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Foreword
- Northwestern University Press
- Chapter
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Foreword Scholars believe that as many African slaves were sold across the Sahara Desert, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean as crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Think of it as the “other slave trade.” One of these slaves—who would be named Abram Gannibal by his new master—was born in the country today called Cameroon, sold into slavery, and taken across the desert to Constantinople . In 1704, when he was about seven or eight, he was purchased by Peter the Great. Under Peter’s protection and tutelage, Gannibal became a broadly educated and well-traveled man; Voltaire himself called him “the dark star of the Enlightenment.” Despite exile to Siberia—and, later, forced retirement under Peter III—Gannibal would ultimately rise to the rank of chief military engineer in the Russian Army, along the way fathering eleven children with Christina Regina von Schöberg, of German and Swedish extraction. In 1799, their granddaughter, Nadezhda, would give birth to a son she called Alexander. For over a century and a half, Alexander Pushkin has been a shadowy if dramatic presence in African American letters, a resonant symbol of all that a person of African descent could achieve if his or her talents were unfettered by the confining strictures of racism, and simultaneously an abidingly potent sign of the sheer absurdity of America’s bizarre “one-drop rule.” The great artist Quincy Jones has announced plans to make a film about Pushkin for this very reason. Pushkin has enjoyed pride of place in every textbook of “the world’s great men of color,” as the journalist and historian J. A. Rogers put it. Had Pushkin, the great-grandson of a black African, been born in the United States rather than in Russia, he would most likely have been a slave or, at best, a second-class citizen. His great-grandfather, accompanying Peter the Great to Paris, became friends with Montesquieu, Diderot, and Voltaire, but one is forced to wonder how the father of the American Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, would have regarded him? Would Jefferson have encouraged a Monticello-born Pushkin to write, to excel, indeed to found America’s national literature based on a rich and emerging vernacular? Pushkin would xi have become Jefferson’s house servant at most, perhaps learning how to keep books, sort the mail, and select and pour the wine. “What proportion of America’s collective artistic and intellectual genius ,” black thinkers since Frederick Douglass have exclaimed, “has been lost or underdeveloped, because even the slightest touch of the tar brush trumps talent every time?” Elevated to the status of a black icon by the American abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier in 1847, Pushkin was heralded as a beacon of hope in the long dark night of slavery, the shining star of “The Negro Can Be Elevated” movement, which excavated and held high “key noble specimens” of Negro achievement in the antislavery version of the great man and great woman school of black history. In 1940, when no less a skeptic than W. E. B. DuBois decided to publish an ostensible entry from his ill-fated Encyclopedia of the Negro, he chose “Alexander Pushkin” for the topic of his article. Pushkin demonstrated all that a Negro could be: a cultured aristocrat, a man of letters, indeed the father of a national literature. By the time of the Harlem Renaissance, a veritable kitchen cabinet of superstar mulattoes and impeccable black Africans and Americans could be summoned whenever someone needed to show that persons of African descent could achieve at the highest levels in the arts. Think of it as the “Beethoven was black” school of history, even if Beethoven, sadly, did not really make the cut. (Nor, for the record, did Cleopatra or Hannibal.) But Juan Latino; Beethoven’s sometime friend and rival, George Bridgetower; and Alexander Dumas did. And of this group, no one informed the African American imagination more than Pushkin, the tragic Romantic hero of the American abolitionist movement. Pushkin’s great-grandfather first appears in the African American popular imagination in 1828, in an article published in Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper. Whittier’s longer, widely cited essay (with and without attribution) appeared in the National Era in 1847, two years following the publication of Frederick Douglass’s genre-defining autobiographical slave narrative. The timing was not accidental; as Anne Lounsbery suggests in an exceptionally fascinating essay, Pushkin was Douglass’s doppelganger, the handsome, dashing man of letters, whose personal...