Early African American Print Culture

17. John Marrant Blows the French Horn: Print, Performance, and the Making of Publics in Early African American Literature

c h a p t e r 1 7 John Marrant Blows the French Horn: Print, Performance, and the Making of Publics in Early African American Literature elizabeth maddock dillon Performing Conversion Sometime late in the year of 1769, John Marrant walked into an evangelical meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, where the famous Reverend George Whitefield was holding forth: Marrant’s intention was to blow his French horn in the midst of the meeting in order to disrupt the sermon of the controversial Methodist preacher. Marrant, then fourteen years old, was a free black young man of tremendous musical talents who had been incited to this prank by a companion. However, as he lifted the French horn off of his shoulder, jostling for room among the throng of bodies gathered to hear Whitefield, Marrant was suddenly struck down by the religious exhortation of Whitefield: rather than lifting the horn to his lips as he had intended, he abruptly found himself lying speechless and senseless on the ground. His revival from this stupor, which occurred over the course of the next several days, unfolds as a tale of religious awakening, culminating in the moment when “the Lord was pleased to set [his] soul at perfect liberty.” This account of Marrant’s conversion, which appears in A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785), is striking for a number of rea- John Marrant 319 sons. First, it is one of the earliest documents in print that is authored by an African American. Second, it places us within a familiar scene (religious revival ) before a famous white man (George Whitefield), but the scene is narrated from the unfamiliar perspective of a free black youth. Third, central to the scene is an unusual and somehow excessively present material object: namely, the French horn. The French horn is an object that we are unlikely to readily place in the hands of the eighteenth-century black youths of our historical imagination. But precisely the thingly, material quality of the French horn (an object that attracts attention to itself—one with sinuous curves, reflective ambit, deep and penetrating tones within) and its striking presence at the center of the scene lends a certain allure and potency to the conversion narrative. Indeed, in a dismissive review of Marrant’s narrative, which appeared in a London periodical, the role of the French horn is the specific subject of mockery: the review reports that Marrant “had strolled into a meeting house where Mr. W. was preaching, in order to disturb the meeting by blowing a French-horn; but was himself struck to the ground by a blast from the spiritual trumpet.” The mirroring relation between the literal French horn and the figurative spiritual trumpet is presented here as de trop—a sign that the narrative as a whole is too “glibly” constructed, too “enlivened by the marvellous” to be of serious interest to readers. The French horn is too much of a scene stealer, according to this review, and its presence turns Marrant’s conversion narrative into an orchestrated performance of Methodist drama rather than a legitimate account of religious experience. Given the oddity of the French horn as an object with a starring role in a conversion narrative as well as the difficulty of interpreting this object as a sign of the force of the narrative, or the opposite—that is, of the narrative’s originality or its excessively codified nature—it seems worth asking: why is there a French horn in the middle of John Marrant’s conversion narrative? Further, were one to begin by placing this object—the French horn—rather than the subject—John Marrant—at the forefront of an analysis of this text, might such a move enable a new reading of the Narrative and of its stature as one of the first texts of early African American print culture? My aim in this essay is to propose such a reading of Marrant’s Narrative, as well as, more broadly, to propose a new account of the public sphere by way of an analysis of the performative dimensions of early African American print culture. Speci fically, I aim to delineate the workings of an embodied public sphere in contrast to existing accounts of a print public sphere characterized by rational 320 elizabeth maddock dillon critical thought and disembodied authorship...