Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America

Introduction

 Introduction “By the Way, Where Did You Learn to Speak?” For centuries, curious observers have asked black speakers and writers, “Where did you learn to use the English language so effectively?” Determined to answer this question, eighteen of Boston’s leading citizens put Phillis Wheatley through an extensive oral examination and pronounced her, even though “brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa,” sufficiently “qualified to write” her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects.1 The resulting papers of authentication , as one introduction to Wheatley suggests, “helped establish a convention, a kind of interracial literary etiquette, that white readers soon came to expect when encountering an African American author.”2 Although no records suggest that Lucy Terry Prince was ever called before an examining board, a certain amount of skepticism is associated with accounts of her rhetorical acumen and the situations in which it was demonstrated. Prince, author of “Bars Fight” (1746), considered to be the first extant poem by an African American, was taken from Africa in 1730 and sold to a Deerfield, Massachusetts, innkeeper. She married Abijah Prince and purchased her freedom in 1756; they moved in 1780 to Guilford, Vermont, with their six children and settled on 100 acres of newly acquired land. Her obituary includes the claim that “the fluency of her speech captivated all around her” and that she “was not destitute of instruction and education.”3 According to some accounts, Prince used her rhetorical abilities to argue against the denial of admission of her son into Williams College “in a ‘3-hour speech’ before the trustees, quoting abundantly text after text from the scriptures to support her claims for his reception.” David Proper explores several problems in trying to authenticate this event, including the fact that candidates for admission to Williams were   Introduction required to know Latin and Greek, or French, knowledge the school in Guilford would have been unable to provide Prince’s son, although he could have been privately schooled.4 A second rhetorical performance attributed to Prince is that she argued to protect their Vermont land claim before Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase of Maryland in 1796. Chase is reported to have given Prince the compliment that she “made a better argument than he had ever heard from a lawyer in Vermont.” In her article “Women Advocates before the Supreme Court,” Claire Cushman places Prince at the front of a long line of women Supreme Court advocates. Cushman concludes that Prince probably argued before Justice Chase when he was riding circuit in Vermont in 1796, during a period when Supreme Court justices also presided over circuit courts—still a remarkable accomplishment.5 The questions surrounding Prince have had more to do with the occasions of her rhetorical performances than with her rhetorical skills. The authenticating documents attached to slave narratives attesting to an author’s literacy represent later attempts to answer this question.6 In his preface to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, William Lloyd Garrison wrote that Douglass had written it “in his own style, and according to the best of his ability,” and that it was “entirely his own production.”7 These same kinds of supporting documents, white-authored texts, like Garrison’s letter attesting to Douglass’s character and, just as important, to his literacy, surround the narratives of Harriet Jacobs and others for whom their readers needed the authentication of white society. In 2002, literacy questions swirled around authorship of the recently discovered manuscript “The Bondwoman’s Narrative By Hannah Crafts A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina.” The central literacy question then was that if the manuscript is indeed autobiographical, how did the author develop the rhetorical skills to write her story? Most of the essays in the collection In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on “The Bondwoman’s Narrative” attempt in some way to answer this literacy-based question. A twentieth-century fictional version of this question appears in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947) when the protagonist, having incited a riot by addressing a crowd at the scene of a Harlem eviction, flees the scene followed by Brother Jack, a member of the Brotherhood. When Brother Jack catches up with him, he puzzles, “You know, I haven’t heard such an effective piece of eloquence since the days when I was in—well, in a long time. You aroused them so quickly to action, I don’t understand how you managed it. If only some of our speakers could have listened!” He goes on finally to...