Introduction— African American Writers Respond to Poe

Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) did much to jumpstart scholarly investigations of the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe, Blackness, and Whiteness.¹ She brilliantly analyzes how nineteenth- and twentieth-century White authors in the United States portray people of African descent by means of "American Africanism," that is, the use of conceptions of Blackness to justify the conflation of being White with being American.² Morrison places special emphasis on Poe, of whom she states, "No early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe."³ Inspired by and taking its title from the chapter in Playing in the Dark that discusses Poe, the pathbreaking essay collection Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001), edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, addresses various racial matters in Poe's texts.⁴ This Poe Studies special feature has a related but markedly different focus, namely the ways in which African American writers acknowledge, borrow and appropriate from, signify on, and otherwise respond to Poe, as well as how they, in the process, respond to their own conditions. Part One comprises interviews with and original compositions by the creative writers Linda D. Addison, Gary Phillips, Valerie Wilson Wesley, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin; Part Two has essays on gothic literature, Afrofuturism, detective and mystery writing, and popular fiction by leading scholars M. Michelle Robinson, Isiah Lavender III, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Howard Rambsy II.

From the antebellum period to the present, Black authors in the United States have explicitly referred to, noted the influence of, and responded directly or indirectly to Poe and his writings, thereby being "particularly active in keeping Poe alive."⁵ This literary relationship can be traced at least as far back as February 10, 1854, when Ethiop (William J. Wilson) published a letter about the abolitionist collection Autographs of Freedom that mentioned Poe in Frederick Douglass's Paper.⁶ Richard Kopley contends that the relationship between Douglass and Poe began nearly a decade earlier, as he hears echoes of "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) in passages of the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.⁷ Critics have also noted similarities between Poe's ratiocinative tale "The Purloined Letter" (1844) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).⁸ Employed as a nanny by author, editor, and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis from the early 1840s through the 1850s after escaping to the North, Jacobs undoubtedly had access to Poe's writings in Willis's library, and, although it is unlikely, could conceivably have met Poe, whom Willis also employed in 1844 and 1845, at Willis's New York City residence.⁹ In Incidents, Linda Brent (Jacobs's pseudonym) essentially hides in plain sight for nearly seven years and engages in—and decisively wins—a "Competition in Cunning" with the man who formerly enslaved her: "Dr. Flint had not given me up. Every now and then he would say to my grandmother that I would yet come back, and voluntarily surrender myself; and that when I did, I could be purchased by my relatives, or anyone who wished to buy me. I knew his cunning nature too well not to perceive that this was a trap laid for me; and so all my friends understood it. I resolved to match my cunning against his cunning."¹⁰ In her "loophole of retreat," a place of concealment two hundred yards from Flint's home, Linda writes letters describing a fictitious life in New York City, which she arranges to have carried to the North and mailed back to North Carolina, to convince Flint to stop searching for her.

A half century after Poe's death and around the same time that the White media and academy in the United States were beginning to truly embrace him, Black writers from the post-Reconstruction era to the 1920s paid homage to, reworked, or otherwise evoked him. In the early 1890s, journalist T. Thomas Fortune, longtime editor of the New York Age and reputedly the author of several of Booker T. Washington's writings, published the sonnet "Edgar Allan Poe," expressing his "love" for "dark-browed Poe," the "wizard of the Orphic lyre": "Not one has dreamed, has sung, such songs as he, / Who, like an echo came, an echo went, / Singing, back to his mother element."¹¹ Charles Chesnutt presumably has Poe in mind in "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," published in The Conjure Woman (1899), as it involves an enslaved women turned into a "black cat" who suffers an unfortunate fate. Recognized as the first African American detective and mystery story, Pauline Hopkins's "Talma Gordon" (1900), featuring a locked-room murder mystery and a rapacious ship captain who kills his men to keep the location of pirate treasure to himself, signifies on "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Gold-Bug."¹² A year later, in Sutton E. Griggs's novel Overshadowed, the words "Thou Art the Man" appear on a placard near a murdered Black man; a brother and sister die nearly simultaneously (similarly to Roderick and Madeline Usher); and a widower mourning his lost love hears an ominous, Raven-like tapping at a window.¹³ While in high school in 1917 and 1918, Melvin Tolson, who later wrote favorably about Poe in his criticism, composed the stories "The Cabin's Victim" and "Wanderers in the Sierra," which his biographer Richard Farnsworth has described as "imitative" of Poe.¹⁴ In the Harlem Renaissance author Wallace Thurman's June 1926 Messenger short story "Grist in the Mill," a black bird comes to the window of and speaks a single word (beginning with an n) to an aristocratic White Southerner who has lost his wits after learning that he has received a life-saving transfusion of a Black man's blood.

African American writers' engagement with Poe altered in the 1940s and 1950s, as Poe and his writings became a shorthand for horror in the United States.¹⁵ The narrator-protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) famously begins his Prologue by declaring, "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."¹⁶ This statement at once links the experience of being Black in the United States to gothic fiction and pointedly distinguishes between them. Moreover, critics have written about the relationship between Richard Wright and Poe since the early 1970s, discussing the latter's influence on the former's early story "Superstition" (1930) and Wright's explicit mention of Poe in "How Bigger Was Born," included in Native Son (1940).¹⁷ Near the end of his life, James Baldwin referred to the Poe-Wright connection in his comments on the abductions and killings of at least thirty Black males in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981: "Richard Wright once wrote that if Edgar Allan Poe had been born in 20th Century America, he would not have had to invent horror; horror would have invented him. The statement sounded perhaps a trifle excessive, like a gifted actor's extra flourish. But it does not seem even remotely excessive now. On the contrary, it seems relatively mild, even kind. Certainly nothing in Poe begins to approximate the horror now reigning."¹⁸

Late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century African American poets acknowledged Poe's impact on their writing. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Maya Angelou talks of "enjoy[ing] and respect[ing] … Poe," referring to him to as "Eap" and "reciting the beautifully sad lines" of "Annabel Lee" when she was young.¹⁹ Over thirty years later, Yusef Komunyakaa likewise identified "Annabel Lee" as one of his "First Loves."²⁰ Similarly, as Melba Joyce Boyd notes, poet and longtime editor of the Broadside Press, Dudley Randall, spoke of his early affection for "The Raven."²¹ June Jordan, however, had an opposite experience, being forced by her father at a very young age to memorize and recite the verse of Poe and others she "could not understand," although she was able to appreciate the "music" of Poe and Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry.²²

Poe plays a conspicuous role in several African American novels appearing during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In addition to being mentioned in Gil-Scott Heron's The Vulture (1970), he factors in four of Ishmael Reed's books published between 1967 and 1976, namely The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Flight to Canada.²³ In the last of these, about a protagonist named Raven Quickskill, Reed asks, "Why isn't Edgar Allan Poe recognized as the principal biographer of [the Civil War]? Fiction, you say? Where does fact begin and fiction leave off? Why does the perfectly rational, in its own time, often sound like mumbo-jumbo? Where did it leave off for Poe, prophet of a civilization buried alive, where according to witnesses, people were often whipped for no reason." Anticipating one of Morrison's key contentions, he adds, "Poe says more in a few stories than all of the volumes by historians."²⁴ Likewise, Poe figures significantly in The Blood-worth Orphans (1977), whose author, Leon Forrest, said in a 1995 interview, "The writers who influenced me the most were writers who were in the first instance poets. Thomas Hardy was one of the first, along with Edgar Allan Poe, and then in college Faulkner and James Joyce."²⁵ In addition, as Howard Rambsy II and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, respectively, discuss in this special feature, Poe appears as the main character of Marc Olden's obscure marvel Poe Must Die (1978), and the "The Fall of the House of Usher" (along with The Inferno), provides the underpinning for Gloria Naylor's justly well-known Linden Hills (1985).²⁶

Since the 1990s, the relationship between Poe, credited with pioneering modern detective fiction, and authors of African American mystery writing has been particularly strong. Like Hopkins at the start of the century, several Black writers, including Walter Mosley, Valerie Wilson Wesley, Barbara Neely, and Gary Phillips have turned to detection to broach issues of race. When an audience member asked Mosley why each of the installments of his hugely popular Easy Rawlins series has a color in its title, he revealed that it was not a deliberate decision to do so until the third novel and stated about the second, "A Red Death is kind of like a send-up, you know—'Masque of the Red Death,' Edgar Allan Poe, the discoverer of the detective novel in the American world."²⁷ Wesley, whose series featuring the hard-boiled private eye and fiercely protective mother Tamara Hayle began shortly after Mosley's, acknowledges Poe's influence and her varied reactions to him in "Edgar and Me," found in the following pages. This special feature includes two other writers whose mysteries began appearing in the 1990s. Phillips, the creator of the detective and donut shop owner Ivan Monk, contributes an original short story connected with Poe set in the present day; meanwhile, M. Michelle Robinson's essay concerns the relationship between Poe and Neely, author of the Blanche White mystery series.

Two hundred years after Poe's birth, recent mainstream and science/speculative fiction by African American writers has contributed to keeping him in the public consciousness. The narrator of Paul Beatty's Slumberland (2008) invokes Poe, along with Leonardo da Vinci and Tupac Shakur, as a genius; like the Mona Lisa, says Ferguson W. Sowell (aka DJ Darky), "'The Raven,' 'How Do U Want It,' 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' 'Dear Mama,' 'California Love,'—each is a masterpiece."²⁸ Moreover, Mat Johnson's Pym (2010) rewrites Poe's only novel from an Afrofuturist perspective, as Isiah Lavender III discusses in his contribution. This special feature also includes two interviews conducted via Zoom in the latter half of 2021 while the pandemic was still raging. In the first, much-lauded Gothic and science fiction writer and poet Linda D. Addison speaks about Poe's influence on her and how she has responded to him since 2005 in a series of what she names "call and response" poems, one of which, "On My Own," appears here for the first time. In the second, the editors engage in a wide-ranging conversation (and at times "geek out" about Poe) with Maurice Carlos Ruffin, the title of whose 2019 novel, We Cast a Shadow, evokes Playing in the Dark's analysis of the "shadowy Africanist presence" in American society.

Early African American authors, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, T. Thomas Fortune, and Pauline Hopkins, paid homage to and/or riffed-off of Poe, a phenomenon that has continued to the present day. Following the Harlem Renaissance, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, and others engaged with Poe differently (and variously), regarding his writings as epitomizing American horror and horror in America. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison opened a new chapter about Poe by introducing the highly useful concept of American Africanism. Many Black writers and scholars have been profoundly disturbed by Poe's treatment of race, as evidenced in the contributions by Wesley and Lavender to this issue. The former reveals that her teen-age crush on Poe "ended badly." The latter not only states openly what scholars and writers have long avoided saying, namely that Poe "is racist," but also calls on people to "stop apologizing for" him. Despite finding The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym "blatantly racist," however, Lavender chooses to come to terms with Poe's longest fictional text because it is "such a fascinating novel." Moreover, as Lavender shows, Johnson reckons with and reworks Poe's novel in Pym, thereby creating an independent work of art in which he makes his own points about race in American literary history, specifically, and in United States history and society generally.²⁹ The creative writers and scholars in this special feature do not sugarcoat Poe's unapologetic enhancement of the horrors of slavery and antebellum racial inequities in his characterizations of Black and Brown peoples, and they evince an acute awareness of the profound disappointments of African Americans and their allies that occurred post-slavery with the institutionalizing of Jim Crow restrictions. At the same time, they acknowledge Poe's ground-breaking contributions to literature, particularly in the genres of poetry, horror, detection, and science fiction. Their responses to Poe's on-going influence on African American literary history and their own creativity reflect twenty-first-century perspectives and the evolving sensibilities of readers.