Still Life, with Bones: A Response to Samuel Otter

Samuel Otter's compelling reading of Frank Webb's "still life" puts me in mind of another portrayal of African-American life in Philadelphia, also a kind of still life. In 1830, John F. Watson published his ambitious historical survey, Annals of Philadelphia, Being a Collection of Memoirs, & Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants from the Days of the Pilgrim Founders. Included in the book is a single chapter on black Philadelphians entitled "Negroes and Slaves," a brief chapter that quickly takes the reader from the time when Philadelphia was under "the curse of slavery" (479) to the then present, a time when "better views and feelings had long prevailed" (482).¹ Watson offers a rather curious documentation of black Philadelphia, beginning the chapter by taking the reader back to a seemingly remote time. "In the olden time," Watson begins, "dressy blacks and dandy colour'd beaux and belles, as we now see them issuing from their proper churches, were quite unknown." "Once," Watson continues, black Philadelphians "submitted to the appellation of servants, blacks, or negroes, but now they require to be called coloured people, and among themselves, their common call of salutation is—gentlemen and ladies. Twenty to thirty years ago, they were much humbler, more esteemed in their place, and more useful to themselves and others" (479). Although the chapter covers the abuses of slavery, suffice it to say that its tone fundamentally follows its opening paragraph. There is, of course, nothing terribly curious about a racist portrayal of African Americans in the 1830s. What gets curious, though, is the subsequent career of Watson's book. Watson published an expanded two-volume version of the book in 1860, and then a three-volume version in 1884. In all three versions, the chapter on "Negroes and Slaves" is exactly the same, aside from very minor typographical changes—each one, in 1830, 1860, and 1884 complaining that black Philadelphians were much more tolerable 20 to 30 years ago than in the present, each one advancing by 30 and then 24 years the time when African Americans in Philadelphia were humbler, more esteemed, and more useful to themselves and others.

As Otter notes, Webb's novel operates within the context of "the Philadelphia pattern of regressive advance," and as Watson's book makes clear, this is a pattern with its own textual history. Indeed, this pattern of regressive advance has been a central dynamic in the reception and evaluation of nineteenth-century African-American literature. In her 1994 commentary on the relative absence of scholarly attention to nineteenth-century African American women's literature, Frances Smith Foster notes that "overall . . . most scholars continue to repeat the assessment of Robert Bone in The Negro Novel in America: 'In the beginning was slavery, and it prevented the Word from becoming flesh. Leisure and education are the necessary conditions of literary activity, and the antebellum South did not recklessly indulge its slaves in either'" ("Introduction" xix). Although much has changed since 1994—including the increasing recognition that African-American writers cannot be gathered into a narrow homogeneous community whose ideological state is characterized in generalities about enslavement and freedom—one can still find in scholarship, teaching, and conversation evidence that the pattern of regressive advance still persists and that the presentation of the great majority of nineteenth-century African-American literary texts is still largely restricted to what amounts to a chapter on "Negroes and Slaves," surrounded by updates but still largely the same. What Foster wrote then remains sadly relevant today: "While it is customary now for survey courses to include one or two early works, they are generally given as evidence of a few extraordinary individuals' ability to read and write or as examples of abolitionist protest literature. The common interpretation is that in either case, they wrote primarily for white folks and that, as in the idea of the dog who walks on two legs, the wonder is not what or how well they wrote but that they wrote at all. Early African American literature, we continue to believe, is more valuable as artifact than...