Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature

6. Miltonic Soundscapes in Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South

229 6 Miltonic sounDscaPes in anna Julia cooPer’s a Voice from the south In keeping with the proto-womanist spirit of tempered assertiveness , Anna Julia Cooper, another prominent member of Milton’s black sisterhood, performs a series of rebellious vocal exercises with Milton in her 1892 publication, A Voice from the South.1 Whereas Harper rebelliously engages Milton mostly through a subversive appropriation of literary form and theme, Cooper actually vocalizes her knowledge of the epic poet’s figures, rhetoric, and literary persona through a range of allusive fragments. A Voice from the South is a unique text in the sense that its contents are comprised of eight essays that Cooper sets to a compositional score of literary music. Cooper divides these eight essays into two sections. One section appears under the heading “Soprano Obligato,” while the second boasts the title “Tutti ad Libitum.” Soprano obligato is Latin in derivation and is used in music to identify an indispensible component of accompaniment that is an integral part of a musical score. Because soprano, derived from supra, meaning “superior” or “highest above,” typically refers to female voices, Cooper appropriates the musical term as a metonym for women. Considered alongside one another and according to Cooper’s womanist logic, the term soprano obligato communicates the indispensability of women and their voices in public discourse. 230 Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt The term tutti ad libitum extends Cooper’s subversive interest in the womanist politics of skilled musicianship. Meaning “all at liberty” in music, the term especially commands members of an ensemble to play without restraint or imposed limitations. Such a command generally occurs at “the end of an extended solo passage when the entire ensemble enters.”2 In titling the second division of her essays with this musical reference, Cooper voices a womanist sensibility that fully integrates women in the chorus of public and philosophical opinion that has traditionally consisted of men. Because she argues the larger concerns of the race after first privileging her arguments concerning black women’s indispensability to the elevation of the human race, Cooper philosophically produces a literary score that harmonizes the sexes for the betterment of Western civilization. This philosophical bridging of the sexes is at the heart of Cooper’s womanist impulse throughout Voice from the South. To give greater literary expression and musical vocality to this impulse in the early years of the fin de siècle, Cooper vocalizes her knowledge of Milton and worries the line of epic and early African American tradition near the close of the nineteenth century. Cooper is renowned in early African American culture as a proto-womanist, essayist, activist, educator, and high school principal , among numerous other achievements. She was born a slave in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858 and lived to the age of 105. By the age of 10, she had skillfully negotiated an arrangement to serve as a “peer teacher” at the St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute in order “to supplement her tuition scholarship .” A high school that enjoyed a reputation as “a hub of intellectual activity,” St. Augustine’s was “created under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Episcopal Church.”3 Vivian May, one of the most recent scholars to enrich contemporary understandings of Cooper, argues that the school offered the former slave girl a liberal arts education that proved “formative in shaping [her] comparative, Black Atlantic view of race politics and history.”4 Cooper married fellow theology student George A. C. Cooper and continued her educational aspirations well after his death two years later. First, she entered Oberlin in 1881, enrolling “in the ‘Gentleman’s Course,’” where she “earned a classical education on Soundscapes in Anna Julia Cooper 231 par with men” and graduated among that institution’s first cohort of African American women.5 These formative years of education undoubtedly exposed Cooper to Milton, who, by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, remained popular in Victorian culture and relevant in African American tradition. Her rigorous education at St. Augustine and Oberlin would prime her for greater accomplishments throughout the remainder of her career and public life. These accomplishments included her distinguished career as a teacher and high school principal committed to academic rigor and student excellence. Throughout her 35-year teaching career, Cooper specialized in multiple disciplines. For instance, Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan acknowledge her disciplinary specialties in “the classics...