'A' is for Afro-American: A Primer on the Study of American Literature

FRANKLIN 53 H. BRUCE FRANKLIN ?' IS FOR AFRO-AMERICAN: A PRIMER ON THE STUDY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE All classes in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second. The bourgeoisie always shuts out proletarian literature and art, however great their artistic merit. Mao Tse-Tung, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, 1942. The situation of the slave is, in every particular, incompatible with the cultivation ofhis mind. It would not only unfit him for his station in life, and prepare him for insurrection, but would be found wholly impracticable in the performance of the duties ofa labourer. . . . Inert and unintellectual, he exhibits no craving for knowledge; and prefers, in his hows ofrecreation, indulgence in his rustic pleasures to the pursuit of intellectual improvement. . . the negro never suffers from the thirst for knowledge . Voloptuous and indolent, he knows few but animal pleasures; is incapable ofappreciating the pride and pleasure of conscious intellectual refinement . . . . The dance beneath the shade surpasses, for him, the groves of the academy. The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists, 1836. The year is 1833. A snowy-haired epicure in his mid-fifties dines alone at a small table on the veranda. He is an educated professional man, the physician of the region, a husband, a father, and the owner of a fine residence in town and several farms. His gray eyes lift as a fifteen-year-old slave begins to clear the dishes. "Linda, instead of doing that, stay here and shoo these flies." "Yes, Master." "Linda, I have wanted to make you happy, and I have been repaid with the basest ingratitude. How dare you tell me you love a nigger! Do you know that I have a right to do as I like with you-that I can kill you, if I please? Do you think any other master would bear what I have borne from you? Many masters would have kUled you on the spot. How would you like to be sent to jail for your insolence?" This scene is reconstructed from facts and dialogue found in a mid-nine- 54 MINNESOTA REVIEW teenth century work of American literature, a work written by one of the two participants. It was not the master who turned out to be the literary artist. Only one piece of his writing survives, the notice he had posted throughout the region when Linda ran away, and even that we must get from her book: $300 REWARD! Ran away from the subscriber, an intelligent, bright, mulatto girl, named Linda, 21 years of age. Five feet four inches high. Dark eyes, and black hair inclined to curl; but it can be made straight. Has a decayed spot on a front tooth. She can read and write, and in all probability will try to get to the Free States. AU persons are forbidden, under penalty of the law, to harbor or employ said slave.1 We do know that the doctor also wrote wildly obscene notes to her, but these, unfortunately, have not been preserved. He apparently did not record his own view of slavery. We may assume that it coincided with that articulated by the most eminent literati of the slave states, men such as William Gilmore Simms, still touted today as the greatest writer produced by the Old South, who penned eloquent arguments proving that "there are few people so very well satisfied with their conditions as the negroes,—so happy of mood, so jocund, and so generally healthy and cheerful."2 This is not the view of the young slave woman, alternately repelling her master and the flies hovering around him. She was able to evade his grasp, although it meant hiding for seven years in an attic crawl space less than three feet high in her grandmother's shed, an imprisonment which crippled her limbs. Then she escaped to the "free" states. In 1861 she published, under the pen name Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl, the book in which her master goes down to posterity. Unlike the novels and romances of William Gilmore Simms and most of the other literary...