On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay by Cheryl A. Wall (review)

This review was completed and submitted to the journal before I learned of Cheryl Wall's passing on April 4, 2020. Like so many in the field, I owe an enormous debt to her pioneering scholarship and institutional leadership. As we mourn the loss of her warmth, generosity, and guidance, we are also reminded that Dr. Wall's intellectual legacy will always be with us. Through her works she extended our vision and changed our words, indelibly enriching the historical and theoretical study of the tradition.

—JM

Toni Morrison once described the precious and vulnerable space in which we attempt to read and write as "a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war." That state of peace, she observed, is paradoxically one of solitude and communion, "the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one," as she put it with characteristic elegance. Cheryl A. Wall's On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay, reminds us that Morrison is not an outlier so much as a consummate example of a self-fashioning essayistic tradition deeply rooted in African American literary history. Yet systematic and dedicated scholarly treatments of the essay as a black literary practice have been surprisingly rare. Indeed, until now only two full monographs published a decade apart, Gerald Early's pioneering study, Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Context (Ecco, 1993), and Cheryl Butler's The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence (Routledge, 2003), have been devoted to the subject. Given this paucity, Wall's book remedies a terrible lack and also inevitably sets a new benchmark, one that will hopefully spur a wave of studies and renewed specialist interest while providing instructors with an essential and much-needed pedagogical resource.

Historically speaking, the essay has tended to be democratic in its ambitions but typically aristocratic in its rhetorical assumptions as well as the material conditions that underwrite its appearance. Montaigne's celebrated Essais, his "attempts" at capturing an ordinary experience that could speak to the common life of others, drew on a humanistic culture that flourished among the European elite and eventually became a privileged instrument and vehicle of Enlightenment thought. In the United States, the essay received an original impress and a new mandate from Emerson, who spoke of the individual sovereignty of the American scholar at Harvard in 1837. But across the Charles in the section of Boston's Beacon Hill known then as "Nigger Hill," David Walker was also radically revising the form, although his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World emphasized not the grandeur of encompassing all knowledge within the self, but the horrors of mass ignorance and the collective abjection of his fellow black Americans. Like Emerson and the other luminaries of New England, Walker was keen to use the unruly freedom and individuated voice of the essay to impart new vigor to society, to establish new relations among mankind, to make the essay a revolutionary instrument of consciousness: they have fed different, if also overlapping, rhetorical and literary traditions in the U. S. ever since. Emerson justly remains a touchstone for all readers interested in the essay. But how often do we hear about Walker's contributions to the form?

What happened, we might ask, when the American essay was invested with the voices of persons whose very humanity was deemed suspect at best, and all too often simply denied outright? From Walker's Appeal and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" in the hands of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, gathered in Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider or Alice Walker's In Search...