Ezra Greenspan on William Wells Brown: “The most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era”

The author of the forthcoming biography William Wells Brown: An African American Life, Ezra Greenspan edited William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings, which has just been published by The Library of America. Greenspan holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and is professor of English at Southern Methodist University.

Why read William Wells Brown, and why now?

Why Brown? Because he pioneered virtually every genre of African American writing. Want to know black culture in his revolutionary time and as it has come down to us today? Read William Wells Brown. Because he was the most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era. And because he was, as a mid-twentieth-century critic noted, a person unable to be uninteresting.

Why Brown now? Because he was arguably the parent of our postmodern cultural concerns/preoccupations a century before they were born. Fragmentation, alternating perspectives, sampling, multimedia, generic confusion were his signature practices—all the more interesting for us because they came about in a different cultural era and in response to different historical exigencies.

Clotel concerns a subject—Thomas Jefferson’s black descendants—that has drawn an unusual amount of interest. Why is this subject so fascinating?

An undergraduate student commented to me earlier today that one needs to be careful in Texas about challenging core beliefs about myths of American origins and exceptionalism. I don’t think Texas is exceptional in that regard. Clotel puts on a show that fascinates, in part, because it savages such beliefs. It goes after the father of American fathers and exposes the fundamental hypocrisy between his creed (“all men are created equal”) and practice. The fictions of blood, family, and national union that Jefferson (and Brown’s white father) created and embodied still survive in our culture and polity, though with greater contestation than in Brown’s time. Are we one people? On what basis do we define our peoplehood? And what has skin color got to do with it? Clotel asked hard questions that we are still asking today.

Discoveries made while preparing the collection? While writing the biography?

Many, many—out of which a few. Ralph Ellison had profound reasons for calling people of color “invisible.” One that I discovered in the course of researching Brown is that, politics and ideology aside, it is very hard to make people visible who left behind no archive of papers, letters, diaries, and the like. To this day, I have not seen a single letter between Brown and any member of his family—this, and he is the most prolific African American writer of his era. Writing full-scale biographies of minorities is excruciatingly difficult work.

A second: the kind of singular personhood that I had thought I would find in Brown’s writings did not exist. He danced around the expected correlation between his life, authorship, and autobiographical subject. I don’t mean to say that Brown fabricated his life, say, in the Narrative of William W. Brown, but he was a crafty fellow and many people have read him too literally and simply. My lesson: check the facts as carefully as possible before accepting his testimony.

How would you compare Brown to his famous contemporary Frederick Douglass? How did Brown himself view the comparison?

FD v. WWB—One, the greatest nineteenth-century African American public figure; the other, the greatest nineteenth-century African American cultural figure.

Men with strikingly similar backgrounds (white father, black mother; border state background; extraordinary powers of observation, expression, persuasion; unswerving sense of duty to the collective).

Equally, men with strikingly different temperaments and powers: Douglass a charismatic figure who sucked the oxygen out of a room, intellectually powerful, inclined to the dramatic, a natural leader; Brown culturally sophisticated, personally polished, inclined to indirection and irony.

Brown would have sided with Dogberry: comparisons were “odorous.” He was constantly compared to Douglass and hated it.

What qualities as a writer and a man allowed Brown to pioneer so many different genres of African American writing?

For one thing, lack of formal education. He did not have to unlearn deeply engrained lessons about literary forms. I would guess, rather, that he could see the forms (and their arbitrariness) all the more clearly for viewing them from the outside in. For another, endless curiosity, flexibility of temperament, and heedlessness about the possibility of failure.

What drew you to Brown as the subject for a biography?

The books. So many remarkable books, I thought, without at first connecting them back to their source. Then, once I started to think biographically, the person. When the life and the work start to converge in intriguing fashion, literary biography gets born.

Will bowdlerizing Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn attract more readers?

Weeks after it was first published in February 1885, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn endured its first censorship attempt when the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts banned it. Now, 125 years later, a new edition from NewSouth Books in Alabama re-engages the controversy by choosing to replace the book’s 219 usages of the word “nigger” with “slave” (and similarly replacing “Injun”). The edition is the brainchild of Twain scholar Alan Gribben who found audiences more accepting when he made these changes during public readings, as he explained this morning in an NPR interview with Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen:

As I had these experiences on my lecture tour it began to seem to me that we were handicapping teachers and younger readers by not making something available that simply sidestepped this whole controversy about this one word. . . In every case the audience would let out an almost audible sigh of relief as though I had resolved some problem that they came to the reading with. . . Just get the rid of the word and then you can start talking about the story and the beauties and the sharp social critique in these words.

News about the new edition has sparked a viral response that has made Huckleberry Finn a trending topic on Twitter this week. Most reactions are negative. In a poll taken by the The St. Louis Post-Dispatch book blog, 98% of the 618 respondents said the change should not be made. With  articles appearing this past week in The New York Daily News and The New York Times, Shelley Fisher Fishkin (editor of The Library of America’s The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work) is one of many scholars rallying to defend the original language, As she writes in the Times:

To understand how racism works in America it is necessary to understand how this word has been used to inflict pain on black people, challenge their humanity, and undercut their achievements. Leading black writers in America from Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison have understood this: to criticize racism effectively you have to make your reader hear how racists sound in all their offensive ugliness. When Malcolm X famously asked, “What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?” and answered “Nigger,” he was testifying to the destructive power of this word and the world view it embodied.

Writer Ishmael Reed echoed Fishkin’s argument on The Wall Street Journal blog Speakeasy:

If one censors Mark Twain’s use of the word, why not censor the black writers who use the term? Whose characters use the term? My new book, Barack Obama and The Jim Crow Media, The Return of the Nigger Breakers, uses a term in the title that was employed in slave times to refer to workers whose specialty was breaking unruly slaves. One was Edward Covey to whom Frederick Douglass was sent to be broken. This account appears in “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” an 1881 classic which includes the word “nigger” at least ten times.

Like Douglass and other 19th-century authors, Twain used the words with which he was surrounded and to insist that he omit words is not only to put a gag on his characters but a gag on the Age.

Toni Morrison, in an essay included in The Mark Twain Anthology, acknowledges, “Reading ‘nigger’ hundreds of times embarrassed, bored, annoyed—but did not faze me.” And she concludes that, while readers have been arguing over what the novel is for a hundred years, “What it cannot be is dismissed. It is classic literature, which is to say it heaves, manifests and lasts.”

Also of interest:

• Read how Mark Twain turned the banning of Huckleberry Finn into an advertising opportunity (a previous Reader’s Almanac post).
• Read more about Twain’s use of black dialect and his influence on black writers in LOA’s exclusive interview with Shelley Fisher Fishkin (PDF) about The Mark Twain Anthology.

Related LOA works: The Complete Mark Twain Library (7 volumes, plus a free book)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and the martyrdom of John Brown

Margaret Kimberley, on her Freedom Rider blog, muses, “if anyone ever won by losing, it is John Brown”; her sentiment echoes the complex mix of feelings that contemporaries felt on the day of Brown’s execution, December 2, 1859.

“This will be a great day in our history,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in that day’s diary entry, “the date of a new Revolution,—quite as much needed as the old one.” Longfellow believed that by hanging Brown, the Virginians were “sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”

Brown envisioned arming an insurrection of Southern slaves by capturing the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. His assault and occupation on October 16 lasted less than thirty-six hours and cost the lives of three townspeople, one marine, and ten of Brown’s eighteen men, including two of his sons. Beyond his initial recruits, no slaves answered his call.

Three weeks before, Brown had hoped to enlist Frederick Douglass by outlining the plan for the raid to him. Douglass thought it suicidal, as he details in Life and Times:

I at once opposed the measure with all the arguments at my command. To me such a measure would be fatal to all running off slaves . . . and fatal to all engaged in doing so. All his arguments, and all his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into a perfect steel-trap, and that once in he would never get out alive . . . I looked at him with some astonishment . . . and felt that he was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.

After being jailed, Brown refused to plead insanity or to be rescued. As he told his brother, “I am worth inconceivably more to hang, than for any other purpose.” Brown’s dignified demeanor during his briskly paced trial and the publication of his moving letters to his wife began a swell of sympathy in the North. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Journal, “if Brown is hung, the gallows will be as sacred as the cross.”

Brown had met with Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in 1857—most of Brown’s funding came from northern abolitionists. Following the raid Thoreau sprang to his defense, eager to correct what he believed to be inaccurate press accounts. “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” which he delivered in Concord on October 30 and again on November 3, was reprinted and discussed in all the Boston papers. It will surprise anyone who thinks of Thoreau as the apostle of nonviolence:

It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. . . I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.

Two more essays on Brown would follow: “Martyrdom of John Brown” and “The Last Days of John Brown,” the latter for a memorial service on July 4, 1860. Three days after Brown’s hanging Thoreau wrote in his Journal:

Of all the men who are said to be my contemporaries—it seems to be that John Brown is the only one who has not died. I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. . . He is no longer working in secret. John Brown has earned immortality.

Also of Interest: Biographer and scholar Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. devotes his blog to the life and times of John Brown: Abolitionist.

Related LOA works: Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies; Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems