Redefining African American Children's Literature before 1900

Growing acknowledgement of a diversity gap in children's book publishing and movements such as "We Need Diverse Books" (WNDB) make Who Writes for Black Children? a timely addition to scholarly dialogue about the intersection of early African American literary studies and children's literature studies. Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane's collection tangles with both the complications and the benefits of broadening definitions of "African American children's literature." In their introduction, Capshaw and Duane reject Kenneth Warren's controversial statement that antebellum writing by black Americans only retroactively became African American literature (xvi). Instead, they characterize African American children (as well as adults) before 1900 as literary creators, consumers, interpreters, and disseminators and reject depictions of children's literature as incomplete or primitive (x, xxiv). Their viewpoints are echoed by the contributors, many of whom refer to other chapters in the book, inviting cross-textual dialogue unusual for an edited collection. For example, author Angela Sorby, with her notion of "conjuring" readers (4), or "creat[ing] … the conditions that make literate agency possible" (6), is mentioned by the editors in their introduction, as well as by nearly half of the other contributors in the collection. While scholars might read only one chapter, the frequent connections between chapters invite them to peruse the whole book.

The first three analytical chapters dwell on Sorby's conjuring of black children as readers/consumers. They lay the foundation for the entire analytical essay section which, as a whole, is one of the book's most notable contributions: combining "African American," "children's," and "before 1900," as there is "startlingly little study of African American children's literary

culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (x), with the exception of Michelle Martin's Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children's Pictures, 1845-2002. Other seminal recent works are limited to literature for adult rather than child consumers (Eric Gardner's Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature) or focus on contemporary works (Rudine Sims Bishop's Free within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children's Literature) rather than those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These first three chapters challenge some critics' perception of African American children's literature before 1900 as merely "seeds" (Bishop, Free 21); instead, Sorby, Courtney Weikle-Mills, and Karen Chandler portray several young poets as fully developed and worthy of study. In the first chapter, Sorby confronts readership issues with nineteenth-century poetry, in particular its celebration of white growth and frequent depiction of African Americans as temporally stagnant (4). She analyzes the writing of Lucy Skipwith, Daniel Alexander Payne, and Ann Plato, as well as poetry in autograph/friendship albums, exploring how each conjures its readers, as such writers struggled to secure an audience. Payne's excerpt, for example, was crafted essentially without readers: South Carolina law made it illegal to teach an African American to read or write; nevertheless, Payne envisioned young readers "bursting with potential" (10). In "Free the Children: Jupiter Hammon and the Origin of African American Children's Literature," Weikle-Mills analyzes the poetry of Jupiter Hammon, the first black author to publish for African American children. Her chapter is especially valuable, especially in the wake of the 2013 discovery of Hammon's unpublished poem "An Essay on Slavery" that confirms Hammon's rejection of slavery and his "connection of black liberty with childhood"; previously, Hammon was believed to repeat pro-slavery rhetoric or support change "in a coded way" (23). Significantly, Weikle-Mills is only the third scholar to publish a close reading of Hammon's children's poetry. Weikle-Mills's chapter "contends that Hammon's specific vision of childhood … enabled him to advocate for a moderate, palatable, and pious form of freedom that did not depend on violent revolution" (22-23), which is supported by his An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley. Hammon's ideal reader...