Early African American Poetry Essay

The Africans that were brought to the United States of America as slaves were faced first with the ordeal of surviving the middle passage – the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean – and then surviving within the institution of slavery. As slaves, they were denied the right to retain their languages and religions. Instead, they were forced to learn a new language, English, and a new form of religion, Christianity. The fact that there is any evidence of African-American literature written before 1865, when the Civil War ended, is remarkable. In many areas it was against the law to educate a slave. Thus, the majority of slaves were illiterate. Some slaves tricked their owners’ children into teaching them to read and write. A few slaves were lucky:
their owners believed in educating slaves. We should not confuse illiteracy, however, with a lack of literature or culture.
The African literary tradition that the slaves carried with them was an oral tradition. The customs, values, traditions, and history of a people were embodied in their oral literature. The earliest survivors of the African oral tradition were the work songs and field hollers that slaves called to each other as they worked in the fields. Another literary survivor was the folktale.
Early African Americans shared folk tales that explained the unexplainable, expressed values, and identified acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They provided the slaves with hope and entertainment.
In the late 1700s, a limited amount of African American literature had been written or published.
Early African American poetry, such as that of Phyllis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon (The earliest published black American writer, Jupiter Hammon wrote his most popular piece, An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York, at age seventy-six, after being freed by the family he served for three generations. In the Address, Hammon preaches those slaves are capable of accepting Christ, and that those who do not are morally enslaved by their master. By accepting Christ, slave guarantee themselves freedom after death, the only freedom Hammon believed was imminently possible. Drawing heavily on biblical theology, Hammon encouraged black to have high moral standards precisely because their enslavement on earth had already secured their place in heaven, where the color veil would be lifted. He also advocated a plan of gradual emancipation as a compromise to ending slavery immediately, and thought a pension should be established by slave owners for slave emancipated after they were no longer able to work. However, Hammon was criticized for his insistence that older slaves should be cared for by their masters if they were incapable of caring for themselves. Hammon's essay was published by the New York Quakers twice during his lifetime, and once after his death by members of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery), reflects the strong religious influences of
the time. Revolutionary War-era writers such as Benjamin Banneker, mathematician and astronomer, and Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) spoke out for the equality of all people, especially African Americans.