"Face Zion Forward": First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798 (review)

Both students and scholars interested in early Black Atlantic writers and culture should welcome "Face Zion Forward": First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798, edited by Joanna Brooks and John Saillant, despite its shortcomings. The anthology comprises eight un-annotated works by John Marrant, David George, Boston King, and Prince Hall. Four of the longer texts are already available in reliably annotated scholarly editions (Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr's Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century [1995] and Vincent Carretta's Unchained Voices [1997]): A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant (London, 1785), Marrant's A Sermon Preached on the 24th of June 1789, Being the Festival of St. John the Baptist (Boston, 1789), An Account of the Life of Mr. David George, from Sierra Leone in Africa (London, 1793–1797), and Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher, Written by Himself (London, 1798). Another sermon attributed to Marrant and two by Hall have also appeared in modern editions, but not in fully annotated versions.

The extent of Marrant's involvement in the creation of one of the sermons included in "Face Zion Forward," however, is arguable. Brooks and Saillant acknowledge that the 24 June 1789 Sermon may not be completely Marrant's own creation: "Although it is likely that Prince Hall assisted Marrant in composing portions of the Sermon most concerned with Masonic history, the text also reflects Marrant's preacherly concern with the gathering and redemption of postslavery communities" (18). But the questions of authorial attribution and possible editorial intervention are more vexed in this case than they indicate. The Reverend Jeremy Belknap, a historian who helped Prince Hall in 1788 petition for the release from slavery of three kidnapped free Black Bostonians, noted in St. George Tucker's published copy of the Sermon that "Prince Hall claims the whole of this [co]mposition as his own except the [b]eginning + the end." And writing to another friend, Ebenezer Hazard, on 19 September 1789, Belknap remarked that although he did not hear the sermon, "those who did say it is much improved since the delivery. This I can easily believe from what I observed myself when I heard [Marrant] preach."

Inclusion of Marrant's Journal in "Face Zion Forward" enables readers to judge for themselves the likelihood that the author of the presumably unedited Journal also wrote the polished rhetoric of the Sermon. The previously unavailable A Journal of the Reverend John Marrant, from August the 18th, 1785, to the 16th of March, 1790 (London, 1790) is the centerpiece of "Face Zion Forward." Publication of this text with Marrant's frequently reprinted Narrative and two published sermons justifies the editors' claim that Marrant's "collected writings appear together here for the first time" (10), and in effect creates an autobiography of most of his life.

The general Introduction to "Face Zion Forward" offers sound historical and biographical contexts for the individual texts that follow, none of which is introduced separately. The editors also make a strong case for the possibility of recognizing a Black consciousness beneath the veil of a White amanuensis. The critical framework offered in the introduction is less reliable and useful, however, because the editors approach the works from an anachronistically modern sense of racial identities, distorting or overlooking the more theoretically nuanced and historically sophisticated approaches found, for example, in Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic:Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and Roxann Wheeler's The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (2000). One might also quibble that the writers anthologized here were not "the first" of their kind; to consider them so dismisses the achievements of such Black Atlantic predecessors as Briton Hammon, Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, Francis Williams, and Ignatius Sancho.

The biggest shortcoming of "Face Zion Forward" is the editors' decision "to restrict all scholarly and interpretive mediation to the introduction" in...