerald. “The 1960s, African Americans, and the American Comic Book.” Strips,

Toons and Bluesies: Essays in Comics and Culture. Eds. D.B. Dowd and Todd

Hignite. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004: 68‐69.

Eburne, Jonathan P. “The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes,

Surrealism, and the Série Noire.” PMLA 120. 3 (2005): 806‐821.

Edwards, Brent H. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of

Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

310 Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and

1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Antioch Review 5.2 (1945): 198‐211.

Fabre, Michel. “Richard Wright's critical reception in France: censors Right and Left,

négritude intellectuals, the literary set, and the general public.” The Mississippi

Quarterly 50.2 (1997): 307‐325.

Fabre, Michel, Robert E. Skinner and Lester Sullivan, eds. Chester Himes: An

Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Westport: Greenwood Press,

1992.

Fabre, Michel and Robert E. Skinner, eds. Conversations with Chester Himes. Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Frantz Fanon. Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

‐‐‐. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press,

1965.

‐‐‐. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2005.

Farr, James. “Locke, Natural Law and New World Slavery.” Political Theory 36.4

(2008): 495‐522.

‐‐‐. “So vile and miserable an estate…”: the problem of slavery in John Locke’s

political thought.” Political Theory 14.2 (1986): 263‐289.

Fouchard, Jean. Le Théâtre à Saint­Domingue. Port‐au‐Prince: Imprimerie de l’Etat,

1955.

Frat, Muriel. “Toussaint Louverture provoque une polémique.” LeFigaro.fr. 15

February 2012. 11 May 2012.

311 tv/article/telefilm/67823/toussaint‐louverture‐provoque‐une‐

polemique.html>.

Gaffield, Julia. “Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions,

1801–1807,” Journal of Social History 41.1 (2007): 81‐103.

Gainot, Bernard. “Le général Laveaux, gouverneur de Saint‐Domingue, député néo‐

jacobin,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 278 (1989): 433‐454.

Garland, David. “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in

Twentieth‐Century America” Law and Society Review 39.4 (2005): 793‐833.

Garraway, Doris L. “‘Légitime Défense’: Universalism and Nationalism in the

Discourse of the Haitian Revolution.” Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the

Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Ed. Doris L. Garraway.

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hokins University Press,

1977.

Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787­

1845, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint­Domingue. New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Gautier, Madeleine. “Un romancier de la race noire: Richard Wright.” Review of Un

Enfant du Pays (Native Son) by Richard Wright. Présence Africaine 1 (1948):

163‐165.

312 Girard, Philippe R. Philippe R. Girard, “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s

Diplomacy, 1798‐1802,” William and Mary Quarterly 66.1 (2009): 87‐124.

Gobineau, Arthur de. The Inequality of Human Races. Trans. Adrian Collins. New

York: Putnam and Sons, 1915.

Goggi, Gianluigi.“Diderot‐Raynal, l’esclavage et les lumières écossaises.” L’esclavage

et la traite sous le regard des Lumières. Ed. Jean Mondot. Lumières 3 (2004):

53‐93.

Gould, Philip. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Anti­Slavery in the Eighteenth Century

Atlantic World. New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Gourgaud, [General] Gaspard. Talks of Napoleon at St Helena with General Baron

Gourgaud. Trans. Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer. Chicago: A.C. McClurg &Co.,

1904.

Gordon, Arthur. Reprisal. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

Gragnon‐Lacoste, [Thomas Prosper]. Toussaint Louverture. Paris: Durand et Pedone‐

Lauriel, 1877.

Grégoire, H. Enquiry concerning the intellectual and moral faculties, and literature of

Negroes. Trans. D. B. Warden. Brooklyn, 1810.

Grégoire, [M.].Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur ou sang­mêlés de Saint

Domingue, et des autres Isles françoises de l’Amérique, adressé à l’Assemblée

Nationale. Paris: Belin, 1789.

Griggs, Sutton E. Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem. 1899.

Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Habib, Imtiaz. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500­1677: Imprints of the Invisible.

313 Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2007.

Hayley, William. Essay on Epic Poetry: in five Epistles to the Revd. Mr. Mason. London:

J. Dodsley, 1782.

Henry, Paget. “Between Hume and Cugoano: Race, Ethnicity and Philosophical

Entrapment.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18.2 (2004): 129‐148.

Hersch, Seymour. “On James Farr’s ‘So vile and Miserable and estate…’” Political

Theory 16.3 (1988): 502‐503.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English

Revolution. 1972. London: Penguin Books, 1991

Himes, Chester. My Life of Absurdity. New York: Paragon House, 1976.

‐‐‐. The End of a Primitive. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1997.

‐‐‐. The Quality of Hurt. New York: Paragon House, 1971.

Hinks,Peter P. To Awaken my afflicted brethren: David Walker and the Problem of

Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University

Press, 1997.

Hoffmann, Léon‐François. Le nègre romantique. Paris: Payot, 1973.

Howard‐Pitney, David. The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America.

1992. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005.

Howlett, Jacques. “J'irai cracher sur vos tombes.” Review of J'irai cracher sur vos

tombes by Boris Vian. Présence Africaine 1 (1948): 165‐166.

‐‐‐. “Notes sur Chester B. Himes et l'aliénation du Noir.” Review of If He Hollers Let

Him Go by Chester Himes. Présence Africaine 4 (1948): 697‐704.

314 H.T. “J'irai cracher sur vos tombes.” Review of J'irai cracher sur vos tombes by Boris

Vian. Lettres Françaises. 10 January 1947, 4.

Hughes, Derek. “Introduction.” Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery from the

Seventeenth Century. Ed. Derek Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2007.

‐‐‐. The Theatre of Aphra Behn. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Within the Circle: An

Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to

the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Hume, Robert. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo

Revolution. 2nd ed., revised. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.

Jewett, Robert, John Shelton Lawrence. The American Monomyth. 1977. Lanham:

University Press of America, 1988.

Jenson, Deborah. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex and Manuscripts in the

Haitian Revolution. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.

Johnson, Lynn R. “A Return to the Black (W)hole: Mitigating the Trauma of

Homelessness in Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio.” Southern Literary

Journal 42.2 (2010): 12‐33.

Jones, Christopher M. Boris Vian Transatlantic: Sources, Myths and Dreams. New

York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998.

315 Jordan, Matthew F. “Recorded Jazz and La Voix Nègre: The Sound of Race in the Age

of Mechanical Reproduction.” Nottingham French Studies 43:1 (2004): 89‐99.

Kaplan, Cora. “Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Literary

Imagination.” History Workshop Journal 46 (1998): 33‐62.

Kaufman, Miranda.“Caspar Van Senden, Sir Thomas Sherley and the 'Blackamoor'

project.” Historical Research 81.212 (2008): 366‐371.

Klonsky, Milton. “The Writing on the Wall.” Review of The Lonely Crusade by

Chester Himes. Commentary 5 (1948): 189‐190.

Lachance, Paul. “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana. “ Ed. David P.

Geggus. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia:

University of South Carolina Press, 2001: 209‐230.

Lacroix, Pamphile de. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la revolution de Saint­

Domingue, vol.I. Paris: Pillet Aîné, 1819.

Laveaux, Etienne. Compte­Rendu par le general Laveaux à ses concitoyens, à l’opinion

publique et autorités constituées. Paris: Bureau central d’abonnementaux

journaux [1797].

[Stephen Laveaux and Henry Perroud]. “Authentic Communication,” Greenleaf’s New

York Journal. 20 May 1796.

Lazo, Rodrigo. Writing to Cuba: filibustering and Cuban exiles in the United States.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Levine, Robert S. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Representative

Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Lipking, Joanna. “Confusing Matters: Searching the Backgrounds of Oroonoko.” Ed.

316 Janet Todd. Aphra Behn Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996: 259‐284.

Locke, Alain. “A Critical Retrospect of the Literature of the Negro for 1947.” Phylon

9.1 (1948): 3‐12.

Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. 1925. New York:

Touchstone, 1997.

Macpherson, C. B. Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1962.

Madiou, Thomas. Histoire d’Haïti. Vol. III. Port‐au‐Prince: Courtois, 1848.

Marcellesi, Laure. “Louis‐Sébastien Mercier: Prophet, Abolitionist, Colonialist,”

Studies in Eighteenth­Century Culture 40 (2011): 247‐273

McClintock, Anne. “ ‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism.”

Ed. Anne McClintock. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nationalism, and

Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Melamed, Jodi. “The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes's End of a Primitive

Sounds the Limits of Midcentury Racial Liberalism.” American Literature

80(4): 769‐797.

Mercier, Louis Sébastien. Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred. Trans. W.

Hooper, M.D. Vol 1. London, MDCCLXXII. [1772]. Eighteenth Century

Collections Online. Gale. CIC Penn State University. 23 June 2011.

ontentSet=ECCOArticles&type=multipage&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&docI

317 d=CW116282659&source=gale&userGroupName=psucic&version=1.0&docL

evel=FASCIMILE>

‐‐‐. Astræa’s return; or, the halcyon days of France in the year 2440: a dream. Trans.

Harriot Augusta Freeman. London, 1797.

Miles, Robert. “Recent Marxist Theories of Nationalism and the Issue of Racism,”

British Journal of Sociology 38.1 (1987): 24‐43.

Moses,Wilson J. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

‐‐‐. Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious

Myth. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982.

Observations d'un habitant des colonies sur le "Mémoire en faveur des gens de

couleur..." adressé à l'Assemblée nationale par M. Grégoire. Gallica.fr. 12 May

2012.

C3%A9goire%22.langEN >.

“The Ostend Manifesto.”

Newman, Simon P. “American Political Culture and the French and Haitian

Revolutions: Nathaniel Cutting and the Jefferson Republicans.” Ed. David P.

Geggus. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia:

University of South Carolina Press, 2001: 72‐89.

Nicholls, David. “A Work of Combat: Mulatto Historians and the Haitian Past: 1847‐

318 1867.” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16.1 (1974): 15‐38.

Nwankwo, Ifeoma. Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational

Identity in the Nineteenth‐Century Americas. Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

O’Donnell, Mary Ann. “The Documentary Record.” Cambridge Companion to Aphra

Behn. Eds. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2004: 1‐11.

Pacheco, Anita. “Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” Studies in English

Literature 34 (1994): 491‐506.

Pagden, Anthony. “The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of

nationalism in Diderot and Herder.” Ed. Gyan Prakash. After colonialism:

Imperial Histories and Colonial Displacements. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1995: 129‐152.

Paquin, Lyonel. The Haitians: Class and Color Politics. Brooklyn: Multi‐Type, 1983.

Peabody, Sue.“There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and

Slavery in the Ancien Régime. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Pearson, Jacqueline. “Slave Princes and Lady Monsters: Gender and Ethnic

Difference in the Work of Aphra Behn.” Ed. Janet Todd. Aphra Behn Studies.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996: 219‐234.

Perkins, James H. The Memoir and Writings of James Handasyd Perkins. Ed. William

Henry Channing. Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1851. 2 vols.

319 [J.H.P.]. “Louis le Droit; A Tale of Martinique.” The National Era. 2 August 1849.

[H. Perroud], L’Ordonnateur de Saint Domingue aux ministre plénipotentiaire et

consuls de la République auprès des Etats­Unis d’Amérique. [1796]. 12 May

2012. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k58043162.r=.langEN.

Perroud, Henry. Précis des derniers troubles qui ont eu lieu dans la partie du Nord de

Saint Domingue, adressé au Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies. Cap‐

Français: P. Roux, [1796].

Phillips, Wendell. “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Speeches, Lectures and Letters. Boston:

Lee and Shepard, 1884: 468‐494

Pierrot, Grégory. “'Our Hero': Toussaint Louverture in British Representations,”

Criticism 50.4 (2008): 581‐607.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

Polizzotti, Mark. Introduction: Laughter in the Dark. Anthology of Black Humor. By

André Breton. 1940, 1966. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997.

[P. U. C. P. D. D. L. M. ]. Observations d'un habitant des colonies sur le "Mémoire en

faveur des gens de couleur..." adressé à l'Assemblée nationale par M. Grégoire.

Gallica.fr. 12 May 2012.

C3%A9goire%22.langEN >.

Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and

Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Quintanilla, Mark. “The World of Alexander Campbell: An Eighteenth Century

320 Grenadian Planter,” Albion 35.2 (Summer 2003): 229‐256.

Rainsford, Marcus. An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. London:

Cundee, 1805.

[Marcus Rainsford], The Revolution, or; Britain Delivered. A Poem in Ten Cantos. 2d

ed. London: R.B. Scott, 1800.

Rawidowicz, Simon. Israel, the Ever­Dying People, and Other Essays. Ed. Benjamin C.

I. Ravid. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1986.

Raynal [Abbé]. A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of

the Europeans in the East and West Indies. J. J. Justamond trans. 2nd ed.

London: T. Cadell, 1776.

R.E.C., “Race in the Rough.” Review of If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes.

Phylon 7.2 (1946): 210‐212.

“Réclamation des nègres libres, colons américains.” Le Moniteur, 27 November 1789.

Reinhardt, Catherine A. Claims to Memory: Beyond Slave Emancipation in the French

Caribbean. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006.

Renda, Mary. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism,

1915­1940 (Chapel Hill: university of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Review of An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti by Marcus Rainsford.

Annual Review and History of Literature IV (1805): 219‐228.

Review of The Revolution, or; Britain Delivered by Marcus Rainsford. The Monthly

Review 34 (1801): 96.

Review of The Revolution, or; Britain Delivered by Marcus Rainsford. The Critical

321 Review, or, Annals of Literature 31 (1801): 473.

Righter, Ann. “Heroic Tragedy.” Restoration Theatre. Eds. John Russel Brown and

Bernard Harris. New York: Capricorn Books, 1967.

Roscoe, William. “The Wrongs of Africa” (Part the First). The Poetical Works of

William Roscoe. Ward and Lock: London, 1857: 25‐46.

Ruquist, Rebecca. “Chapter 4: Writing in Blackface: Boris Vian's J'irai cracher sur vos

tombes, a pulp fiction Faulkner.” Paris, Race and Universalism in the Black

Atlantic:Léopold Sedar Senghor, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian and Richard

Wright. Diss. Yale University, 2003. 26 May 2007. rebeccaruquist.blogspot.com.

10 November 2008. .

[Edward Rushton], The West Indian Eclogues. London, 1787.

Saint‐Aubin, Arthur F. “Alphonse de Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture and the

Staging of White Masculinity,” Nineteenth Century French Studies, 35.2

(2007): 333‐351.

Saint‐Rémy, Joseph. Vie de Toussaint Louverture. Paris: Moquet, 1850.

Sartre, Jean‐Paul. “Black Orpheus.” What is Literature? and Other Essays. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1988: 289‐330.

Schloss, Rebecca Hartkopf. “The February 1831 Slave Uprising in Martinique and the

Policing of White Identity.” French Historical Studies 30.2 (2007): 203‐236.

Schuyler, George. “The Negro Art Hokum,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of

African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the

Present, Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997: 51‐54/

322 Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment,

Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Segal, Alan. Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Seraille, William.“Afro‐American Emigration to Haiti during the Civil War.” The

Americas 35.2 (1978): 185‐200.

Shelby, Tommie. “Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism: Martin Delany on the

Meaning of Black Political Solidarity,” Political Theory 31.5 (2003): 664‐692

Smith, Harrison. “Lynching Avenged.” Review of Reprisal by Arthur Gordon.

Saturday Review. September 16 1950.

Spengemann, William. “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko.”

Nineteenth Century Fiction 38 (1983‐1984): 384‐414.

John Spurr, “Shaftesbury and the Seventeenth Century.” Anthony Ashley Cooper, First

Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621­1683. Ed. John Spurr. London: Ashgate, 2011: 1‐25.

Starke, Catherine J. Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters,

Archetypes, and Individuals. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1971.

[James Stephen]. Buonaparte in the West Indies, or; the History of Toussaint

Louverture, the African Hero, part I­III. London: J. Hatchard, 1803.

Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1996

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Take of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), vol. II, 232.

Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature.

323 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Tal, Kali. “That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near Future Fiction,” Social Text 20.2

(2002): 65‐91.

Ténot, Frank. Boris Vian: Le Jazz et Saint­Germain. Paris: Du May, 1993.

Thompson, Ayanna. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage. New

York: Routledge, 2008.

Thorndike, Ashley H. Tragedy. New York; Cooper Square, 1908.

Tomich, Dale. “‘Liberté ou Mort’: Republicanism and Slave Revolt in Martinique,

February 1831.” History Workshop 29 (1990): 85‐91.

Trouillot, Michel‐Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Venaissin, Gabriel. “Le roman du faux‐témoignage.” Esprit 212 (1954): 463‐466.

Vian, Boris. I Spit on your Graves. Trans. Boris Vian and Milton Rosenthal. 1948. Los

Angeles: TamTam Books, 1998.

‐‐‐. The Dead All Have the Same Skin. 1947. Trans. Paul Knolbloch. Los Angeles:

TamTam Books, 2008.

David Walker, An Appeal to coloured citizens of the world, but in particular, and very

expressly, to those of the United States of America. 3rd ed. Boston, 1830.

Wallace, Maurice. “'Are We Men?': Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine

Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775‐1865.” American Literary History 9.3

(1997): 396‐424.

Waring, Robert L. As We See It. Washington D.C.: Sudwarth, 1910.

Warren, Kenneth W. What Was African American Literature? Cambridge: Harvard

324 University Press, 2011.

‐‐‐. “Does African‐American Literature Exist?” The Chronicle Review. Chronicle of

Higher Education. 24 February 2011.

African‐American/126483/>. 4 May 2012.

Waters, Hazel. Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black

Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Weil, Simone. An Anthology. Ed. Siân Miles. New York: Grove Press, 2000.

White, Ashli. Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Wexler, Laura. Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America. New York:

Scribner, 2003.

Williams, John A. “Chester Himes Is Getting On.” New York Herald Tribune Book

Review. 11 October 1964: 2; 21.

‐‐‐. Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light; A Novel of Some Probability. 1969; Boston:

Northeastern University Press, 1999.

Williams, John A., Lori Williams, ed. Dear Chester, Dear John: Letters Between Chester

Himes and John A. Williams. : Wayne State University Press, 2008.

Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York: MacMillan Co.,

1902), 433‐436.

Zobel, Joseph. “Les Nègres et l'Obscénité en Littérature.” Lettres Françaises. 25 July

1947, 4.

325 VITA Grégory Pierrot EDUCATION

PhD in English, The Pennsylvania State University, 2012 M.A. in English, The Pennsylvania State University, 2008 M.A. in English, Université Paris IV‐La Sorbonne, Paris, 2001 B.A. in English, Université Paul Verlaine, Metz, 1998

PUBLICATIONS

“Avoiding Haiti: Representation of Black Masculinity and History in Martin Delany’s Blake,” Early American Studies and the Haitian Revolution, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler eds. (volume currently under review). “Sable Warriors and Neglected Tars: Edward Rushton's Atlantic Politics,” Race, Romanticism and the Atlantic, Paul Youngquist ed., Ashgate. Forthcoming (2012). “Chester Himes, Boris Vian, and the Transatlantic Politics of Racial Representation,” African American Review 43.2‐3 (Spring/Fall 2009): 247‐262. “‘Our Hero’: Toussaint Louverture in British Representations,” Criticism 50.4 (2008): 581‐607. “'Rock and a hard place’: Last Exit to Brooklyn, New York, Selby et le rock.” Volume! 1.2 (2002) (in French). Translation: “Le rôle des professions,” Sajay Samuel. Esprit 8‐9 (Août/Septembre 2010): 185‐ 192. For attribution, see “Erratum,” Esprit 12 (Décembre 2010), 237.

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

“Marcus Rainsford: A Career in Writing Revolution.” C19: The Society of Nineteenth‐Century Americanists Inaugural Conference. Pennsylvania State University, May 20‐23, 2010.

Respondent (with Dr. Paul Youngquist, University of Colorado, and Dr. Anthony Kaye, Penn State) to Dr. Susan Buck‐Morss. “Hegel, Haiti and Universal History,” Rock Ethics Seminar. Pennsylvania State University, February 5, 2010.

“The American Way’: Of Torture and Ethics in Percival Everett’s The Water Cure.” Celebrating Contemporary African American Literature: The Novel since 1988. Pennsylvania State University, October 23‐24, 2009.

“Chester Himes, Boris Vian, and the Transatlantic Politics of Racial Representation.” American Literature Association 20th Annual Conference on American Literature. Boston, MA ‐24, 2009.

ACADEMIC HONORS

The Pennsylvania State University Institute for the Arts and Humanities Graduate Student Summer Residency, 2011. The Pennsylvania State University Sparks Fellowship, 2010‐2011. The Pennsylvania State University George and Barbara Kelly Fellowship in Nineteenth Century English and American Literature, 2009. The Pennsylvania State University Africana Research Center Research Grant, Fall 2009.