Lateral Reading Lyric Testimony; or, The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in the Americas

Abstract

We begin with a mistake: in 1856, the Black abolitionist William G. Allen published his anthology The African Poets, Horton and Placido. The volume brought together the work of two enslaved poets. The first was an actual historical figure: George Moses Horton (1798-1884) published four books of poetry and was a fixture on the campus of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where students commissioned him to compose acrostic poems and romantic letters. 1 The second was not: "Juan Placido," as he is called in Allen's anthology, was a conglomeration of two distinct Afro-Cuban poets, the slave Juan Francisco Manzano (1797-1854) and the freeborn Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (1809-1844), known as "Plácido," whom abolitionists celebrated for his role in an 1844 slave conspiracy leading to his execution by Cuban authorities. 2 This confusion originated with the abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, who had misattributed poems by Manzano-first published anonymously in English in 1840-to "Juan Placido." The African Poets similarly reprints Plácido poems that Whittier had mistakenly attributed to the same writer. 3 Both intentionally and erroneously, then, Allen's anthology assembles a hemispheric and multilingual archive of enslaved poetics.Despite the mix-up, this framing of the early history of Black poetry in the Americas is yet instructive, for it signifies a road not taken in the institutionalization of African American literary studies in the later twentieth century. Indeed, the publications of enslaved writers-whether Anglophone slave narratives or the poetry of Jupiter Hammon (1711-ca. 1806), Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753Wheatley (ca. -1784, and Horton-are commonly considered the basis of a tradition that later becomes known as African American literature. Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example, calls Wheatley's interrogation by eighteen Bostonian gentlemen, who convened to verify the authorship of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the "primal scene of African-American letters." 4 Like many commentators since the mid-nineteenth century, Gates positions