Any discussion of blacks as a racial group, whether examined under the guise of science or the humanities, must be framed by a consideration of the historical construction of the term in the Western imagination. Certainly Europeans were not the first to contrast their lighter skin against the darker skin of Africans and other people of color. However, the explosion of fifteenth-century European exploration spawned the construction and the solidification of Western paradigms of a racialized black-white human dichotomy. While continental Africans drew boundaries of group identity along kinship and ethnic lines, the arrival of trade-seeking Europeans along the coast of Africa would dramatically alter the way Africans negotiated identity. On the continent itself, Africans were for the most part able to maintain the integrity of their ethnic groups. Increasingly, however, they faced a European economic and military presence that sought to reduce them to a monolithic African-black identity. Just as Europeans would name the native people of America "Indians" and then treat them as a single racial entity, they developed a racial rhetoric that marked Africans as a single people. Through European discourse, Africans became blacks, and this racial designation would have more severe implications for those who were stolen away to the New World than for those remaining on the continent. Transported Africans were dispersed into enslaved communities that comprised slaves from various ethnic African groups. Consequently continental alliances could not be reproduced, and African people in the New World were forced to shape a new concept of selfhood. The concept that emerged was not free from the influence of European captors who came to understand themselves as white primarily through their negotiation of a black presence.

Like Africans, early Europeans did not imagine themselves a people unified by a shared skin color. Europeans identified themselves along ethnic or national lines: Greeks no more considered themselves racially connected to Swedes than the Ibo and Ashanti of West Africa considered themselves bound by color. Histories of the various people and nations of pre-imperialist Europe show clearly that they found no particular marker of racial connectedness in whiteness. In fact, throughout the literature of Europeans one finds distinctions made between fairer-skinned northern and western Europeans and their darker southern and eastern neighbors. Through the construction of Americanness, however, whiteness was conferred upon Americans of European descent, and blackness was presumed synonymous with African ancestry. By the close of the seventeenth century in America, blacks were defined as a distinct race in the discourse of national identity. The lines of black and white became entrenched as America's expanding plantation economy found itself increasingly in need of free labor. With laws throughout the colonies confirming the place of blacks as slaves and servitude their lifelong and inherited condition, blacks in America quickly became a new race and a new class. Despite the reality of black and white unions before and after these laws and despite the small but evident population of free blacks in America, blacks came to symbolize the antithesis of Americanness. Blacks represented the absence of freedom guaranteed to whites; they symbolized human degradation and the absence of opportunity granted to whites.

That Africans did not arrive in America with a concept of self rooted in perceptions of skin color is evident in a number of autobiographical accounts of Africans in the New World. Among these, the 1789 autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano offers a detailed account of the kinship ties that remained with Equiano from his early childhood in Africa. While the veracity of Equiano's African memories has been questioned by some scholars, his account of life among native Africans nevertheless demonstrates the social and political alliances that existed among them. His narrative takes readers into the cultural world of a people whose identity had not yet been informed by European racialized constructs. As such, the narrative highlights a cultural identity that arose not out of African people's notion of themselves as black but rather as a people defined by ties of kinship, family, and nation.

Ironically, early black writers found the seeds of black racial identity in white racialized readings of the Bible. They and their literary descendants accepted the contention that the biblical figure Ham was the ancestor of Africans. The Bible identifies Ham as one of Noah's three sons (Gen. 5:32) and Egypt as the land of Ham (Ps. 78:51, 105:23). According to the racist discourse that grew out of the transatlantic slave trade, the curse inflicted on Ham for his sin against Noah defined the course of history for Ham's descendants. While this seems a despairing entrance into the community of humankind, early black writers and activists appropriated this biblical connection between Africanity and Christianity—but not without revisiting the actual Scripture and revising the paradigm. According to the story told in Genesis, Ham looks upon his father, Noah, who is drunk and naked. For this show of disrespect, Ham is cursed. Proslavery advocates embraced the story of Ham's curse, arguing that this biblical proclamation defined the generational place of blacks (Ham's presumed descendants) as servants to their white brothers. The point of departure for black readers of the Bible was the presumption of who precisely had been cursed. This was emphasized by the black Episcopal minister Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) in his 1850 essay "The Negro Race Not under a Curse." Crummell highlighted the misreading of this Scripture by many of his fellow white clergy, pointing out that it was not Ham who was inflicted with the curse of bondage but his son Canaan. With this clarification, black activists like Crummell asserted the connection of Africa to biblical antiquity and the history of civilization.

While America's prevailing black-white dichotomy of race originated in the white imagination, whites did not always see Africans simply as blacks. Early European traders recognized Africans according to their native group connections, and even early American slaveholders frequently expressed particular favor or disfavor for certain groups of Africans. However, by the close of the eighteenth century, whites had constructed a regularized racial vocabulary to signal the slave population. Of varied and distinct ethnic backgrounds, blacks in the New World found themselves referred to interchangeably as Africans, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Negroes, and blacks. This interchangeable vocabulary would be taken up by Africans and their descendants in America to forge an identity of self from a people whose histories had been otherwise disparate.

The works of early black authors such as Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), Prince Hall (1748–1807), and David Walker (1785–1830) especially exemplify this transformation. Wheatley, who was captured and sold into slavery when she was about seven or eight, alternates racial descriptions of herself and fellow black Americans. From her description of herself as an Ethiop from the land of "Egyptian gloom" ("To the University of Cambridge in New-England," p. 15) to her repeated reference to herself as the African muse, Wheatley demonstrates the linguistic transformation of self precipitated by the transatlantic slave trade. Any memory of her pre-slave self becomes buried in the racialized discourse of the master. While she remembers her native home and her parents, she emerges into adulthood seeing herself connected to fellow blacks on the continent that is her new home.

Wheatley's eighteenth-century contemporary Prince Hall also reveals in his writings the question of identity that blacks in the New World teased out. Hall, the founder of the secret society Prince Hall Masons, vacillated in his use of the terms "African" and "Ethiopian" as he addressed his black fellows of the African Lodge in 1797. Hall highlights the still-fluctuating vocabulary used to refer to first-generation African slaves and slaves of African descent. Hall's and Wheatley's references to blacks as a race demonstrate the formation of a black consciousness in America that struggled to connect Africans in the New World. In particular, their identification of Africans as Ethiopians and Egyptians and their emphasis on the significance of these ancient people in biblical history represent what would become a widespread cultural discourse of identity among African Americans. While the common use of "Egyptian" and "Ethiopian" to describe blacks subsided by the middle of the nineteenth century in America, those terms that substituted—Negroes, blacks, colored—are no less suggestive of a people united through a common modern experience and an ancient spiritual history. Nineteenth-century black writers and thinkers were as fervent as their black predecessors in their belief of a common ancient African past. To this end, the biblical promise of Psalms 68:31 that "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God" became a defining discourse of identity for many nineteenth-century black leaders. In writings by early nineteenth-century activists such as Maria Stewart, Alexander Crummell, and David Walker, references to the Psalms verse can be found. The promise of this ancient passage came to signify the common destiny of the disparate groups of Africans who emerged into a race of people in the New World. Blacks were the Ethiopians destined to meet the favor of God and emerge out of bondage.

Before the United States ended its legal sanction of the African slave trade in 1808, the slave population was increasingly comprised of blacks born in America. Because the slave trade continued illegally to the dawn of the Civil War, the influence of native-born Africans on the slave population in America was long-standing. This continued importation of native Africans might have reminded generations of blacks of their ancestral ties to Africa; however, nineteenth-century black activists were primarily concerned with the condition and united interest of fellow blacks in the United States. Blacks appropriated and reworked America's racialized reading of the Bible and translated their common oppression into a rhetoric of racial identity and purpose. Whether free or on the plantation, antebellum blacks had come to define themselves as a race of people. This perception was not without its complications, for the notion of a distinct black race was compromised before seventeenth-century slave laws locked blacks into perpetual slavery.

BLACKS IN THE WHITE LITERARY IMAGINATION

From the time blacks arrived in Virginia as indentured servants in 1619 to the end of the seventeenth century, marriages between blacks and whites and blacks and Native Americans foretold the complex cultural and racial influences that shaped the identity of Africans in America when their status would be legally transformed to that of slaves. Laws enacted in the early colonies to prohibit unions between blacks and whites were designed to both clearly define the slave population as black and prevent racial mixing that would cloud the definition of whiteness. These laws represented a failed effort at the very moment of their inception, and as evidenced by the significant numbers of mulattos in the slave population at the end of the Civil War, these laws did not deter those white men who decided that female slaves could be forced into sex as well as servitude. Despite the prevalence of slaves who were living testaments to the fallibility of racist rhetoric and laws, the language of race prevailed.

One's blackness was not confirmed necessarily by the manifestation of dark skin but ultimately by lineage to one of African descent. Likewise, the appearance of white skin was not enough to confirm one's whiteness. In early America, however, blackness was assumed a very real marker of race, and it was a matter of great concern for some of America's most celebrated founding founders. Some colonial thinkers expressed sympathy for the enslaved Africans, but most expressed their anxiety and uncertainty over the threat posed by blacks living among whites. From Cotton Mather's (1663–1728) 1706 speculative essay "The Negro Christianized" to Thomas Jefferson's (1743–1826) 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia, one sees the persistent struggle of whites to clearly define Africans and their place. Jefferson's presumed scientific account of blacks is particularly striking for its resonance throughout antebellum proslavery rhetoric as well as its survival into the postbellum caricatures of newly freed blacks. Jefferson defines Africans as a race, separate from and inferior to whites, and he expresses his deep conviction that blacks, whether free or enslaved, pose a threat to both the race (whites) and the nation. Most provocative is his depiction of blacks as a species of uncertain classification, void of meaningful depth of thought and emotion. This characterization would find its way into countless discourses on the rightness of black enslavement in the nineteenth century. Moreover, these racialized constructs of blackness found their way into the fictional sketches of early nineteenth-century white authors. In Washington Irving's (1783–1859) celebrated short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (published in the 1819–1820 collection The Sketch Book), Irving includes a sketch of local blacks in a tale that otherwise focuses on a fictional white backwoods community. His characterization of the local blacks, particularly the black messenger who is sent to deliver Ichabod's invitation, as a simpleminded, party-loving coxcomb, echoes the portrait of blacks painted in Jefferson's work.

Similarly, in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the second in his series of Leatherstocking Tales, James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) embeds a narrative layer that hints at the threat of black blood infiltrating and diluting white purity. Cooper develops this sub-narrative through the character Cora, the darker-skinned of the two sibling heroines. While Cora is a model of female virtue and sensibilities, her darkness is persistently cast against the fair skin of her sister and of the novel's hero, Hawkeye, who repeatedly reminds his companions that he is of pure white ancestry. Cora and Alice share the same father, a Scotsman; however, Cora's mother, deceased at the start of the novel, was the offspring of a West Indian planter and a slave mother. Although Cora is the more serious and endearing of the sisters and is loved equally by her father, her fate is a maidenly death. Cora's death and her burial alongside Uncas, the last rightful prince of the Mohican nation, symbolize the impossibility of generational race mixing in the emerging white American landscape that Cooper envisions. Cora further represents the tragic mulatto heroine, a prevalent figure in nineteenth-century fictional explorations of miscegenation. She, like most of her fictional contemporaries, can be awarded no other fate than death, particularly at the hands of white authors who cannot imagine a world not clearly divided into white and black. The survival of the mulatto, especially in a thriving regenerating environment, would undermine prevailing presumptions that whiteness is clearly identifiable. The fictional death of the mulatto restores racial and social order: blacks remain confirmed outsiders, and white privilege and purity are protected from those who might falsely assume whiteness.

Even in the fiction of sympathetic white abolitionists, generational mulatto survival was unimaginable. Though generally as beautiful and intelligent as their white counterparts, these characters inevitably succumb to their tragic flaw—being the product of miscegenation. The nineteenth-century abolitionist and women's rights activist Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) offers an example of this formulaic narrative in her 1843 short story "Slavery's Pleasant Homes." Rosa, the mulatto heroine in this sketch, dies after successive beatings by her jealous slave master, and her mulatto lover, George, after confessing to killing Rosa's murderer, is hanged. The story offers a tragic depiction of slavery's evil, but it ends with the reassuring restoration of slaves and whites to their separate places. The story hints at no marital intentions for the remaining mulattos at the end of the sketch. Contrastingly, in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), one of America's most celebrated abolitionist texts, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) grants her mulatto protagonists life and regeneration. Stowe grants this deviation and yet assures her white readers that miscegenation will not threaten white purity. This she manages through the strategic relocation of the mulatto couple, George and Eliza. They survive their trials and find themselves looking hopefully to the future; however, their future awaits them not in America but in Liberia. Stowe relocates the couple to the black nation-state, where they will presumably contribute to Liberia's rise to prominence. As for the unambiguously black in the narrative, they remain in America. Uncle Tom has died by the novel's end, but his children choose to remain in the South, loyal to the young white master who has guarded over them.

Popularized depictions of blacks as lighthearted, childlike servants served the rhetoric of many proslavery advocates. By the mid-1800s, however, the reality of Haiti's successful slave revolt and insurgencies such as Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion in Virginia and Denmark Vesey's 1822 uprising in South Carolina incited more serious and threatening images of blacks in the imaginations of white writers. These revolts signaled the tenuous power relationship between master and slave, and they revealed the hyperbole in idyllic representations of the paternalistic master looking over his plantation estate and his dependent, fun-loving slave charges. As Herman Melville (1819–1891) suggested in his 1855 fictionalization of a slave revolt at sea, when presented with a viable opportunity for freedom, the seemingly docile slave can be moved to inexorable acts of violence and deception. "Benito Cereno" is the tale of an insurrection led by the seemingly faithful slave Babo, who leads the transported Africans in the overthrow of the white captain, Don Benito Cereno, and his white crew. Babo symbolizes the haunting image of blacks that lay just beneath the surface of the reassuring images of black docility painted by writers like Irving and Cooper. Intelligent and calculating, Babo hints at the slave's dormant but ever-present spirit of independence and, most alarmingly, its unpredictable potential for unleashing. Blacks like Babo would be painted as merciless killers, and as in Melville's tale, they would come to symbolize the violent, uncontrolled black threatening white civility, safety, and prosperity. The images of Melville's fictional insurrectionist, Babo, and Stowe's pacifist, Uncle Tom, capture the contrasting discourse of blackness in the white imagination. It is a contrast that hints at the dichotomy of white desire and white fear—the desire to lord over a needful, compliant black underling and the fear of the vengeful, noncompliant spirit that lurks so close to the surface.

BLACK VISIONS OF BLACKNESS

Herman Melville's fictional depiction of the savage, freedom-seeking black deviates significantly from a similar tale of a slave insurrection at sea published two years earlier. The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass's (1818–1895) 1853 fictionalization of an actual slave insurrection, constructs a black hero whose use of violence is judicious. Douglass's hero is named for the real-life insurrectionist Madison Washington, who led the successful overthrow of a slave ship destined to deliver him, along with other slaves, to a New Orleans slave port. While Douglass's heroic liberator does not shrink from the use of violence, he manages to orchestrate an insurrection that leaves only two whites dead. He does not seek reckless revenge but rather holds the whites captive until the slaves have secured their freedom. Douglass's restrained hero is a deliberate construction, answering white anxieties about their safety in a nation of free blacks. Similarly, in Frank Webb's novel The Garies and Their Friends (1857), Webb does not shrink from showing his black characters resorting to violence against their white persecutors. In a pivotal episode, members of this fictional middle-class black community find themselves threatened by a white immigrant mob. Although Webb has framed his fictional black characters around mid-nineteenth-century paradigms of middle-class gentility, they energetically embrace arms to protect themselves and their community.

Webb, like Douglass, must perform a delicate juggling act: while asserting the revolutionary spirit of his black characters, he must be careful not to paint them as irrational and easily provoked to violence. Webb's success in this regard is due in great part to his choice of leader. Although the hardworking Mr. Ellis would have seemed a likely choice to lead his community against the murderous white mob, Webb elects the wealthy black entrepreneur Mr. Walters. Walters, the wealthiest black man in the community, offers his lavish home as a fortress during the violence. He further stands as the central organizing force in the community's efforts to defend itself. A man of intelligence and means, acquainted with the conventions and sensibilities esteemed in Anglo-American society, Walters is reminiscent of the stately patriarchs who thoughtfully led colonists into resistance against their mother country. Madison Washington and Mr. Walters dispel representations of blacks as recklessly violent and lacking in foresight; however, it is through Webb's fictional hero that one finds the nationalist visionary. Mr. Walters leads his community through the crisis of the race riot, but his significance to the community is far-reaching. Walters is wealthy, but he is not the Emersonian individualist. He is a man in and of the community, and his hope is to see young black boys like Kinch and Charlie mature into men of means, able to take care of themselves and offer aid to others. Walters is committed to helping fellow blacks, for he understands that even free blacks in the North must band together to find economic and social prosperity.

In his novel Blake; or, The Huts of America, Martin R. Delany (1812–1885) echoes Frank Webb's nationalist message. Delany was well known in abolitionist circles for his interest in a black nation-state. This was a vision that Delany held into the post-Emancipation era. Published in 1859, Blake allows Delany a prewar fictional journey to a campaign for emancipation that sprang from a visionary slave. Delany's hero-insurrectionist does not limit his plans to the local population; instead Blake has devised a strategy to unite slaves beyond the borders of the United States. The success of Blake's insurrection extends beyond just the freedom of a handful of slaves. Blake's vision promises freedom for all blacks in bondage and further promises the foundation of an international alliance of blacks.

Without trepidation, nineteenth-century black authors were willing to paint their male heroes in the image of stereotypical physical blackness. Dark-skinned and wooly haired, heroes such as Madison Washington, Mr. Walters, and Blake are unmistakably black by the conventions of their time. Ironically, however, this confirmation of blackness is not so generously awarded black fictional heroines. In general, early black writers resisted giving fictional life to unambiguously black female heroines. As in the case of Madison Washington's fictional wife, black heroines were often left absent of any detailed physical description. In other cases, such as the wife of Delany's hero, Blake, they were noted for their distinctness from both blacks and whites. Nineteenth-century fiction by blacks often echoed the tragic mulatto figure of white-authored works, and the female protagonist was usually sacrificed for this role. In William Wells Brown's (1815–1884) controversial 1853 novel Clotel, the heroine, Clotel, highlights the often melodramatic end these women met. In Brown's narrative, Clotel and her sister, Althesa, are the offspring of Thomas Jefferson and his mulatto servant Currer. Mother and daughters will meet tragic ends, and the one surviving granddaughter of the Jefferson-Currer union relocates to France in hopes of a viable home-land. Similarly, in Harriet Wilson's (1808–c. 1870) Our Nig (1859) and Hannah Crafts's Bondwoman's Narrative (c. 1850s), the authors relate stories of mulatto protagonists who suffer alienation and abuse that lead to their early deaths.

It is in postwar narratives that black authors began to represent their mulatto heroines more optimistically. The tragic mulatto heroine would not disappear in post–Civil War black literature and would survive into the twentieth century. However, as demonstrated in Frances E. W. Harper's (1825–1911) Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), black authors began to expand the literary possibilities for these heroines. Even though Minnie dies an early death, this mulatto heroine has not suffered the alienation of her fictional predecessors. This narrative phenomenon became more prevalent in the late nineteenth century, but Webb's antebellum novel prefigures this shift. Although Mrs. Garie, the main mulatto protagonist, meets a tragic and violent end, her near-white daughter, Emily, marries into the black Ellis household and becomes a happy member of the thriving black Philadelphia community. As Harper's later nineteenth-century works demonstrate, mulatto heroines were no longer restricted to symbolic representations of the sins of the master. Like Minnie, they came to represent the integral place of all shades of black in shaping the story of those in America who fell under the monolithic identity called black.

See also "Benito Cereno"; Clotel; Miscegenation; Slavery

Elizabeth J. West