Centuries Of Writing By African-Americans Distilled To One Volume

“We are canon makers!” said Henry Louis Gates Jr.

There was a note of triumph in his voice. Gates, a Harvard University professor, is co-editor, with Nellie Y. McKay, of the new Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, the result of 10 years of work, and just published Monday.

Here is the first known short story written by an African-American, “Le Mulatre,” (“The Mulatto”) by Victor Sejour, found in the Bibliotheque National in Paris and published in English for the first time.

Here is the work of Phillis Wheatley, a slave who was brought to these shores as a frail 8-year-old from Senegal and became the first African-American to publish a book in English. Here is the work of the 1993 Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison; rap, gospel and jazz; sermons, poems and slave narratives: 2,665 pages bound together in a single, two-and-a-half-pound volume.

“There is no more question of the legitimacy of this literature,” said Gates, who is W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities at Harvard and chairman of its Afro-American studies department.

There have been hundreds of anthologies of African-American writing, beginning in 1845 with “Les Cenelles,” edited by the New Orleans writer Armand Lanusse, “to show how French they were,” said Gates. But this is the first one published by W.W. Norton, whose anthologies, known collectively as “the Nortons,” define “the canon,” the accepted norms for great literature.

There are 10 Nortons, and they are among the most widely used college texts. Since the first one, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, was published in 1961, they have sold 15 million copies.

The anthology begins with Negro spirituals, a testimony to the centrality of the vernacular tradition in African-American literature. “Most anthologies start with authors,” said Gates, “but this one begins anonymously.” The vernacular section has work songs, folk tales and sermons.

“There are two things black people did,” said Gates, “pray to God, and sing about it. If you had 1,200 people coming to a church, and you couldn’t sustain a sermon, they wouldn’t come.”

Embedded in all aspects of this oral tradition is the pattern of call and response. “It is the structural principle of worship, the unbroken center of secular and sacred forms,” Gates said. “It’s never not been there.”

McKay called it a “talking book,” and it is the only Norton Anthology accompanied by a CD-ROM, which includes speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, jazz by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and a rendition of “Rosie” by inmates of a prison farm.

The anthology contains the text of “Bars Fight,” a poem from 1746 by Lucy Terry that is the earliest known work of literature by an African-American. “Bars” was a colonial word for “meadows,” and the poem described an Indian ambush: “August ‘twas the twenty-fifth,/Seventeen hundred forty-six,/The Indians did in ambush lay,/Some very valiant men to slay.”

“A terrible poem,” said McKay, “but we had to own it.”

Each entry is accompanied by an introductory essay, biographical information and footnotes, written by a team of nine editors. Among the entries is the strange story of Wheatley, the first African-American actually to publish a poem in English.

Wheatley was purchased in 1761 from among the human cargo of the West African slave ship Phillis by a wealthy Boston merchant. After only four years’ exposure to English, she began writing poetry. Her first, “To Maecenas,” written in the tradition of neo-classical occasional and elegiac verse, appeared in a Rhode Island newspaper in 1767: “Maecenas, you, beneath the myrtle shade,/Read o’er what poets sung, and shepherds play’d.”

In 1773, Wheatley underwent an oral examination by 18 of Boston’s prominent citizens who questioned her authorship. She passed the test, and the elders issued an open letter asserting that she was the writer.

Published in English for the first time is Sejour’s story “Mulatre.” The writer was born in New Orleans, the son of a freeman from Santo Domingo and a New Orleans woman of mixed race.

Following the custom of his class, Sejour studied in Paris, where he was a successful playwright during the 1850s. “Le Mulatre” appeared in 1837 in “La Revue des Colonies,” a French anthology sponsored by men of color. The story was rediscovered in 1992 by William Andrews, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina.

The anthology also includes broad sections on “Literature of the Reconstruction,” “The Harlem Renaissance,” “Realism, Naturalism and Modernism” and the “Black Arts Movement, 1960-1970.” Some works are printed in their entirety, including the autobiographical “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Maude Martha” and August Wilson’s “Fences.”

Of the 120 entries in the book, 52 are by women, a result of the interest of female scholars of the 1970s and ‘80s, both black and white, in rediscovering the writing of women. In the anthology’s final section, “Literature Since 1970,” women make up the majority.

Some writers have been left out of the anthology. Originally, McKay didn’t want to include rap. But Gates and other scholars have made a case for the continuity of rap from the West African oral tradition, through slave tales and sermons.

All in all, the new Norton, said Gates, is testimony to the growing presence of black literature in the mainstream. “There used to be one black writer now and then on the best-seller list,” he said. “Now there are sometimes three or four black authors at the same time. Black Americans bought 160 million books last year.”

McKay said: “Where the Norton anthologies go, black literature will go. No one will be able to say again they don’t know what to teach.”