African American Writers and Classical Tradition by William W. Cook and James Tatum (review)

This book is valuable nearly as much for what the authors allow that they cannot say as for what they can. They describe in considerable detail the great variety and quality of African-American literature; they cannot, however, offer any African-American literary figure before the middle of the last century who wrote any substantial work based on sustained contact with an ancient model, anything comparable to the Anglo-American Robert Montgomery Byrd’s Gladiator, John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, or Sol Yurick’s The Warriors. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the general implementation of the classical world was not wide, and when present generally not deep, African-American authors are even less wide and less deep. Thus the bulk of this book provides extensive and useful biography and synopses, while with the help of extrapolation and assumption, perhaps 20 percent at most deals directly with the classical tradition, chiefly yielding parallels but little influence. From these scant leavings the authors have produced a clearly written, deeply researched, and highly readable history of an essential area of American literature, a landmark contribution to the study of the classical tradition in America.

The pervasive influence of the classics in prerevolutionary culture extended to the name (but little else) of the first published African–American, Jupiter Hammon (not mentioned in this book). The most classical aspect of Phillis Wheatley’s justly famous “To Maecenas” (addressed not to a patron but a poet), is its title. In the nineteenth century, translation replaced erudition, as many educated folk learned of ancient characters, incidents, and even rhetorical structures at second hand, as the Great Emancipator himself demonstrated at Gettysburg. The authors show that Frederick Douglass manifested the periodicity or tricola of Cicero but not that he had read Tully or Quintilian, any more than Lincoln had read the Epitaphioi. The reported remark of John C. Calhoun, who himself had studied Greek at Yale, “that if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man,” directly goaded academically and socially ambitious men like W. E. B. Du Bois and William S. Scarborough and presumably others of the “Talented Tenth.” Yet true assimilation of antiquity remained elusive. Cook and Tatum describe Du Bois’s “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” an allegorical conflation of the virgin huntress with the city of Atlanta, as “ultimately no more classical in spirit than it is Christian in morality” (123). Jessie Fauset’s Chinaberry Tree may have incest, recognition scenes, and tragic pretensions, but it has no connection to Sophocles (137). Countee Cullen wrote a poem on Icarus in high school. Ralph Ellison has been credited with an “Odyssean voice” in The Invisible Man, based largely on inexplicit connections to the Cyclops: a doctor with three eyes (the third his head mirror; 158, 191), a simile that ends chapter 5 (158), and among other items, the hero Bigger Thomas’s assertion, “I am nobody but myself,” which is not exactly Odysseus’ response to Polyphemus. And so it goes: the inscrutable Melvin Tolson is comparable to Pindar because no one understands him either. Tolson knew some Vergil but not Pindar (216). Satirists like the conservative George S. Schuyler and Ishmael Reed have a few characters and incidents with parallels to the classics, but these are not directly derived from them.

It is not until page 292 (and the year 1974) that we find a deliberate use of an ancient source, the Theseus tale, in Fran Ross’s Oreo. Athens is New York; Oreo is Theseus; and other characters are Amazons, Hippolytus, Procrustes, and so forth. Rita Dove is the first first-class author who explicitly sets out classical models, and mention can now be made of the 2009 Georgics-influenced inaugural poem of Elizabeth Alexander...