Notes
Notes All articles from the Christian Recorder, the Colored American, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Freedom’s Journal,andthe Provincial Freeman wereretrievedfromAccessibleArchives,Inc., African-AmericanNewspapers:The19thCentury, . Introduction: “By the Way, Where Did You Learn to Speak?” 1. The signers of this document were some of the “most respectable Characters in Boston,” including Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts; seven clergymen ; Thomas Hubbard, treasurer of Harvard College; and John Hancock, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The full text of this frequently quoted letter, “To the Publick,” prefacing Wheatley’s volume, reads as follows: “We whose names are under-written, do assure the world, that the poems specified in the following page, were (as we verily believe) written by PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few years since, brought an uncultivated barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the disadvantage of serving as a slave in a family in this town. She has been examined by some of the best judges, and is thought qualified to write them” (Wheatley, From Poems on Various Subjects, 216–17). 2. Wheatley, From Poems on Various Subjects, 214. 3. Proper, “Lucy Terry Prince,” 188. The obituary was originally published in the Greenfield (Mass.) Franklin Herald of August 21, 1821. 4. Proper, “Lucy Terry Prince,” 200. 5. Ibid., 201; Cushman, “Women Advocates,” 69. 6. In his study of the black narrative, From Behind the Veil, Robert B. Stepto observes that authenticating documents functioned to guarantee, verify, or legitimate the narrator and that narrator’s ability to relate his or her experiences of slavery. Such authentication thus assured the narrative’s acceptance as factual evidence. 7. Garrison, “Preface,” 6. 8. Ellison, Invisible Man, 251. The parallels between Ellison’s invisible man and Frederick Douglass are worth noting. The invisible man was employed in the service of the Brotherhood specifically because of his facility with language in much the same way that Douglass was used as an instrument of the antislavery movement, with William Lloyd Garrison as Brother Jack. Further, like Douglass, the invisible man escapes to the North and “freedom” where the Brotherhood attempts to control what he could say, just as Garrison’s attempt to censure Douglass led to Douglass’s separation from Garrison’s organization. 9. Lynette Clemetson, “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well,” New York Times, February 4, 2007, sec. 4, 1, 4. 10. See my essay “‘When and Where I Enter.’” 11. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 43. 12. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 1354a 6–11. 13. Brandt, “Literacy,” 392. 14. Nell Painter’s article on Truth’s sources of knowledge is instructive here. Painter considers the ways in which Truth interacted with and manipulated literate culture in the absence of conventional literacy skills. See chap. 2, n. 8, for further discussion of Painter’s article. 15. Royster, Traces of a Stream, 45. 16. Royster and Williams, “History in the Spaces Left”; Jarratt, “Race and Space”; Gold, “Nothing Educates Us Like a Shock”; Zaluda, “Lost Voices of the Harlem Renaissance.” 17. Glenn, “Rhetorical Education in America,” x. 18. Kates, “Literacy”; Schneider, “Freedom Schooling.” 19. Ellison quoted in Robert O’Meally, “Slavery’s Shadow,” 158. 20. Ferreira-Buckley and Halloran, “Editors’ Introduction,” xxii. 21. Cook, “Remarks,” 246. 22. Holmes, “Say What?,” 204. 23. Fahnestock and Secor, “Classical Rhetoric,” 107. 1. Free-Floating Literacy: Early African American Rhetorical Traditions 1. Piersen, Black Yankees, 40. 2. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 170. 3. Allen, Short Personal Narrative, 99–100. 4. Ellison quoted in O’Meally, “Slavery’s Shadow,” 158. 5. Ira Berlin, in Many Thousands Gone, reminds us of a distinction from early studies of slavery between societies with slaves and slave societies. In the former, slavery was one of many forms of labor, and slaves were “marginal to the central productive processes.” In slave societies, slavery was the chief means of economic production, and consequently slaveholders made up the ruling class (8). The categories I refer to here cut across these distinctions and invoke rhetorical communities among conclaves of the enslaved and between enslaved and free blacks, as, for example, in the case of Frederick Douglass, who, while in bondage, belonged to the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. 6. In Ways with Words, Heath cites the definition of A. B. Anderson, W. B. Teale, and E. Estrada (386n2). These authors characterize a literacy event as “any action sequence , involving one or more persons, in which the production or comprehension of print plays a role.” B. Moss considers the African American sermon...
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