Dead and Alive, page 13
He was a great man; like Clarkson and Wilberforce he devoted his career, his time and his money to attacking slavery and the slave trade. To the formerly enslaved living in Britain he was a god. The modern mistake is assuming that such compassion and devotion to a just cause naturally equated to an egalitarian view, especially in a world where egalitarianism led to wars in France and America.
Reading this book is a bracing experience. Some of the first-person accounts we find in it are so out of keeping with our hazy, generalized sense of the period that we almost don’t know what to do with them. Take the ex-slave Harriet Jacobs’s trip to England. She claimed she never saw even ‘the slightest symptom of prejudice against colour. Indeed, I entirely forgot it, till the time came for us to return to America.’ Never mind the fact that Frederick Douglass, the statesman, orator and author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, reported a similar experience. Can it be true?
When she arrived in London, she stayed in the Adelaide Hotel where ‘for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast. Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom.
Some readers will accuse Harriet of false consciousness. Some will say it was written for a white audience and worded to flatter them. Perhaps both are partially true. But when this black woman – who endured such unspeakable torture in her life – tries to tell me something over a chasm of centuries, I feel a responsibility at least to listen, and to try and accept the reality of many simultaneous realities, all of them real to the people who lived within them. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Many in England are fond of quoting that old L. P. Hartley line. What I like about it is that it reminds me that the past is not our plaything. The past has its own sovereignty and psycho-geography, its own suffering, its own ideas about suffering’s alleviation. The people who lived and died in that strange land deserve, at the very least, our close attention and respect, both for what they went through and for how they themselves conceptualized it. When it comes to our interpretations of their lives, it is by now a truism to say that we usually go searching for what we wish to find. And perfect objectivity is, of course, impossible. But degrees of manipulation and distortion exist, and the aim is surely to mitigate against the most egregious forms of both. We want to know, to the best of our judgement, ‘what really happened’. We can never know for sure. All we have is evidence, documents, records, memories.
The past is not to be played with – but who can resist using it as a tool? We bend history to our will, for purposes as much personal as political. In 1999, for example, I wanted to know – for reasons of my own self-esteem – that the history of the African diaspora was not solely one of invisible, silent suffering. I wanted to hear about agency, heroism, revolt. I received all of that from Black England but also something that has proved far more important to me, over time, namely, a sense of the precariousness of ‘progress’. It does not move in one direction. Nor are we, in the present, perfected versions of the people of the past. It is very important that we understand the various hypocrisies and contradictions of the abolitionists. But the significance of this knowledge is not solely that we get to feel superior to them. As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact – in that popular courtroom called ‘The Right Side of History’ – when we hold up a mirror to the past, what we should see most clearly is our own reflection. The judgment goes both ways. Why didn’t every man, woman and child in Georgian England drop everything and dedicate their lives to the abolishment of slavery? Good question. I like to imagine the students of the future asking similar questions about us. Why did we buy iPhones when we knew the cobalt inside them could have been mined by children for subsistence wages? Why did we buy plastic water bottles, every day, for decades, when we knew they were environmentally disastrous? Now, as it was then, a minority of people do indeed dedicate their lives – and risk their livelihoods – to confront these things. Whatever the ideological imperfections of such people, they are at least doing what the great majority of people don’t do, which is something.
To realize that olden-timey people were self-contradictory hypocrites is like realizing that bears shit in woods. As Samuel Johnson noted, we will find many ‘yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes’. We will also find many black overseers.[*] Truly revolutionary individuals, like Frederick Douglass, will always be rare. They are at least as hard to find in the twenty-first century as they were in the eighteenth or nineteenth. One role of the historian is surely to keep the names and memories of such anomalous individuals as a present concern, to remind us of what is possible, politically and personally, on this benighted planet. But I confess I am also moved and inspired by less perfected lives. By half-baked pressure groups and misguided ladies’ societies. By sanitized ‘slave narratives’, calculated to move sentiment in a progressive direction. By nationwide sugar boycotts – even if the poor women refusing to eat that sugar would not have let a person like me into their kitchens. By William Davidson’s failed Cato Street conspiracy, and Robert Wedderburn’s calls to violent rebellion against both slavery and the British government. By the kinds of working-class radicals who were as inspired by the socialist land reformer Thomas Spence as they were by the Jubilee of Leviticus. I am moved by the afflicted who have the ‘wrong’ language for their own suffering – or who may have had no language at all. Now, none of these people or movements are the equal, in my own mind, of the political commitment and personal heroism of a man like Sam Sharpe. And all the well-meaning, frequently misguided lady abolitionists of history pale in comparison to the ethical clarity of the Leicester radical Elizabeth Heyrick, author of Immediate, Not Gradual, Abolition; or, an inquiry into the shortest, safest and most effective means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery. But my high regard is not what the dead need or require, because they don’t need anything from me: they are dead. What I need from the dead, by contrast, is to try and comprehend how they lived and why, in the hope that it might bring some insight into how we live and why. It’s perfectly obvious to me that white lady abolitionists were often paternalistic, that William Wilberforce’s Christian liberation theology considered ‘negroes’ childlike innocents in need of protection, and that Harriet Jacobs seems to have mistaken British politeness and relative tolerance for equality before the law and full civil rights. It’s less obvious to me that my own subjectivity is so perfectly enlightened that my only attitude towards such people should be teleological pity or self-righteous contempt. To read Black England is to discover that many imperfect and blinkered people, black and white, enslaved and free, with all kinds of dubious or complex motivations, struggled for hundreds of years to end a global system of capital so large that no element of English life was not in some mode driven by it. They did it. Heaven on earth did not immediately follow – but one version of hell did end. Others replaced it. Whenever I am tempted to forget how momentously difficult such struggles against capital, vested interest and personal apathy really are, I can walk into any shop in my country and look at the rows and rows of plastic bottles in the fridge – the plastic everywhere – and remember.
The present is blinding – and distorting. But good historians enter the country of the past with their minds as open and alert as possible, particularly attentive to the forgotten and the silenced, yes; suspicious of the official narrative, of course – but also continually alive to the possibility of the unexpected, the unimagined and even the undesired. When considering the history of the African diaspora I always feel we are very lucky to be able to draw on an epistemological principle born of that same diaspora, specifically from the Akan peoples of Ghana: the Sankofa. ‘Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri.’ Literal translation: ‘It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.’ Gretchen Gerzina takes that principle seriously, bringing back to us what we are always perilously close to losing, through ignorance, neglect, amnesia, wilful manipulation and, yes, taboo. To see Black England back in print in this sumptuous new edition is a personal joy to me, and a great gift to anybody profoundly interested, as I am, in the past and present of Black British people – and of England itself.
Skip Notes
* Though to accuse such men of collaboration is to profoundly misunderstand the nature of the plantations. As Primo Levi argued, ‘we also tend to simplify history’, and his account of the obscene, individual corruption that occurred within concentration camps, ‘The Grey Zone’, is an instructive example of what history looks like when it is told by the afflicted themselves, on their own terms.
Black Manhattan
This was the foreword to a reissue of James Weldon Johnson’s groundbreaking study of African American culture in New York, Black Manhattan, first published in 1930.
The book you have in your hands is a curio. A slice of American history composed in the midst and turmoil of that history, and yet written in a tone of determined brightness, with steady optimism…Black Manhattan must have read oddly even to its first readers: its publication coincided with the Depression. The utopian Harlem of the Roaring Twenties, so joyfully depicted by Johnson – ‘the principal streets never deserted, gay crowds skipping from one place of amusement to another, lines of taxicabs and limousines standing under the sparkling lights of the entrances to the famous night clubs’ – was more or less out of date as soon as the ink was dry. And those who came to the book later, in 1945, or 1968, or as I did, in the early noughties, could not help but register a melancholy distance between Johnson’s optimistic predictions and the complex reality of what followed. But the distance is the point. I always find reading this book a useful corrective to the current habit of overlaying the present on the past, of demanding from our ancestors the same attitudes, arguments and aims we hold ourselves. The object of Black Manhattan, in Johnson’s own words, was to prove that the ‘Negro’ was a ‘creator as well as a creature’ – an aim made only more poignant by the fact that its necessity has long passed. But Johnson was born only eleven years after the Dred Scott Decision of 1857 (the law that established the ‘negro’ a non-citizen, being ‘so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect’) and his generation of Victorian black scholars and race cheerleaders took to heart the duty of proving the opposite case, as if a certain number of black doctors or black jockeys or black chorus girls or black public school teachers would secure equal citizenship on the basis of merit proved. Race cheerleading of this kind had a very particular psychology and set of received ideas. Whereas today ‘appropriation’ is often viewed as cultural theft, for Johnson’s generation, to be worthy of appropriation signalled you had something worth appropriating, and was therefore a matter of pride:
[The Negro’s] sacred music: the Spirituals; his secular music: the plantation songs, rag-time blues, jazz, and the work songs; his folk-lore: the Uncle Remus stories and other plantation tales; and his dances. All of these have gone into and, more or less, permeated our national life. Some of them, various forms of his secular music and his dances, have been completely taken over; they are no longer racial, they are wholly national. Even the Uncle Remus stories have been appropriated and appear, with slight adaptations, in the daily newspapers as popular bedtime stories.
Examples we consider now in a wholly egregious light, were – if we are to believe Johnson – experienced differently at the time, at least by some. (‘Negro programs are now so popular that there are quite a number of white broadcasters who are doing Negro “stuff”. The great favorites among these at present are Amos and Andy, whose imitations are so good that they are extremely popular with colored people.’) And though Johnson is rarely blind to painful caricature in the otherwise forgotten Broadway shows he preserves for posterity here, for him the fact that an African American had reached a career on the stage at all was what really counted. Throughout, there is an empathetic understanding of limited choices: he doesn’t judge harshly those actors who found themselves in demeaning or stereotypical roles – which was, in the final analysis, almost all of them. Instead, he registers their efforts, notes their popularity, and moves forward, to the next promising example of ‘progress’. His even tone will frustrate many readers, but there doesn’t seem much need for rhetorical inflation when the realities presented are so stark. Instead of micro-aggressions, his was the era of aggression-aggressions:
[Jack] Johnson has said that not only did he have to fight Jeffries, but that psychologically he also had to fight the majority of the thousands of spectators, many of whom were howling and praying for Jeffries to ‘kill the nigger’.
Sometimes, though, you wish he would notice that a critic like Mary Martin, writing for the Nation – and quoted at length by Johnson – only appreciates the genius of the great tap-dancer Bill Robinson if she can first establish that whatever genius a ‘Negro’ might possess must be ‘primal’ and ‘unconscious’. (‘For Bill Robinson does not know intellectually that the capacity for rhythmic coordination is the fundament, not only of art but all human achievement…’) Or that the great nineteenth-century British actress Mrs Kendal perhaps does not offer the great Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge the finest compliment when she writes: ‘Although a genuine black, he was quite preux chevalier in his manners to women.’ But in Johnson’s historical reality, this kind of sentimental paternalism was, relatively speaking, the good press. He collects plenty of examples of the bad:
A good part of the press and some literary fellows were industrious in fomenting the sentiment that the security of white civilization and white supremacy depended on the defeat of Jack Johnson. One of these writers […] wrote in the red-blooded style of the day that Jeffries was bound to win because, while he had Runnymede and Agincourt behind him, the Negro had nothing but the jungle; that the Negro would be licked the moment the white man looked him in the eye. This psychic manifestation of white superiority did not materialize…
It’s worth noting, too, that in his genteel way, Johnson anticipates some of the arguments of the present, understanding, for example, that the unique nineteenth-century success of black men in boxing and horse racing was not the result of some innate physical gift for punching and riding but the direct consequence of what we might now call a ‘structural’ issue: ‘He never gets so fair a chance in those forms of sport or athletics where he must be a member of a team as in those where he may stand upon his own ability as an individual. The difficulty starts with prejudice against his becoming a team member.’ To say nothing of the prejudice – or legal bar – against him entering a university, the front of a train carriage, or most of the professions.
Black Manhattan is an uneven book, not in quality but in the weight it lends to its different narrative strands. At first it appears to be a piece of broad social history, outdated by the standards of modern scholarship but still fascinating; it then morphs into an account of the legal, civic and criminal attacks on the concept of black citizenship from the mid-1600s to 1930 – but somewhere in the middle it disappears into a granularly detailed account of Broadway history, emerging only a few pages before the end to consider Harlem’s other great cultural legacies, literature and radical politics. But in all these disjointed sections there are things to treasure. It is wonderful to know the names of four of the eleven men who made up the original black population of Manhattan: Paul d’Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portuguese and John Francisco. It is always heartening to remember the greatest presidential bid ever floated: Victoria C. Woodhull for President with Frederick Douglass as her Vice, on the Equal Rights Party ticket. There are certainly more thorough accounts to be read on the history of slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction – and its subsequent dismantling – the development of Jim Crow, the scourge of lynching and the bloody racial massacres of the early twentieth century, but few provide Johnson’s intense subjectivity and almost transcendent, willed belief in the possibility that every bloody setback, every unpicking of the rights supposedly guaranteed in the constitution, could be overcome with committed resistance. Dutifully he records slave rebellions, legal challenges, successful cultural milestones, and so many individual acts of resilience and defiance. Even false dawns – like Marcus Garvey’s shakedown of Harlem pocketbooks, or Booker T. Washington’s depressing political accommodations – are never wholly condemned, only quietly mourned.
Sometimes you do get a hint of something like despair. I hear it particularly in Johnson’s recounting of a shameful order – issued during the First World War, by American authorities – for the instruction of French officers in their dealings with African American troops:
‘We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside of the requirements of the military service […] We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of (white) Americans. It is all right to recognize their good qualities and their services, but only in moderate terms, strictly in keeping with the truth.’ Out of such an order the great taboo could not be left: ‘Make a point of keeping the native cantonment population from “spoiling” the Negroes. (white) Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between white women and black men.’ All these ‘don’ts’ had a familiar, homelike ring.
