Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (review)

In William Penn’s and Thomas Holme’s 1683 map, Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, a grid charts the streets that link the Schuylkill to the Delaware; the east-west parallel lines comb across the north-south parallel lines, making a city of right angles. The city’s original geometry mirrors the ideals Philadelphia is designed to symbolize: rationality, order, uniformity, and equality. As a symbolic space, it is an “experiment in freedom”; the actual city space functions as a laboratory where citizens test and resist the parameters of African American freedom. Somewhere between the experiment and the laboratory, between the abstract and the actual Philadelphia, between freedom and slavery, a gap opens and fills with stories. Like the interletter space distinguishing “free man” from “freeman,” the problems of betweenness and the narratives that document them are shaped by race, space, and politics.

In Philadelphia Stories, Samuel Otter’s beautifully written and researched analysis of stories from the gap, he identifies Philadelphia as a “literary place” characterized by “positional antagonisms” (17). For instance, rather than finding themselves included within freedom, African American Philadelphians are beside, beneath, behind freedom—with a contentious proximity (162–65). Otter’s literary Philadelphia, extending from the New Republic to the Civil War, emerges through repeated images and events particular to the geographic and symbolic city, shaping a localized literary form—Philadelphia stories—characterized by instability, experiment, and excess, but previously unexplored by critics. Otter defines Philadelphia stories as a literary tradition that depicts the “volatile freedom” of life for African Americans and that stems from the incongruity between what the city promises and what it delivers.

Introducing a literary tradition or form that has escaped critical attention, Otter includes fictional and nonfictional works by familiar authors, including Charles Brockden Brown, Mathew Carey, Hugh Henry Bracken-ridge, Robert Montgomery Bird, George Lippard, Martin Delany, and Herman Melville. Alongside this analysis, he traces Philadelphia stories in lesser-known texts that would have been more widely read when originally published, such as works by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, John Beauchamp Jones, Sarah Josepha Hale, and others. Unexpected and beguiling items such as Edward W. Clay lithographs, silhouettes from Charles Wilson Peale’s Museum, a volume (including images) commemorating the burning of Philadelphia Hall in 1838, even a recipe for a boneless roast turkey, broaden and deepen Otter’s already rich archive. Because of his finesse with an impressive catalogue of texts, the reader can easily maneuver from a novel to a recipe, to a riot account, to a still-life painting (as in the discussion of The Garies and Their Friends, for instance), climbing deeper into the dimensions of a Philadelphia story without losing one’s way.

As Otter explains and the diversity of texts he studies suggests, Philadelphia stories have not been studied together or acknowledged as a literary tradition because they appear to resist coherence. They have different authors, different formats, different objectives, so scholarship on Brown or the middle class or reform organizations cannot encompass them. But Otter’s investigation of Philadelphia stories is all of these and more. What seems to make each text quirky actually connects it to the rest; they share distorted surfaces or uneven topographies that, as Otter argues, represent volatility, instability, vulnerability, revolution, violence. Otter reads the trope of distorted surfaces as an emblem of incongruence between the “experiment” that invites the rupture of racial boundaries and the prejudice that partitions life in Philadelphia for African Americans, distorting social existence. In the literature, the city’s surfaces (doors, walls, streets, floors) and an individual’s surfaces (skin, clothing, speech, gestures) can be read as analogues of the barriers that grant or thwart African American access to freedom. For instance, an African American woman, as a free citizen of Philadelphia, can perform her free middle-class status by walking down Chestnut Street, but to white citizens resistant to racial equality, her race distorts her dress, her carriage, and her speech...