American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman

5. Mourning of the Disprized: African Americans and Elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln

   Mourning of the Disprized: African Americans and Elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln When I think of my own griefs, I remember theirs. —  As part of the mourning culture of black Americans, elegy was also part of the racialized drama of sorrow and resistance that characterized American culture more generally and that took shape in related genres like the eulogy, the funeral sermon, the spiritual, and even the minstrel song. An occasional form, commonly devoted to detailing its subjects’ lives and connections, elegy sometimes helped to restore a sense of the severed affiliations from which blacks suffered disproportionately. But the forced unsettlement of African-American life and the deracination of slave experience especially meant that particularizing details were frequently difficult to discover or preserve. Many elegies for African Americans are perforce anonymous and typifying. They often resemble elegies for Native Americans in this way—especially those written by whites. To a much greater extent than Native Americans, however, African Americans wrote and published elegies of their own in English, helping to determine the cultural role that mourning would play in the oppositional consciousness of both blacks and whites. From the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, AfricanAmerican elegy was a challenge to dominance written under the sign of MOURNING OF THE DISPRIZED  lamentation. The challenge was sometimes modest and sometimes militant , and it was taken up as well by white poets, who, like their black counterparts, wrote elegies for subjects of both races, contributing to a complex history of identification and remembrance. It is a history of political radicalism but also of faith in transcendence, a history of the idealization of mourning as well as the struggle for emancipation. Elegies by and for slaves commonly generated sympathy and support for the combative, sometimes violent cause of abolitionism. But they also helped articulate an ethos of renunciation, repeatedly discovering in death an end to otherwise insoluble problems of existence. These problems were not limited to the physical and psychological trauma suffered by slaves but included the melancholy and rage of traumatized white and free black populations as well. For slaves, to publicly mourn at all was boldly to consecrate ties of feeling and of blood that often lay under the heaviest interdictions. Yet despite repressive circumstances, American slaves cultivated and sustained various deathways across generations. Among them were the nighttime funerals favored by slaves both in the South and in the British West Indies. Customary though they were from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, such funerals were regularly suspected of being pretexts for the organization of rebellion. From Antigua to Virginia to New York, periodic legislative acts restricted or prohibited slave funerals with the hope of forestalling insurrection. In some cases, it was probably a wise precaution; Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion in Virginia in , for example, is said to have gained momentum from a meeting held at a slave child’s funeral. Whites who attended such funerals heard black mourners sing English hymns. A favorite was Isaac Watts’s “Hark from the tombs a doleful sound” (sung also at Washington’s funeral). Whites in attendance also heard, often quite uncomprehendingly, samples of the oral heritage of slave songs that would come to be known as spirituals . Famously linked with “sorrow” by both Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, the songs—transcribed and collected during and after the Civil War—are richly varied in theme and mood. Yet the impression of their sorrowfulness—their apparent reflection of, in Paul Gilroy’s words, “the consciousness of the slave as involving an extended  MOURNING OF THE DISPRIZED act of mourning” —has been hard to dislodge, even though scholars such as Saidiya Hartman have stressed their “complexity and opacity” and have discouraged treating them as “an index or mirror of the slave condition.” Some of the force of these warnings derives from the way in which the songs were collected and preserved, a haphazard and uneven process conducted largely by whites who often lacked basic transcription skills. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the earliest compilers, apologized for his poor approximations of dialect, saying, “I could get no nearer.” He admitted to being “bewildered” by one song, and he found another to have “a kind of spring and lilt to it, quite indescribable by words.” Yet, despite these admitted shortcomings, Higginson’s descriptions of the songs as they were sung in the army camps of...